Boris Reitschuster German Journalist From Augsburg

Early life

Boris Reitschuster was born on 12 May 1971 in Augsburg, Germany. He attended a Gymnasium near St. Stephan in the city and completed his Abitur in 1990. After finishing school he moved to Moscow, where he qualified as an interpreter at the scientific centre of the Moscow State University of Economics, Statistics and Informatics. That period gave him a direct grounding in the language and politics of Russia, the country that became the main subject of his later reporting.

Career

Reitschuster began his journalism career in Russia. From 1992 to 1994 he worked as a Moscow correspondent for several German newspapers, among them Deutsches Allgemeines Sonntagsblatt, Darmstädter Echo and Thüringische Allgemeine. He then returned to Germany for a traineeship at the Augsburger Allgemeine, which ran from 1995 to 1997. After the traineeship he worked for the news agencies DPA and AFP, with postings in Augsburg and Munich.

In November 1999 he was appointed head of the Moscow office of the German news magazine Focus, a post he held until August 2015, a stretch of nearly sixteen years. Over that time he reported on the Russian political system and on the successive presidencies of Vladimir Putin and Dmitry Medvedev, and he became known in Germany as a critic of Putin. Reitschuster has said that he returned to Germany in 2011 after encountering threats while working in Russia.

Alongside his reporting he has written a series of non-fiction books on Russia, published in German. His first, Briefe aus einem untergehenden Imperium, appeared with the publisher Dietz in Berlin in 1994. A book on Putin followed from Rowohlt Berlin in 2004, and in 2006 Econ published Putins Demokratur, which was later reissued in updated editions by Ullstein in 2007 and by Econ in 2014 under the subtitle Ein Machtmensch und sein System. Further titles include a book on Medvedev (2008), Russki Extrem (2009), Putins verdeckter Krieg (2016) and Russki Extrem im Quadrat (2016). A new edition of Putins Demokratur with a different subtitle was issued by Ullstein in 2018.

Since 2015 Reitschuster has worked as a freelance journalist, contributing to a range of outlets that includes Focus, The European, Tichys Einblick and Junge Freiheit, and he also appears as a presenter and lecturer. He runs his own website and blog. German media have described the site in different terms, and several outlets have characterised its political orientation as right-wing or conservative; an assessment by the monitoring service NewsGuard likewise describes it as reporting on German politics from a right-wing perspective that the site does not make explicit.

His channel on YouTube had around 379,000 subscribers as of March 2025.

Recognition

Reitschuster has received several journalism awards. In 1998 he won the journalism prize of the Bund der Vertriebenen Bayern, and in 2004 the Andere Zeiten journalism prize. In 2008 he was awarded the Theodor Heuss Medal, which the awarding body gave for his commitment to freedom of expression and assembly and to the protection of citizens' rights in Russia. In 2023 he received the Freiheitspreis of the Atlas-Initiative.

Public roles

For almost sixteen years Reitschuster held one of the most visible foreign postings in German weekly journalism, leading the Moscow bureau of Focus from late 1999 until the summer of 2015. Since leaving that position he has taken part in public debate through his own online platform, through guest contributions to other publications and through speaking engagements, with his commentary focused on Russia and on German domestic politics.