Yevgeny Alexeyevich Kiselyov (Russian: Евгений Алексеевич Киселёв, Ukrainian: Євген Олексійович Кисельов; born 15 June 1956) is a Russian television journalist. As the host of the NTV weekly news show Itogi in the 1990s, he became one of the nation’s best known television journalists, criticizing government corruption and President Boris Yeltsin.
In 1997, the New York Times described him as “Russia’s most prominent television journalist”. In 1999, Itogi broadcast an episode in which Kiselyov broke new ground by lambasting the administration of Boris Yeltsin, describing them as “the family”, an “insiders’ code phrase” for Yeltsin and his small circle of advisers. He criticized them for handpicking the latest Cabinet, comparing Yeltsin’s rule to that of the Roman emperor Caligula. In 2001, he left NTV following its takeover by the state-controlled company Gazprom, serving briefly as general manager of TV-6 before the government refused to renew its broadcasting license in January 2002.
In 2008, Kiselyov moved to Ukraine. He stated that he moved because working in Ukraine allowed him to be a true political journalist. “In Russia, there is no open political debate any more. The authorities are hermetically sealed, we can just hypothesize about the discussion going on inside … Here [in Ukraine] you have access to tons of information, to almost any politician”. He also said that he felt Russian journalism had developed a culture of self-censorship.
On 27 October 2019, Kiselyov founded his self-named YouTube channel, with the current handle @evgeny.kiselev. As of 29 September 2023, the channel has 326,000 subscribers.
