MOSCOW (AP) — Gleb Pavlovsky, a former Soviet-era dissident and later political consultant to the Kremlin where he helped polish the image of President Vladimir Putin, has died, his family said Monday. He was 71 years old.
Pavlovsky was a prominent political adviser to the Kremlin for 15 years and was widely considered one of the architects of the post-Soviet political system.
His death was announced by the family through their channel in a messaging app. He says he died Sunday in a Moscow hospice following a serious illness. Funeral arrangements have not been announced at this time.
Pavlovsky was born in Odessa on the Black Sea and became involved in dissident activities as a university student.
He was arrested in 1982 and sentenced to three years of internal exile. During the trial, Pavlovsky pleaded guilty to the charges and testified against some of his comrades, some of whom never forgave him.
After serving his sentence, Pavlovsky returned to Moscow in 1985 and became active in the pro-democracy movement spawned by Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev’s reforms.
After the 1991 Soviet collapse, he began working as a political consultant and in 1996 participated in the successful re-election campaign of Russia’s first president, Boris Yeltsin.
When Yeltsin resigned and appointed Putin as his successor, Pavlovsky participated in Putin’s first election in March 2000. He continued to be a Kremlin consultant until he fell into disgrace and lost the post of adviser to the presidency in 2011.
After losing his job, he became a critic of the Kremlin, denouncing the authorities’ tendency to control all areas of Russian politics, including a relentless crackdown on the opposition and the independent press. He strongly criticized Putin’s decision to send troops to Ukraine.