After spending his childhood in different parts of the USSR as his father was an army officer, he completed school and enrolled at the Rostov State University in Rostov-on-Don, graduating in 1953 with a degree in law.

[2] Bovin was the object of heavy criticism from the party establishment for his position on the 1968 Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, which he vocally opposed, instead praising the reforms in the CSSR that led to the Prague Spring.

Discredited in the eyes of the Central Committee, Bovin was suspended from his office and transferred to the Soviet newspaper Izvestia,[5] where he worked as a political commentator from 1972 to 1991, thus beginning his journalistic career.

Bovin again exhibited his independent, slightly oppositional political stance while working for Izvestia, mainly through his objective position on Israel, which at that time had no diplomatic relations with the USSR (those had been suspended after the Six-Day War in 1967), being officially regarded a strategic enemy and attacked in numerous "anti-Zionist" propaganda campaigns.

[11] However, despite his close relations with the Soviet Union press, in March 1987, he called for more independent and Western media commentary and said that the "days when every article represented the government position" belonged to the past.

His popularity in Israel was immense and he was generally viewed in a positive light by the Israeli public, despite being the representative of a nation that was perceived as being deeply opposed to the Jewish state, due to his aforementioned political stance.