One of Russia’s oldest weekly magazines – Ogonyok – is marking its 115th anniversary. Its first issue came out as an illustrated supplement to the Birzhevye Vedomosti (The Exchange Gazette), a daily liberal bourgeois political, economic, and literary newspaper in pre-revolutionary Russia, TASS reports. Today, the weekly’s circulation exceeds 80,000 copies. It reached 3 million copies at the peak of the magazine’s popularity in the late 1980s.
“The magazine’s first issue came out on December 9 /December 21 New Style/ in 1899. It immediately found it reader yielding only to the Niva magazine in its popularity, Ogonyok’s editor-in-chief Sergei Agafonov said in a TASS interview.
The magazine continued coming out in revolutionary years and during the Great Patriotic War. “Over the years of its existence, Ogonyok has become a chronicle of historical events,” Agafonov noted.
There was one short interval from 1918 to 1923 when the magazine was not published. After that, it re-opened again. Soviet journalist Mikhail Koltsov headed Ogonyok’s editorial board. In 1938, Koltsov was arrested and repressed, and Yevgeny Petrov, one of the authors of the well-known post-revolutionary book “The Twelve Chairs”, replaced him as the magazine’s chief editor for a short time. Soviet poets Alexei Surkov and Anatoly Sofronov took turns in heading the publication in subsequent years. A supplement to Ogonyok titled Bibilioteka (Library) became particularly popular when Anatoly Sofronov was Ogonyok’s chief editor. Biblioteka came out from 1925 to 1991. Both Ogonyok and Biblioteka printed the works of famous writers like Mikhail Zoshchenko, Alexander Tvardovsky, Ilya Ilf and Yevgeny Petrov, Alexei Tolstoy, Vladimir Mayakovsky and Isaac Babel.
Vitaly Korotich became Ogonoyok’s editor-in-chief in 1986 turning it into one of the most popular and readable magazines of the perestroika era. Early in 2009, Ogonyok stopped coming out because of financial woes. The magazine was revived after the Kommersant publishing house obtained the right to it. Today, it is published in its classical oversized format on the traditional matte paper.
The magazine’s permanent authors and experts include historian Edward Radzinsky, philosopher Alexander Dugin, literary figure Dmitry Prigov, artist Oleg Kulik and writer Sergei Lukyanenko.
A special jubilee issue of the Ogonyok magazine came out early in December. It had collected articles and interviews about the magazine’s history.
Russkiy Mir Foundation Information Service
