Vladimir Posner

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Vladimir Posner

Birth name	Vladimir Vladimirovich Posner
Born	April 1, 1934 (1934-04-01) (age 74)
Birth place	Paris, France
Circumstances
Notable credit(s)

Vladimir Vladimirovich Posner (also spelled "Pozner"; in Russian, Владимир Владимирович Познер), born April 1, 1934, is a Russian journalist best known in the West for appearing on television to represent and explain the views of the Soviet Union during the Cold War^[1]. He was a memorable spokesperson for the Soviets in part because he had grown up in the United States and spoke flawless American English with a New York accent.

He worked as chief commentator for the North American service of the Radio Moscow network. In the early 1970s, he was a regular guest on Ray Briem's talk show on KABC in Los Angeles. During the 1980s, he was a favorite guest on Ted Koppel's Nightline. Posner was the host of Moscow Meridian, an English-language current affairs program focusing on the Soviet Union; the show was produced by Gosteleradio, the Soviet State Committee for Television and Radio, and broadcast on Ted Turner's Satellite Program Network^[2]. He also often appeared on The Phil Donahue Show; in 1986, the two co-hosted A Citizen's Summit, a bilateral, televised discussion (or "spacebridge") between audiences in the Soviet Union and the US, carried via satellite.^[3]

In 1980 he called for arrest and extradition of Andrei Sakharov, an act for which he apologized in his 1990 autobiography Parting with Illusions.^[4] He also wrote Eyewitness: A Personal Account of the Unraveling of the Soviet Union, and the introduction to the Bantam Classics edition of The Communist Manifesto. Posner also worked for the Institute of the United States and Canada, a Soviet think tank.

In a 2005 interview with NPR's On the Media, Posner spoke openly about his role as a Soviet spokesman, stating bluntly, "What I was doing was propaganda." Comparing his former role to that of Karen Hughes, the U.S. Under Secretary of State for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs, he commented that, "You know, as someone who's gone through this and someone who regrets having done what he's done, and who spent many, many years of his life, and I think probably the best years of my life, doing something that was wrong, I say it just isn't worth it".^[5]

Posner was born in Paris to a Russian-Jewish father and French mother. His father, Vladimir Aleksandrovich Pozner, was a Communist who immigrated to the United States, and spied for the Soviet Union during World War II^{[citation needed]}. Young Vladimir attended Stuyvesant High School on Manhattan's East Side^[6] before his family moved to the Soviet sector of East Berlin and later to Moscow in the early 1950s.

In 1997, Posner founded the School for Television Excellence («Школу телевизионного мастерства») in Moscow to educate and promote young journalists. He is president of the Russian Television Academy, which annually distributes the country's most prestigious TV awards. With his brother Pavel, he co-owns a French restaurant in Moscow, Жеральдин (Geraldine), named after their mother.

[edit] Shows

Vladimir Posner was host of several shows, among them "Mi", (translated "Us"); "Chelovek v maske", ("A Man in the Mask"). Today (2007) Posner hosts a political talk show on Russia's Channel One, the show named "Vremena", ("Times").

He has a lively and unconstrained style of hosting, often firing poignant off-the-cuff remarks at his guests. One of the chief things he keeps referring to, while hosting, is that how this or that political or economic decision, presently at issue in his show, could affect the common people of Russia.^[7]