Elmar Murtazaev leaves the TV channel after a change of ownership. NTV presenter Igor Pyotaev will become the new director of the RBC TV channel Igor Pyotaev NTV biography

Illustration copyright Prokofiev Vyacheslav/TASS Image caption Igor Poletaev at the premiere of the series “Hunting the Devil” in February 2017

NTV presenter Igor Poletaev, who headed the editorial office of the television company's business broadcasting, became managing director of the RBC television channel, taking the place of Elmar Murtazaev, who resigned the day before. The BBC Russian service asked former colleagues what kind of person this was.

RBC employees had not previously mentioned Poletaev as a possible new head of the TV channel. His name was first announced to them on Friday morning.

For Poletaev himself, this is not the first experience of working at RBC: it was here in 2000 that he began his professional career - first in a news agency, and then on a television channel.

“Having immersed myself in the topic during three years of work as a reporter (and then as an editor), I decided to try to realize my old dream - to become a TV news anchor,” says Poletaev’s profile on the NTV website.

“On September 2, 2003, the first live broadcast of RBC-TV took place. It was also my first day on the live broadcast of the information service, which can be described in one word - delight!” - he recalled.

Poletaev began working at NTV in 2006. He came there as a business news anchor and later became one of the presenters of the "Today" news program.

The host of the Dozhd TV channel, Pavel Lobkov, who left NTV in 2011, speaks of Poletaev as an “always correct” and “very neat, tidy” colleague.

“[Poletaev] gave the impression of a broker or bank trader who suddenly went to work on television,” Lobkov said.

According to one of Poletaev’s former colleagues at NTV, he owes his career success in the first years of work to Tatyana Mitkova, who in 2014 became deputy general director and head of the channel’s news broadcasting directorate.

The BBC's interlocutor was skeptical about Poletaev's abilities as a leader. Former presenter of the RBC TV channel Andrei Shilyaev did not agree with this assessment: “Igor Poletaev is an intelligent, experienced person, he has been cooking in the television kitchen for a very long time.”

“The work of a manager is not some special profession or special education, it is a job for a person with common sense,” Shilyaev said.

Shilyaev calls his former colleague “on the one hand a maestro, on the other a mathematician.” “This is the person who can bring a little music and revive the RBC channel, which has been in search of something in recent years,” added the channel’s former presenter.

NTV editor-in-chief Alexandra Kosterina called Poletaev a professional and wished him success in his position as head of the RBC TV channel.

Who was before Poletaev

It became known the day before that this post had become vacant. On Thursday, Elmar Murtazaev, who worked as managing director of the RBC channel since 2016, announced his resignation. And on Friday, Meduza reported that many of the channel’s leading employees would allegedly leave after him.

So far, no one has written a letter of resignation, several employees of the channel, who wished to remain anonymous, told the BBC Russian Service. We are talking about planned vacations, the RBC press service said.

Employees of the “Stories of the Day” and “Prime Time” programs are going on paid leave until October. “We have indeed slightly increased the planned summer vacations for RBC TV employees,” Nikolai Molibog, general director of the RBC holding, confirmed to Vedomosti.

That part of the TV channel team that came with Murtazaev is going on a long vacation: former chief editor of Forbes.ru Alexander Bogomolov (Murtazaev was previously editor-in-chief of Forbes magazine, ex-employees of the Central Television program on NTV Alexander Urzhanov and Igor Sadreev (both came to RBC at the end of 2016), presenter Stanislav Kucher (has been hosting a special broadcast on RBC since 2017), former editor of the Finance department of the RBC publication Elena Tofanyuk, correspondents Roman Super and Rodion Chepel.

In June, the RBC holding changed its owner - now it belongs to the owner of the ESN group, Grigory Berezkin. He has not yet met with the team and did not tell them about his plans for the development of the TV channel, two employees of the holding told the BBC Russian Service. But it was obvious to Murtazaev and RBC employees that the new owner would not leave the old team on the channel.

Paid leave for three months is a kind of “parachute” for employees, say two employees of the RBC TV channel. Murtazaev has long made it clear to his employees that he will not remain working under the new owner, and that, most likely, the management of the TV channel will change. Until new plans are announced, employees are asked to take leave.

No one has announced any specific plans to change the channel's editorial policy, but employees are confident that television will show less political news.

Business broadcasting editor and NTV news presenter Igor Poletaev will become managing director of the RBC TV channel. He will replace Elmar Murtazaev in this position.

RBC announced the appointment of Igor Poletaev as managing director of RBC TV instead of Elmar Murtazaev. Mr. Poletaev had already worked at RBC since 2000, and in 2003–2006 he was a correspondent, editor and presenter at RBC TV. In 2006, he moved to NTV and worked as an economic observer for Business News and host of 19-hour editions of the Segodnya program. When he starts a new job will be announced later, RBC clarified.

Last month, RBC changed its owner: Grigory Berezkin bought the media holding from Mikhail Prokhorov. “Murtazaev informed me several months ago of his desire to leave the TV channel and journalism in general, and I asked him not to make a final decision until there was a change of shareholder,” RBC CEO Nikolai Molibog was quoted in the message. “Unfortunately for us, this day has come Today. We wish Elmar great luck."

Elmar Murtazaev did not disclose his new place of work; according to him, he is negotiating on this matter. Mr. Murtazaev has been involved in journalism for more than 20 years; he has worked for RBC TV since April 2016. He came to the TV channel from Forbes magazine, where he was editor-in-chief for two years and left after the sale of the publishing house Axel Springer Russia, which published the magazine, to businessman Alexander Fedotov.

Igor Poletaev: “My opinion is perpendicular to yours”

“...Disputes generally do not lead to the discovery or affirmation of the truth. It's just a way of self-expression and self-affirmation. A hybrid of art and sport, a way to show off one’s own erudition and intellect or its ersatz before the eyes of an enthusiastic audience. I don't want to say that arguing is completely useless. They are useful, but not for the “truth” and its dissemination, but for the sake of testing the stability of one’s own argumentation. In a dispute, they will pour out all the dirt on you completely free of charge, which you yourself would never have collected or invented. This is a great help, although it is expensive. What is called “mud” is actually a healing thing...”

I.A. Poletaev

Igor Andreevich Poletaev, who owns the statement in the title, was one of the founders of cybernetics in our country. This science (and is it even a science? rather a methodology) is now preferred to be called computer science, thereby emphasizing the rejection of claims to a “theory of everything”, which status was originally firmly attached to cybernetics. In fact, it’s as if we couldn’t throw out the baby with the bathwater—a “theory of everything” didn’t come out of cybernetics, of course, but the idea of convergence of various disciplines (sometimes very different– such as literary studies and electronics) under the roof of a unified approach turned out to be quite fruitful. However, up to certain limits - those in which a mathematical (and algorithmic) approach to describing the phenomena of real reality is generally possible.

Igor Poletaev and the cover of his book

When they talk about the development of cybernetics in the USSR, they usually remember corresponding member. A. A. Lyapunov, academicians A. I. Berg, V. M. Glushkov, S. L. Sobolev, as well as many other scientists whom I will not list here so as not to undeservedly miss anyone. Now it is difficult to imagine how popular these topics were then among scientists and engineers. Poletaev occupies a special place among them, which is very difficult to understand and evaluate in retrospect. Especially if you consider that Igor Andreevich was by no means overwhelmed with formal insignia - titles, degrees and positions - during his lifetime. But it is difficult to overestimate his influence on the domestic cybernetic school: the whole point is that Poletaev was a brilliant polemicist who grasped the essence of the problem before any interlocutor, and was able to argue witty, reasonably and deeply. Because of these qualities, during the “thaw” in the 1960s, he was even invited to speak to the party elite and was allowed to freely criticize the Soviet regime - however, in narrow circles.

How did it happen that this brilliant orator and highly educated person became “Engineer Poletaev,” whom the whole country knew as a gloomy technician fixated on physics, who did not recognize poetry, and who considered the entire humanitarian culture obsolete? But let's talk about everything in order.

Cybernetics

The biography of Igor Andreevich is not rich in external events, but a person who well represents Soviet life of that era is striking in some nuances. Seven-year school (1930) - but with the teaching of three (!) languages: German, French and English. At the same time - a music school, piano class. It was difficult (after seven years) to enter the Moscow Energy Institute, but even before that I.A. tried to enter... the school of infantry commanders, while simultaneously studying in the theater club at his native Dynamo plant. A combination of interests rare for any time. But nothing is wasted - at the end of the war, in February 1945, an air defense division engineer, physicist and foreign language expert Poletaev was sent to America as part of the so-called “Military Trade Delegation” to study radar technology. Poletaev sat out there through the end of the war, the death of Roosevelt, and returned at the end of 1945 - recent allies quickly re-qualified as potential enemies.

An expert in American radar, Poletaev became a valuable personnel and ended up at the Research Institute of the Main Aviation Administration. He served in the military department for another decade and a half. At the same time, he defended his dissertation (in physics), but his range of interests was already different.

It is curious that Nobert Wiener, the author of the acclaimed “Cybernetics” (1948), also came to cybernetics from radar. Anti-aircraft fire control systems were a non-trivial mathematical problem, and an excellent model of any dynamic control processes in general. Having independently arrived at many of the provisions of Wiener’s science, Poletaev became its ardent propagandist in our country.

Unfortunately, it turned out that cybernetics was substituted for political obscurantists (as we would now say - fundamentalists). The most successful and complete, as we know, was the destruction of biology. Having lost (including in the physical sense, as happened with N.I. Vavilov, who died in prison) many world-famous leaders, and the actual opportunity for development, domestic biology has never recovered from this blow, despite the actual lifting of the ban on at the turn of the 1970s. The humanities (sociology, psychology) and economics in the USSR were never popular with those in power, and here they were completely driven underground. Less well known are the corresponding actions in chemistry (the persecution of supporters of the resonance theory led by Academician Y.K. Syrkin, whose lectures the author of these lines had the opportunity to listen to already in the 1970s) and regarding quantum mechanics. But the propagandists of the “only true doctrine” were too short-handed to get physicists, due to their privileged status in ensuring the defense capability of the state. And in mathematics there seemed to be nowhere to stick – everything was somehow... classless.

But the daughter of mathematics, cybernetics, turned out to be “just right” - with its claims to the universality of control processes . In the “Concise Philosophical Dictionary” of 1954, it was defined as follows: “ CYBERNETICS (from another Greek word meaning helmsman, manager)–reactionary pseudoscience..." The “propagandists” had no idea that cybernetics had been successfully not only developing on native soil for a long time, but was also widely used in practice - in the military complex. By 1956, leading mathematicians and other scientists came to the conclusion that this could no longer be tolerated, and in the wake of the 20th Congress, which exposed Stalin’s cult of personality, they began by organizing the Institute of Cybernetics within the Academy of Sciences.

Igor Andreevich took an active part in all this activity. According to the memoirs of M. G. Gaase-Rapoport (later a prominent cyberneticist, and then also a military expert on air defense systems), Wiener’s book in English was given to Poletaev to read by I. S. Brook, the designer of one of the first domestic computers M1, which we will remember later . Even if this memory is erroneous (distribution of prohibited literature was punishable), Poletaev, in any case, had no problems getting acquainted with the original source - as a military specialist, he had access to the special storage facility. At the suggestion of Admiral-Academician A.I. Berg, Poletaev wrote the book “Signal” (1958) - the first domestic public textbook outlining the fundamentals of cybernetics . Without dwelling on the rave reviews that accompany this book to this day from leading experts, it is worth noting that all textbooks on this discipline, published decades later, exactly repeat the structure of Poletaev’s book. And a separate note - it is written, unlike many similar, sometimes very good, textbooks and manuals, in intelligible Russian language and is distinguished by the utmost clarity of presentation. Poletaev’s style is also characterized by a reluctance to hide any controversial issues, of which there were plenty in cybernetics.

State and management

Although Poletaev’s main scientific works were works on biological cybernetics and operations research written in the 1960s, it is impossible to ignore the topic of the relationship between the science of cybernetics and the state of the “planned economy” (we now call it “command”). This topic is completely undeservedly ignored by historians - perhaps because humanists understand little about the essence of purely scientific problems, which sometimes unexpectedly correlate with political ideas. Everyone has heard about Chilean General Pinochet and his overthrow of the government of Socialist President Allende in a coup d'état in 1973. But few people know that one of the key moments of Allende’s economic policy was an attempt to create a cybernetic model of the entire Chilean economy, with the participation of the prominent English scientist Stafford Beer. The attempt was naive (there were one and a half computers for the whole country) and doomed to failure even without Pinochet’s intervention, but still...

The fact is that the ideas of a planned economy, by their very essence, fit perfectly into the cybernetic concept. From a theoretical point of view, in cybernetics, already in the 1950s, everything was ready to build a global mathematical model of state management, implement it “in hardware” and retire the entire State Planning Committee along with numerous ministries and departments.

We will not analyze here the global miscalculations of the supporters of this approach, which would still not allow such a system to function normally, even if it were created and established (and the necessary costs, both initial and ongoing, according to V.M. Glushkov, are comparable to nuclear and space project combined). Let us only note that at a time when it was believed that a machine translation program would actually work with a complexity of “several thousand machine commands” (the statement of A.I. Kitov, also a military scientist, and one of the main initiators of the struggle for Soviet cybernetics), and a computer will be able to completely imitate a person, reaching a memory capacity of 10 10 bits (a little more than a gigabyte - so believed the great Turing), all later objections were, of course, still unknown. Just as the objections to a planned economy in general were not obvious then – at least in our country.

And, of course, it was worth a try - since we manage the economy voluntaristically, then God himself is here, as they say. ordered to use a computer. This is also supported by the fact that such systems for data analysis and decision-making, although not at such a global level, are increasingly being introduced into modern practice. Especially in the field of corporate governance, and of course, where strict management is an integral property of the system - in military affairs.

And in the USSR, at least three centers arose almost simultaneously, where proposals were put forward for state projects of automatic control systems. Two of them were civilian - I. S. Bruk’s INEUM, where the latter gathered under his wing disgraced economists using L. V. Kantorovich’s linear programming methods, dynamic models of the economy, V. Leontiev’s methods of input balances and other progressive tools. Another was associated with the name of V.M. Glushkov, head of the Institute of Cybernetics in Kyiv, who proposed the OGAS (National Automated System) project. This project was the most global and at the same time the closest to implementation, since it was developed as part of a direct government assignment - Glushkov was entrusted with the development of information aspects of the economic transformation system, called the “Kosygin reform”.

The project closest to reality, as it now appears, was developed by the mentioned A.I. Kitov at the Ministry of Defense. He proposed creating a network of dual-use mainframe computers: to manage the economy in peacetime and to manage the army in case of war. All the advantages and necessity of this project were so obvious to him that he did not think at all about the need for, as they say now, “PR” - promotion among his superiors and receiving support. He simply sent proposals “to the very top” and began to wait for a positive reaction.

The System's reaction could have been predicted. “Objective economic indicators” were needed by the officials of that time no more than transparency was needed by modern shadow businessmen. (Glushkov characterizes Soviet economists: “ who didn't count anything at all"). The objection that was put forward to Glushkov at the Politburo level is characteristic: “ Optimization methods and automated control systems are not needed, since the party has its own methods of management: for this it consults with the people, for example, convenes a meeting of Stakhanovites or collective farmers-shock workers" Poletaev was not one of the authors of the project (which was entirely created by Kitov alone), but together with other associates of the author, he openly defended the initiative. One of V.I. Kitov’s colleagues, Colonel-Engineer V.P. Isaev writes: “...all sensible scientists and employees who worked at VTs-1 of the USSR Ministry of Defense or were involved in it at that time, understanding the sound logic and enormous usefulness for our country of the proposals of the A.I. project. Kitov, supported Anatoly Ivanovich and his project with their speeches at the Commission of the USSR Ministry of Defense (including N.P. Buslenko, L.A. Lyusternik, A.A. Lyapunov, I.A. Poletaev and others).”
This support came at a high cost primarily to those in the Armed Forces. The main political department of the army asked the only question: “Where is the leading role of the party in your machine?” The author of the project, A.I. Kitov, was dismissed from the army in 1960, and those who supported it, including Igor Andreevich, in 1961 - formally based on their length of service, after all, almost all of them were front-line soldiers in the 1941 conscription. Later, other directions were also destroyed: Brook was removed from the leadership of INEUMA simultaneously with the fall of Khrushchev, and the “Kosygin” reform was curtailed. They started talking seriously about automated control systems and automated control systems in civilian life and about army control systems only ten years later.

Poletaev moved to Novosibirsk, where he became the soul of scientific symposiums and completed his main works. Poletaev’s son, Andrei Igorevich, in his article in memory of his father, recalls the words of the famous biologist and mathematician Albert Makarievich Molchanov: “ They said that cybernetics is a reactionary pseudoscience. This is wrong. Firstly–not reactionary. Secondly–not a lie, but thirdly–not science. This idea could have belonged to Igor Andreevich, it seems to me».

Andrey Poletaev, son of I.A. Poletaev, during his student years at the physics department of Moscow State University, 1963

He turned out to be right - Poletaev put forward the thesis that cybernetics is not a science back in the late fifties. But discussing this issue would take us far beyond the scope of this article.

Physicists and lyricists

The famous contemporary of Pushkin, E.A. Baratynsky, expressed the general negative feeling about the advent of the age of, as we now say, technocrats in the following significant words (“The Last Poet”):

Disappeared in the light of enlightenment

Poetry, childish dreams,

And it’s not about her that generations are busy,

Dedicated to industrial concerns.

It seems that the outstanding poet grasped the very essence of the problem - science was reproached for ignoring the “beautiful” from the very moment of its emergence. At the beginning of the 19th century, Chateaubriand proposed banning science altogether. Kant looked for rational justifications for morality and came to the conclusion that they do not exist. The situation worsened in the middle of the 20th century, when science, so to speak, “lost its innocence.” If before this the typical image of a scientist - the absent-minded eccentric Paganel - certainly included a certain desire “to search for truth”, “towards disinterested knowledge of the laws of nature”, the concept of “pure science” existed and was cultivated, then, starting with the explosions in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the public I stopped believing this image.

Against this background, at the end of the 50s, a discussion “about physicists and lyricists” arose simultaneously in the West (C.P. Snow) and in the USSR. The very fact of the emergence of such a discussion, regardless of its level and consequences, was of great importance: Tarkovsky’s film “Mirror” begins with the metaphor “I can speak.” In a completely ideologized post-Stalin society, the emergence of such a phenomenon is in itself unusual - there is no doubt that it was not sanctioned from above in any way. A completely honest presentation of one’s opinion in central (!) printed publications, and the polarization of these opinions almost without regard to the “only true teaching” was of great importance for shaping the social climate of that era.

The discussion received its name from lines from the poem by B. Slutsky, which was published in Literaturnaya Gazeta on September 13, 1959:

Somehow physicists are held in high esteem

Something lyrical in the paddock.

It's not a matter of dry calculation,

It's a matter of global law.

This means something hasn't been revealed.

We should!

So, weak wings –

Our sweet iambs...

But the publication of these verses happened only a week and a half after the start of the discussion itself.

The impetus for the beginning was the publication in Komsomolskaya Pravda of September 2, 1959 of I. Ehrenburg’s article “Answer to One Letter.” A student at the Leningrad Pedagogical Institute, Nina V., spoke about her conflict with a certain engineer: “ “Once I tried to read him a poem by Blok,” the correspondent wrote. “He listened reluctantly and told me that it was outdated, nonsense and now a different era. When I suggested that he go to the Hermitage, he got angry, he had already been there, and in general it’s not interesting, and again, that I don’t understand our time... Of course, he is an intelligent and honest worker, all his comrades have a high opinion of him, and I could listen for hours when he talked about his work, he helped me understand the meaning of physics, but he does not recognize anything else in life..."The question was quite in the spirit of the times: " Is it true that interest in art is being replaced in our century by powerful scientific progress?"?. Ehrenburg also responded quite in the spirit of the times: “ ... I believe that the passion, will, and inspiration of those who have not only great knowledge, but also a big heart will win" Supporters of Ehrenburg’s point of view subsequently more than once referred to E. Popova’s speech: “ I am convinced that there, in space, man will struggle, suffer, love, and strive to understand the world more broadly and deeply. A man in space will need a branch of lilac!" This “very lilac branch in space” became the banner of the “lyricists” who contrasted art with “soulless” science. Nowadays they would only laugh at such pathetics, but the reaction of the readers of that time to the article was extremely fast and active. Not a single modern publication would refuse to repeat such journalistic success.

This would all have ended without leaving a trace in our memory if the article in Komsomolskaya Pravda had not caught the eye of Poletaev. As you can judge from the above, Igor Andreevich was a master of verbal duels. What infuriated him in Ehrenburg’s article was, first of all, the level of discussion - as he himself recalled: “ Well, how can you print something like that! Precisely to print, because at first I did not doubt for a second that I. G. Ehrenburg prints one thing and thinks another (he is not a complete fool, in fact, with this “virgin spirituality”" Knowing both science and art very well from the inside, Poletaev, with his usual sense of humor, went for a provocation: “Is it possible to say that modern life is increasingly following artists and poets? No. Science and technology create the face of the modern era, increasingly influencing tastes, morals, human behavior... We live by the creativity of reason, not feelings, the poetry of ideas, the theory of experiments, construction. This is our era. It requires the whole person without reserve, and we have no time to exclaim: ah, Bach! ah, Blok! Of course, they are outdated and have become out of keeping with our lives. Whether we like it or not, they have become leisure, entertainment, and not life... Whether we like it or not, poets control our souls less and less and teach us less and less. The most fascinating tales today are presented by science and technology, precise, courageous and merciless intelligence. Not recognizing this means not seeing what is happening around. Art fades into the background - into rest, into leisure, and I regret this together with Ehrenburg " And he signed himself - “Poletaev (engineer)”, and under this name he became known overnight throughout the country.

He was taken seriously, and so seriously that the discussion spread to the pages of Literaturnaya Gazeta,“Literature and Life”, magazines “Moscow”, “Foreign Literature”, “New World” and other publications. “Engineer Poletaev” had many like-minded people, but the majority still turned out to be against it. In just almost five years, which the discussion lasted (until 1964), academicians, literary critics, journalists, writers and poets, and even foreign authors (C. Snow and M. Wilson) took part in it.

All these people, except, of course, those who personally knew I.A. Poletaev (and those, apparently, did not participate in the public discussion) and did not suspect that Igor Andreevich himself:

– knew English, German, French, Italian, Czech, Polish and Japanese, and also read Swedish, Greek, Chinese and Hungarian with a dictionary;

– had perfect pitch and musical education, mastered new musical instruments all his life, for example, by the end of his life he mastered the violin and flute;

– At home I collected a huge collection of classical music recordings; I also really loved the songs of Charles Trenet and Yves Montand;

– He was engaged in sculpture, painting, filming amateur films, and applied arts (glass blowing). According to his son, he was jealous of Mukhina and Konenkov, because he himself could not do it, but not the others, he felt that he could express himself no worse.

And his performance was simply a provocation, a desire to expose talkers and slackers, of whom there were simply countless numbers in Soviet art by that time. In modern language, Poletaev “deluded the lyricists like suckers,” they innocently fell for it, and he himself watched with satisfaction as a certain virtual “engineer Poletaev” was beaten and how many nonsense was uttered.

Here is his real position, in his own words: “ What did I defend (and I did “defend” something) in this dispute? I remember it, and I am ready to “defend” even now. Probably what I defended can be briefly called “freedom of choice.” If I or someone X, being an adult, of sound mind and solid memory, chose an occupation for myself, then –Firstly–let him do as he wants, if he does not interfere with others, and even more so brings benefit; secondly, let no bastard dare to tell him that you, they say, X –bad because you are a carpenter (engineer, g...cleaner –add what is necessary), and I –Y–good, because I am a poet (musician, burglar –add what is necessary). ... The trouble will begin when a fool, a bohemian dropout, a whirlwind spinner, who calls himself, like a crayfish in the absence of fish, a “poet,” comes to a hard-working engineer and impudently pesters him with the statement that he is “uncultured,” because he is not involved in poetry. This is exactly what Ehrenburg said, may he rest in peace ».

And this confession, published after the death of Igor Andreevich by his son, takes the whole problem to a completely different level. DThat discussion, of course, could not be turned towards a dispute about “freedom of choice.” If it turned out that in fact the question is about the foundations of an “open society”, the coexistence of cultures and worldviews, then no discussion would simply take place. It’s a pity, because the question is not at all closed to this day, and has many more levels that Poletaev himself, most likely, was completely unaware of.

On his tombstone in the Novosibirsk Akademgorodok it is written - “engineer I.A. Poletaev”.

Image copyright Prokofiev Vyacheslav/TASS

Image caption Igor Poletaev at the premiere of the series “Hunting the Devil” in February 2017

RBC employees had not previously mentioned Poletaev as a possible new head of the TV channel. His name was first announced to them on Friday morning.

For Poletaev himself, this is not the first experience of working at RBC: it was here in 2000 that he began his professional career - first in a news agency, and then on a television channel.

Poletaev began working at NTV in 2006. He came there as a business news anchor and later became one of the presenters of the "Today" news program.

The host of the Dozhd TV channel, Pavel Lobkov, who left NTV in 2011, speaks of Poletaev as an “always correct” and “very neat, tidy” colleague.

“[Poletaev] gave the impression of a broker or bank trader who suddenly went to work on television,” Lobkov said.

“The work of a manager is not some special profession or special education, it is a job for a person with common sense,” Shilyaev said.

NTV editor-in-chief Alexandra Kosterina called Poletaev a professional and wished him success in his position as head of the RBC TV channel.

Who was before Poletaev

No one has announced any specific plans to change the channel's editorial policy, but employees are confident that television will show less political news.

New managing director of the channel "RBC TV" will be Igor Poletaev, RBC holding reported. He will replace Elmar Murtazaev in this position. Poletaev has already worked at RBC: from 2000 at the news agency, and in 2003-2006. - on the TV channel. After that, he moved to NTV, now he is the host of the “Today” program.

When exactly the change of directors of the channel will take place is not indicated in the holding’s message. The RBC representative also did not name specific dates, only specifying that this would happen “soon.”

Managing Director of RBC TV Elmar Murtazaev leaves the holding

He will no longer engage in journalism.

Technologies

Murtazaev is leaving the RBC channel and journalism in general, Vedomosti’s sources in the holding previously told. General Director of the RBC holding Nikolai Molibog confirmed that Murtazaev warned about a possible departure several months ago, but agreed to wait for the completion of the sale of RBC.

How strong the changes in the RBC TV team will be depends, among other things, on who will replace Murtazaev and how much the new director wants to update the team, Vedomosti sources said. Today Meduza reported that, following Murtazaev, many of the channel’s employees will leave RBC. An RBC representative denied this and emphasized that some employees were only going on a long summer vacation.

RBC TV is part of the media holding of the same name. Murtazaev has been heading the channel since the beginning of 2016. Two weeks ago, Grigory Berezkin bought a controlling stake in this holding from Mikhail Prokhorov. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Berezkin does not at all insist on changing the RBC TV team, Vedomosti’s interlocutors claim. Molibog also hopes to maintain this edition, they add.

Starting next week, some of the employees of RBC TV will go on a long-planned summer vacation until September, Vedomosti’s interlocutors know, however, it was previously assumed that such a vacation would be shorter. Such paid summer vacations, which involve employees of entire programs, are a common practice on TV channels. These vacations are also a guarantee for employees that they will have the opportunity to calmly assess the changes taking place at the channel and make a decision whether they will remain working at RBC or not, one of Vedomosti’s interlocutors points out.

Two employees of RBC TV told Vedomosti that they do not know what will happen after the end of the vacation: “it will depend on the decision of the shareholders.”

“We have indeed slightly increased the planned summer vacations for RBC TV employees,” Molibog confirmed, “so that if the director of the channel changes, it would be easier for him and all of us to enter management.”