Gleb Pavlovsky was born in Odessa on March 5, 1951 in the family of a civil engineer. In 1973 he graduated from the history department of Odessa State University
While studying at the university, Pavlovsky was a member of the circle-commune “Subject of historical activity” and called himself a “Zen Marxist”. In 1969, he was expelled from the Komsomol for anarchism and left-wing extremism.
After university, until 1974, he worked as a teacher at a school, from which he was forced to quit due to persecution by the KGB in a criminal case on the distribution of Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s work “The Gulag Archipelago”. In 1976 he moved to Moscow, where until 1980 he was a worker. In 1978-1980, he was engaged in the release of samizdat “Search”, for which in 1982, after the publication of the magazine had ceased, he was detained and sentenced to three years of exile in the Komi ASSR
At the end of 1985, he returned to Moscow, where he became a co-founder of the country’s first legal opposition organization, the Club of Social Initiatives. Later he was the director of the news agency “Postfactum”
Since 1991, he has been active in public and journalistic activities. In 1991–1992, he worked as deputy chairman of the board of the Kommersant publishing house, in 1995–1996, as the founder and co-editor of the Sreda journalistic review, since 1995, as co-founder and director of the Effective Policy Foundation (FEP), aimed at organizing election campaigns
In 1996 FEP took part in Boris Yeltsin’s presidential election campaign, in 2000 Pavlovsky’s company developed Vladimir Putin’s presidential campaign. In subsequent years, he collaborated with the presidential administration as a consultant. In 2004, Pavlovsky participated in the presidential campaign of Viktor Yanukovych. From October 2005 to April 2008, he was the host of the Real Politics program on the NTV channel.
In 1997, Pavlovsky, together with Marat Gelman * founded the “Russian Journal” – one of the oldest socio-political Internet publications in the country and became its editor-in-chief
Pavlovsky’s cooperation with the presidential administration as an adviser ends in 2011, when the contract with the Effective Policy Foundation is terminated. Pavlovsky’s position in the 2012 presidential election was cited as one of the reasons. Pavlovsky is increasingly expressing an opposition point of view on events in the country
Pavlovsky died on February 27, 2023 in the hospital after an illness, he was 71 years old. Little is known about Pavlovsky’s personal life. He was reported to have been married several times and that he had five daughters and one son.