Syomin Konstantin

Syomin Konstantin Date of Birth

16 March 1980

Syomin Konstantin Citizenship

Russia

Syomin Konstantin Professional field/official position

TV host, musician and documentary director

Syomin Konstantin biography

SYOMIN Konstantin Viktorovich (b. 1970 in Sverdlovsk) was born into the family of an engineer and subsequently a member of the city council from the United Russia party. While still a freshman in the Faculty of Journalism at Ural State University (graduated in 2001), he began working in television. He worked for local TV companies ASV, ATN, was the host of the weekly newscast On The Eve, and as a war correspondent, he made trips to Dagestan and Chechnya. On one of the trips to Chechnya, an officer Yuri Ilchenko was killed by poisonous gases through the fault of Syomin. He was a correspondent for Expert magazine in the Urals region and met with top Russian oligarchs.

In November 2000, Konstantin Syomin became a correspondent for the Vesti program on the state TV channel RTR (subsequently, Rossiya, now Rossiya-1, belonging to the state media holding VGTRK), and prepared reports for the Vesti Nedeli weekly newscast. From January 2004 to March 2007, he was the head of the VGTRK correspondent’s office in New York. In April 2007, he became the host of Vesti and also hosted the nightly newscast Vesti+. In the same year, he was awarded the medal of the Order of Merit for the Fatherland. In 2012, he graduated from the Department of Documentary Studies at New York University.
From April 2014 to March 2019, Konstantin Semin hosted the Agitprop (Agitation and Propaganda) program on the Russia-24 TV channel. He became famous for the propaganda film Biochemistry of Betrayal in February 2014, directed against opponents of the ruling regime in Russia. He maintains the political blog AgitBlog, where he expresses his communist and pro-Putin views. In the fall of 2017, he took part in the presidential primaries of the Left Front. The wife of Konstantin Semin, Marina, along with his son Vasily has been living in the United States since 2017 and, presumably, has American citizenship.

Syomin Konstantin crimes

Aggressive pro-Kremlin propaganda; libel and provocation against the democratic opposition.

It is difficult to find a more controversial propagandist-provocateur in the Russian media than Konstantin Semin. An offspring of a prosperous family who has lived in the United States for many years and has a family across the ocean, he is one of the most odious advocates of neo-Sovietism and whistleblowers of “Vlasovites” and “traitors” among the Russian liberal and nationalist opposition. Until March 2019, he served as an anti-capitalist mouthpiece on Russian television, which attracted the leftist and communist electorate to support the Putin regime. At the moment, he switched to propaganda work on the internet, where he poses as a left “alternative” to the existing system, however, avoiding criticism of its criminal-Chekist basis and personally of President Vladimir Putin.

In 2008, Konstantin Syomin provoked an international scandal with his comments on the internal political situation in Serbia, which he broadcasted on the Vesti + program on the Rossiya TV channel. “A few years ago, the country, stunned by liberal promises, wept the Western puppet of Zoran Djindjic, a man who ruined the legendary Serbian army and special services, sold heroes of national resistance to The Hague for abstract economic assistance and received a well-deserved bullet for this,” he said commenting on the unrest in Serbia caused by the declaration of independence of Kosovo. These statements were discussed in the Serbian parliament, and calls were made to recall the Serbian ambassador from Russia. During an official visit to Serbia, the Russian delegation led by Prime Minister Viktor Zubkov assured that Syomin’s remarks did not reflect the official position of the Russian authorities.

Konstantin Syomin's most scandalous work was the documentary Biochemistry of Betrayal, which aired on the state TV channel Rossiya-1 in February 2014 during the Euromaidan in Ukraine. The film compared those who disagreed with the Kremlin’s policy to General Andrey Vlasov, the commander of the anti-Soviet Russian Liberation Army during World War II. Syomin claimed that the US was conducting a psychological war, undermining the confidence of Russian citizens in the ruling regime.

When arranging interviews for the film, Syomin and the TV channel administration deliberately withheld the true purpose of the film from the participants, showing only selected controversial fragments. After the release, Syomin admitted to lying and provoking his interviewees, including former Moscow Mayor Gavriil Popov, human rights activist Sergey Kovalev, and others.

As a full-time propagandist on the state television channel, Syomin continued to promote anti-Western and anti-Ukrainian hysteria and attack the Russian opposition. He was involved in the persecution of opposition politician Boris Nemtsov and was mentioned in the Nemtsov List, a list of journalists who incited hatred towards ideological opponents of the Putin regime inside Russia.

In recent years, Syomin has portrayed himself as a critic of the current regime from the left, while expressing notorious opinions even by Russian official standards. However, he remains part of the system and his inhumane views fit into the pro-government discourse. His role in fueling hatred against regime opponents in Russian society is well documented, and he may be held responsible for his rhetoric and assistance in turning the country into a dictatorship.