Margarita Simonyan

Margarita Simonovna Simonyan is a Russian journalist, the editorinchief of both the Englishlanguage, television news network RT and the stateowned international news agency Rossiya Segodnya.

Simonyan was born in the southern Russian city of Krasnodar into an Armenian family. Both of her parents are descendants of Armenian refugees from the Ottoman Empire. Her fathers family, originally from Trabzon, settled in Crimea during the Armenian Genocide of 1915. During World War II, they were deported to the Urals along with thousands of other Hamshen Armenians. Her father was born in Yekaterinburg . Her mother was born in Sochi to an Armenian family that had fled the massacres of the Armenians in the late 19th century. She describes herself as an irreversibly Russified Armenian. Her family owns a restaurant in Moldovka town in Adlersky City District, Sochi. She is from a workingclass family and decided at an early age she wanted to become a journalist. She first worked for the local newspaper, and then for a local television station while studying journalism at Kuban State University.

Source: Wikipedia