Gabriele Krone-Schmalz (born 8 November 1949 in Lam, District of Cham, Bavaria) is a German broadcast journalist and author.
With an academic background in Eastern European history, political science, and Slavic studies, Krone-Schmalz holds a doctorate in history and political science. Since 1976, she has worked primarily for various radio and television broadcasts of the West German broadcasting company Westdeutscher Rundfunk.
Krone-Schmalz worked at the Moscow studio of ARD broadcasting from 1987 to 1992. Between 1992 and 1997, she hosted the world culture programming of the ARD. Since then, she has been self-employed as a freelance journalist.
Krone-Schmalz is also known for her involvement with the philanthropic work on behalf of orphans in Saint Petersburg. She is the author of several books on Russia. [1]
In 2008 she was awarded with the prestigious Pushkin Medal of the Russian Federation. [2]
She is sometimes described as Putinversteher [3] and as a "mouthpiece of Putin's propaganda". [4]
Antje Vollmer is a German politician of the Alliance 90/The Greens. From 1994 to 2005, she was one of the vice presidents of the German parliament, the Bundestag.
Dresdner Bank AG was a German bank and was based in Frankfurt. It was one of Germany's largest banking corporations and was acquired by competitor Commerzbank in May 2009.
Marieluise Beck is a German politician who served as member of the Alliance '90/The Greens group in the Bundestag until 2017. She was also a member of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe.
Sonia Seymour Mikich is a German TV journalist.
Yevgenia Markovna Albats is a Russian investigative journalist, political scientist, writer and radio host. As of 2022, she works as a chief editor of The New Times magazine.
Olga Martynova is a Russian-German writer. She writes poems in Russian, and prose and essays in German.
Gerd Ruge was a German journalist, author and filmmaker. As a journalist he was associated with public broadcasters Nordwestdeutscher Rundfunk (NWDR), ARD and WDR. Through his career spanning over 50 years, he reported from many countries including the former Soviet Union, China, the United States, and Afghanistan. He was the first German journalist with a visa to work in Yugoslavia, and the first correspondent for national television ARD in Moscow. He was ARD correspondent in the U.S. from 1964 and 1969, where he reported after the assassination of both Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy. Ruge summarised his reports in books such as Sibirisches Tagebuch and Russland: Portrait eines Nachbarn and Unterwegs: politische Erinnerungen
Mikhail Pavlovich Shishkin is a Russian-Swiss writer and the only author to have won the Russian Booker Prize (2000), the Russian National Bestseller (2005), and Big Book Prize (2010). His books have been translated into 30 languages. He also writes in German.
Sergei Adamovich Kovalyov was a Russian human rights activist and politician. During the Soviet period he was a dissident and, after 1975, a political prisoner.
Arseny Borisovich Roginsky was a Soviet dissident and Russian historian. He was one of the founders of the International Historical and Civil Rights Society Memorial, and its head since 1998.
Fritz Ferdinand Pleitgen was a German television journalist and author. He was correspondent in Moscow, East Berlin and Washington. Pleitgen was a supporter of Willy Brandt's Ostpolitik. In 1988, Pleitgen became editor-in-chief of television of Germany's then-largest public broadcaster, Westdeutscher Rundfunk (WDR), and was director of WDR from 1995 to 2007. He is regarded as one of the most influential German journalists and media makers. In 2010, he was the manager of Ruhr.2010, a project of European Capital of Culture.
Sergei Ivanovich Grigoryants is a Soviet dissident and former political prisoner, journalist, literary critic, chairman of the Glasnost Defense Foundation. He was imprisoned for 10 years in Chistopol jail as a political prisoner for anti-Soviet activities, from 1975 to 1980 and then four more years starting in 1983 on similar charges.
Peter Pomerantsev is a Soviet-born British journalist, author and TV producer. He is a Senior Fellow at the Institute of Global Affairs at the London School of Economics, where he co-directs the Arena program. He is also an associate editor at Coda Media, a position he has held since at least 2015. Pomerantsev has written two books about Russian disinformation and propaganda: Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible (2014) and This Is Not Propaganda (2019).
Vladislav Leonidovich Inozemtsev is a Russian academician who is the director of the Moscow-based Centre for Research on Post-Industrial Societies, a nonprofit think tank. He is a professor and the chair at the Department of World Economy, Faculty of Public Governance, Moscow State Lomonosov University.
Putinversteher or Putin-Versteher, female form Putinversteherin, integrated form Putinversteher*in, is a German neologism and a political buzzword, which literally translates "Putin understander", i.e., "one who understands Putin". It is a pejorative reference to politicians and pundits who express empathy to Vladimir Putin and may also be translated as "Putin-Empathizer". Similar words are Russlandversteher or Russland-Versteher.
Maria Vorontsova, also referred to as Maria Faassen, is a Russian pediatric endocrinologist. She is the eldest child of Russian president Vladimir Putin.
Johann Saathoff is a German politician of the Social Democratic Party (SPD) who has been serving as Parliamentary State Secretary in the Federal Ministry of the Interior and Community in the coalition government of Chancellor Olaf Scholz since 2021. He has been serving as a member of the Bundestag from the state of Lower Saxony since 2013.
Susanne Scholl is an Austrian journalist, writer and doyenne of the foreign correspondents of the ORF.
The white-blue-white flag is a symbol of opposition to the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine that has been used by Russian anti-war protesters. It has also been used as a symbol of opposition to the current government of Russia, by several personal internet accounts.
Boris Reitschuster is a German journalist and author. He is considered an expert on Eastern Europe and became known for his books on contemporary Russia. He was the head of the Moscow bureau of the German weekly FOCUS from 1999 until August 2015.