For my own record, and for your information: A fairly significant event has taken place here: many genuinely prominent scholars—members of the Expert Councils of the VAK, the Higher Attestation Commission (Russia’s state body overseeing academic degrees)—in mathematics, physics, biology, geology, history, and philology, have demanded a purge of those very VAK Expert Councils and the VAK Presidium, to remove the crooks implicated in the trade in dissertations.
They stated publicly: "When we agreed to work within the VAK system, we in no way meant to join the same corporation as crooks and falsifiers and thereby stain our own names."
This matters because the VAK Expert Councils are the appellate body for reviewing petitions to strip plagiarists of their academic degrees, and that is exactly where all the “dissertation fixers” have entrenched themselves. You can verify this by looking at the statistics on VAK Expert Council members’ involvement in sham dissertation defenses.
And this is what a typical dissertation-selling company looks like. It is headed, of course, by a member of the VAK Expert Council on sectoral and regional economics.
The crooks have made their way into the VAK Presidium as well: here is one member of parliament, here is another member of parliament, and here is a judge of the Supreme Court of the Russian Federation. For some reason, all of them consider themselves scholars.
These are exactly the people who reject our appeals against their decisions. It is very convenient for them: the ACF (Anti-Corruption Foundation), at the request of the excellent “Dissernet” (a Russian volunteer network exposing academic fraud), files a petition to strip yet another United Russia plagiarist of his academic degree—they have already filed around eighty—and it will almost certainly be reviewed by the very same person who sold him that degree in the first place. And so the United Russia plagiarist gets away with it.
This event also matters as an example for people working in other fields: there is no need to wait for someone else to come and cleanse your institution of bribe-takers. If you are tired of your agency being disrespected because of corrupt officials and falsifiers, then take on the job of cleaning it up yourselves.