Aleksandr Y. Bovin, 73, Who Twitted Kremlin

No, not twitter, not in 2004.

May 5, 2004
Aleksandr Y. Bovin, 73, Who Twitted Kremlin
By SETH MYDANS

MOSCOW, May 4— Aleksandr Y. Bovin, one of the most colorful and daring commentators of the late Soviet period and for more than five years Russia's ambassador to Israel, died during the night of April 27-28. He was 73. His wife said the cause of death was a long-standing vascular problem.

Fellow Soviet-era journalists described Mr. Bovin's light-footed dance with the forbidden in his widely read newspaper commentaries and his weekly television program, International Panorama.

''He had a very subtle feel for the time and was always the first one to say things you couldn't say a day ago,'' said Yevgeny Kiselyov, editor in chief of the weekly Moscow News. ''The times Bovin was forced out of International Panorama and came back again served as a kind of a political barometer for everyone back in the tumultuous 1980's.''

Few journalists had better connections. Mr. Bovin joined the mass-circulation government newspaper Izvestia in 1972 after serving as a Kremlin adviser and speechwriter for top leaders, including Leonid I. Brezhnev, who led the Communist Party. In that job as well, he is said to have stretched official limits: ''an oppositionist within the establishment,'' according to a fellow commentator at Izvestia, Vladimir Kondrashov.

Mr. Bovin was among the thinkers whom Mikhail S. Gorbachev called the ''foremen'' of perestroika, who had been formulating some of the ideas he put into practice when he became the last Soviet leader. In 1991, Mr. Gorbachev named Mr. Bovin ambassador to Israel, reopening a diplomatic relationship that had been dormant for two decades. Mr. Bovin returned in 1997 to Izvestia, which said he was survived by his wife and a daughter.

During his years on International Panorama, Mr. Bovin was perhaps the most recognizable face among Soviet newscasters, described by one colleague as ''a quirky-looking fat man with a lush, jaunty handlebar mustache and long hair over an enormous forehead, somehow akin to Balzac.''

With a relaxed, seemingly extemporaneous style, he took television viewers on what was then a heady ride into independent analysis. ''I tried to say things that were almost forbidden,'' he said once, ''to simply approach the edge.'' He courted official displeasure, and was sometimes removed temporarily from the air, for comments about subjects that included the war in the Falklands, Russia's Afghan war, and the shooting down of a Korean passenger plane in 1983.

Mr. Bovin was also well known for his love of food and drink, surrounding himself with plates of food and bottles of champagne at parties and official receptions.

His raffish trademark was his refusal to wear a necktie unless he absolutely had to, a symbol of his self-confident irreverence and also of the concessions he had to make along the way.

''There were such battles over the necktie,'' he told the newspaper Moskovsky Komsomolets in one of his last interviews. ''I couldn't stand wearing them. I hate ties. Why couldn't they leave me alone? But they forced me; they even called Brezhnev to influence me. So sometimes I had to make compromises.''

Photo: Aleksandr Y. Bovin (Photo by Lisa Berg, 1990)