JournalismSundeyeva Zhanna
Main achievement
Newspaper editor who published the Kstati media group since 1994.
About
Zhanna Sundeyeva, born in Moldova, has distinguished herself as an exceptional journalist and editor within the Moldovan diaspora in the United States. In 1994, shortly after emigrating to San Francisco, California, she co-founded the Russian-language newspaper Kstati („Кстати”) with her husband, Nikolay Sundeyev. This weekly publication was dedicated to the Russian-American community in the Bay Area. Under her leadership as Publisher, CEO, and Founder, the newspaper reached a circulation of 9,000 copies, becoming an influential voice in promoting conservative and anti-communist values, reflecting the personal experiences of the founder and her readers, who were marked by the Soviet regime. Through Kstati, Zhanna Sundeyeva built an essential media platform for Moldovans and Soviets settled in America, addressing themes such as cultural identity, American politics, and criticism of extreme liberalism. She actively engaged with the Moldovan-American community, California Republicans, and American conservatives, supporting Donald Trump's candidacy in 2016 due to their shared opposition to "big government" and communism. Her publication served as a space for free debate, inspired by her family heritage – being the granddaughter of a victim of Stalin's Great Purge – and contributed to the integration of immigrants through relevant articles about life in the USA. Zhanna Sundeyeva's personal life was closely tied to family and the fight for freedom, emigrating from Soviet Moldova with painful memories of her grandfather's missed opportunity to go to the USA in 1929. Married to Nikolay Sundeyev, with whom she developed Kstati from scratch, she promoted values such as individual independence and human quality, rejecting racism on racial grounds observed in American liberal discourse, such as Barack Obama's statements about Trayvon Martin. A prominent figure in San Francisco, she remained a symbol of Moldovan women's resilience in expatriate journalism, leaving a lasting legacy in Russian-American media.
