On the 11th of November, the famous Journalist Valeriy Georgiyevich Kadzhaya (1942-2010) has passed away after a difficult and lengthy illness. A native of Tbilisi, he owed his life to a tragedy in the USSR in 1932, when a number of regions were subject to famine because of Stalin's policy of mass withdrawal of wheat from the local farmers. As a result, the mother of the future journalist and her parents moved from their native Kuban to the Trans-Caucasian region.

Even before he graduated from the faculty of journalism of Tbilisi university, Valeriy Kazhdaya became a staff reporter for the republican newspaper “Dawn of the East” (“Zarya Vostoka”). However, he soon moved to a far more respectable edition – to the first newspaper of the USSR, the pan-Soviet “Izvestia.” He worked in the “Izvestiya” and “Week” (“Nedelya”) newspapers for almost 13 years, from 1965 to 1978. Among the newspapers that Valeriy Kazhdaya wrote for were the “Labour” (“Trud”), “Economic Newspaper,” “Kommersant,” and the “Russian Newspaper” (unlike many of the stars of Soviet journalism, he did not disappear with the fall of the Union).

 

As a journalist, Valeriy Kazhdaya did not shy away from difficult topics. One of those was the problem of xenophobia and anti-Semitism, which interested him more and more from the beginning of the 1990's. He wrote articles, published several books, spoke on the “Svoboda” radio – all to prove that anti-Semitism is either a consequence of utter ingnorance or a cold calculation to mobilize allies against a common “enemy.” He was not afraid to touch upon the “sacred cows” that all others merely pranced about. One of his books was dedicated to the anti-Semitic writings of the “deacon of all Russia” Andrei Kuraev, and the other was dedicated to disassembling writings the currently deceased writer and scholar Alexander Solzhenitsyn, laid out in his scandalous book “200 years together.” It was Valeriy Kazhdaya who popularized the nearly-forgotten, yet important work “Jews in Russia” by Nikolai Leskov. His activity was noted many times. In 2000, Valeriy Kadzhaya became the laureate of the Union of Journalists of Moscow Prize for a series of articles against anti-Semitism. In 2005, he became the laureate of the prize of the Union of Journalists of Russia for a series of articles on xenophobia.

 

Valeriy Kadzhaya also left a notable mark in alpinism – he participated in the discovery of the humongous New Athos cave.

 

He was one of those people who received generous wishes of living to 120. Unfortunately, he lived for merely a little over half of that time.