Leonid Bershidsky was born in Moscow in 1971. A journalist since the age of 17, his first job was with the Moscow bureau of the Philadelphia Inquirer, where he helped cover the breakup of the Soviet Union. In 1999, Bershidsky, by then an experienced reporter and editor, became the founding editor-in-chief of the daily Vedomosti, an ambitious media start-up that brought together Financial Times and The Wall Street Journal.
Bershidsky, a graduate of the INSEAD business school in Fontainebleau, France, was the founding editor or publisher of a number of other publications including the Russian and Ukrainian editions of Forbes, as well as the opinion website Republic.ru, now designated by the Putin regime as a “foreign agent.”
In 2014, Bershidsky loudly protested the Russian annexation of Crimea. Soon, he and his family were forced to emigrate to Berlin, where Bershidsky went to work as a staff columnist for Bloomberg Opinion. As the organization’s Europe Columnist, Bershidsky covered politics, policy and business in Russia, Ukraine and throughout Europe until the Covid pandemic broke out in 2020. He spent most of 2016 in the United States chronicling Donald Trump’s path to the presidency.
Bershidsky continued writing columns through 2023, restating his strongly anti-Putin and pro-Ukrainian position as Russia re-invaded Ukraine in February 2022.
Bershidsky is also an experienced literary translator, having translated notable works, including 1984 by George Orwell and The Trial by Franz Kafka into Russian. Additionally, he has translated a selection of poems by Alexander Pushkin into English, titled A Captive Finch, which will be published by Freedom Letters worldwide in 2024.
Now, as technical lead of Bloomberg’s News Innovation Lab, Bershidsky, a proficient coder, experiments with artificial intelligence applications for the Bloomberg newsroom. A German citizen, he lives with his wife and two daughters in Berlin and in Saxony-Anhalt, part of former East Germany.
Selected books
Bibliography
2024 — Animal Tested, novel
2013 — The Craft, non-fiction
2012 — Faberge’s Eight, novel
2011 — Devilish Trills, novel
2010 — Rembrandt Must Die, novel
Literary awards
Shortlisted for PolitProsvet Award 2014