A few months ago, someone sent us a photo of a man standing next to a Tesla. We ran the plate number and realized it was time to publish the story of a character we’ve been watching for two and a half years.
Especially since lately bits and pieces of information about him have started popping up here and there. And we very much want the wider public to see our hero in the full picture, so to speak.
This is a story about success—the kind of success that is possible in Russia today. Watch, read, and help us spread it. You won’t hear about it on TV.
So, who’s in the photo?
That face looks familiar somehow.
It’s Putin’s press secretary, Dmitry Peskov. On the left, he’s standing next to a Tesla. Well, you can stand next to anything! But on the right, he’s already sitting inside that Tesla. That makes things a lot less ambiguous.
We’ve been following Dmitry Peskov for a long time. For anyone who wants a refresher: there’s the story of the 37-million-ruble watch, the honeymoon on a 26-million-ruble-a-week yacht, and the 1-billion-ruble house. To us, he is known as a habitual corrupt official, someone, so to speak, with a taste for illicit enrichment. So how could we not check what this Tesla was all about?
Especially since it’s quite a car: cutting-edge technology, innovation, eco-friendliness—straight from Silicon Valley to Moscow. One like this costs around 10 million rubles.
Don’t bother looking—you won’t find it in Peskov’s asset declaration. The price of this Tesla model is comparable to official Peskov’s annual income.
I think you understand that there are a million and one ways to find out who a car belongs to, and naturally we were very curious to learn whose Tesla Peskov was driving around in.
You can ask a traffic cop you know to check. Or you can look through the traffic fines database.
Several fines had been issued for the Tesla, and where there are fines, there’s the offender’s name.
Nikolai Dmitrievich... hmmm... NOT ANOTHER WORD.
Nikolai Dmitrievich Choles. Meet him.
In fact, you almost met him a couple of years ago: he appeared in our investigation into Peskov and Navka’s honeymoon on the Maltese Falcon yacht, and in many other places too. Because Nikolai Choles is Dmitry Peskov’s son.
Nikolai has an unusual surname—Choles. It’s the surname of his English stepfather. He moved to the UK with his mother (Peskov’s first wife) in the late 1990s and stayed there for more than ten years. He returned to Russia relatively recently, around 2011–2012. Roughly when his father was suggesting protesters’ livers be smeared across the asphalt at Bolotnaya (a reference to the anti-government Bolotnaya Square protests in Moscow).
Today’s story is not really about the Tesla that Peskov registered in his adult son’s name so he wouldn’t have to declare it. We’re going to talk specifically about Nikolai. Because his story is more interesting than the hundred-thousandth proof that Peskov is corrupt.
Nikolai Choles is an example of how, in Russia—where 20 million people live below the poverty line, where 70% of residents dream of earning 45,000 rubles a month—you can live very well, purely for your own pleasure. At the very highest level. And do absolutely NOTHING. And if you do anything at all, it’s while living off the taxpayer.
So, let’s move on to Nikolai Choles’s life in Moscow. As I already said, we followed Peskov’s son for several years, and it was easy and effortless. To understand everything, all you have to do is study his social media carefully.
He uses only the best cars. And it’s not just the Tesla mentioned above. He himself drives a new Range Rover, patriotically tying a St. George ribbon (a Russian military-patriotic symbol) around the mirror. One like that costs 9 million rubles.
His fleet has also included a Ferrari, a Mercedes CLA, and a Harley-Davidson motorcycle.
He flies on private jets. When not on private jets, then first class. Well, sometimes business class too.
Yachts, travel, parties, leisure. The full hedonist package.
Like an English aristocrat, his hobby is equestrian sport. His social media is flooded with horses; he stages photo shoots, hangs portraits of himself with horses, and so on. Judging by what he writes himself on social media, he owns a horse of his own—which is also a pleasure more expensive than a decent car. However, we couldn’t find any unified registry of horse owners, and horses don’t get traffic tickets, sorry.
In short, the man returned from rotten, old, boring Europe to Moscow and is living life to the fullest. His life is one long celebration, and the law is no law to him.
Unfortunately, though, Nikolai does not pay child support for his own child (yes, yes, Peskov has a granddaughter).
Child support is one thing, but with his grandmother, Nikolai’s behavior is even worse. We did not investigate this episode ourselves, but The Insider published a quite credible account saying that Kolya attacked his own grandmother. A criminal case was even opened, only to be quietly dropped later (which does not surprise us at all).
What a nice boy.
And he completely ignores traffic rules. Completely. Because otherwise I cannot explain 116 fines in a single year. 116!!!! I’ll even write it out in words, just to drive the point home: one hundred and sixteen.
The notorious Mara Baghdasaryan has about the same number. But every law enforcement agency is after her, she gets jailed, and the whole country follows her escapades. She is held up as an example of the awful, spoiled rich kids whose wealthy daddies bought them expensive cars. But Peskov’s son is doing just fine. The prosecutor’s office, the Investigative Committee, and the traffic police are not interested. Nikolai is allowed.
Naturally, a man like this also has substantial real estate. In his sole ownership, we see a 110-square-meter apartment in central Moscow on Bolshaya Dorogomilovskaya Street. One like that costs around 25–30 million rubles. The view from the windows is nice too.
Besides that, he also bought an apartment on Rublyovka (Moscow’s elite suburban area) for 7 million rubles, though he already managed to sell it this year.
I can imagine that if you’ve read this far, one question may be bothering you. WHERE DOES HE GET THE MONEY FOR ALL THIS, [EXPLETIVE]?! I understand. But don’t get worked up.
Let’s play devil’s advocate. The guy is Peskov’s son, yes, but he’s an adult. He could very well have earned this lifestyle. After all, he lived in Britain. Maybe he got the best education at some Eton, then Oxford or Cambridge? Maybe he made his fortune abroad and came back to Russia to serve his country? Why did we suddenly decide he’s a parasite if he might actually be a top professional and a successful man? It would be downright improper to go after every official’s child just because we found a Ferrari in his possession. That would be populism.
An important question indeed. So we turned to primary sources. Over there, in England. We combed through business registries, alumni lists from prestigious universities, searched everywhere. But for some reason we found only one mention. And it wasn’t from the Oxford library—it was from the court and prison in the city of Peterborough, Cambridgeshire.
More precisely, first on this small local news portal from a place called Milton Keynes:
And then we ordered the court hearing transcript. This is a completely official service offered by any British court. You need to know the case number and pay a substantial fee (we ordered it in 2015 and shelled out something around £300). We always remember that ACF (the Anti-Corruption Foundation) is a nonprofit organization that exists on your donations, so here is the full transcript for you—you helped us pay for it, so it belongs to you too. If you read English fluently, I highly recommend it.
The hearing transcript says that in 2009, Dmitry Peskov’s offspring, together with two acquaintances, attacked a teenager near a local McDonald’s, took his money, and beat him up.
And a few weeks before that attack, he had been given a 10-month suspended sentence for another assault—on a young woman whose phone he stole.
From the statement submitted by his lawyer, we learn that Nikolai does not even have a secondary education and is highly prone to violence. The judge says this openly and backs it up by noting that Choles assaulted someone else while already in prison.
The sentences in the two cases were combined, and Nikolai Choles spent more than a year in an English prison.
There is no doubt that this is the same Nikolai Choles. First, it is a very rare combination of a Russian first name and an English surname. Second, the age matches. Third, he committed his first theft at a railway station 15–20 minutes from the place where he himself says he lived.
Obviously, with that kind of criminal record, no work experience, and no education, Nikolai had few prospects in the UK. But do you know where there were plenty? In Russia. Because his father is not the press secretary to the Queen of Great Britain, but to the President of Russia.
And as you can see, in Russia it all worked out. Here he lives like a millionaire, is not the least bit shy about it, and posts his photos on social media. This kind of lifestyle costs a great deal.
Let’s call in the devil’s advocate a second time. He’ll say: “Wait, but this is all perfectly clear. The guy came to Russia, started a business, won a couple of state contracts, or maybe his dad got him a position at a state bank. That’s where the money comes from—haven’t we heard plenty of stories like that?”
All right, let’s look for where he works in Russia. Where does the money for Range Rovers, Teslas, apartments, and everything else come from?
He has no notable business of any kind. In fairness, I should make one small qualification: in February of this year, Nikolai registered his only company, but it has not conducted any activity so far and shows no signs of life whatsoever. And besides, everything listed above was bought before February 2017.
So there’s no business—but there is this:
Recognize the logo? Nikolai was hired by RT (Russia Today). An English-language propaganda channel funded by our tax money. In other words, you and I were paying a young man fresh out of prison, without even a secondary education, at least 100,000 rubles a month. Why were we doing that? Because he is Peskov’s son.
Despite the fact that Nikolai himself claims on Facebook that he still works for RT, that is not true. His segments aired there for only a couple of months, and he did not stay at the channel long. Not a single video after 2012.
We even asked his former colleagues at RT whether they remembered Nikolai. They did remember him, though from a long time ago. They said they had a sports presenter by that name, but he left quickly because he ran into a rather serious problem for a journalist: he spoke and wrote poorly in both Russian and English.
There on Facebook, we also see that Choles calls himself the creative director of Fight Nights, a company that organizes fights, various shows, and competitions.
This does not surprise us in the least. He can work there as creative director, lord of the fights, ruler of the ring—whatever he wants. Because the whole operation is sponsored by Peskov’s friend, businessman Ziyavudin Magomedov.
The very same Ziyavudin Magomedov who, as we stated two years ago, paid for Peskov and Navka’s honeymoon on the largest and most luxurious sailing yacht in the world—the Maltese Falcon.
And here, by the way, is Peskov himself at one of the Fight Nights matches. Apparently he came to admire the achievements of his son, the creative director.
So, in plain terms, daddy simply asked a friend to give his son a job and pay him a salary. There is just one small problem. Daddy is a public official. And such “favors” from a businessman to an official look very much like a bribe. Though of course that is mere pocket change compared with renting a yacht for 26 million rubles a week.
But in fact, Nikolai did not last long even at his father’s friend’s company. Since 2015, he has not worked anywhere. At that point we couldn’t take it anymore, so we called and asked, “Come on, where do you work? Tell us.” And he honestly said, “Sorry, nowhere.”
Right. He works nowhere, yet buys apartments on Rublyovka, Range Rovers, Ferraris, Teslas, watches, travel, and spends his days riding horses. In short, we know what this profession is called: the son of a corrupt daddy. In Russia, that is practically a government position. Soon they’ll add it to the official pay scale and start assigning pensions.
So that, my friends, is the story of a golden boy. Worthy of his diamond-studded father.
This is very much ours. Russian. Putin’s Russia. This is how the country works, and this is how social mobility is structured. You can get an excellent education and be incredibly hardworking, but in this system, let’s be honest, you still have little chance of getting anywhere. And if you live outside the capital, you have no chance at all.
But for a guy with no education and a prison record, the elevator doors open immediately, and he is taken straight to the floor where champagne is poured and Ferraris are handed out.
Naturally—because daddy is an honored member of the thieves’ gang guarding the buttons on that elevator. And they have built a delightful, cheerful Russia of opportunity for themselves and their children. For everyone else, it is a country of the poor, the miserable, and the sick. The average salary is lower than in China, and people buy mobile phones on credit.
We have to choose. Either we accept this, decide that this is how things are supposed to be, and that nothing can be changed.
Or we demand a normal path of development for the country, equal opportunities for everyone, and accountable officials.
I am running in the election with a clear program—and even a draft law—under which people who pull tricks like this, when an official and his relatives spend an order of magnitude more than they earn, will be sent to the defendants’ bench.
And I will send Peskov there, and those who spent his bribe money, and everyone like him.
But I need your support—at the very least, your signature. You know this bunch of crooks does not even want to let me onto the ballot. The only candidates they like are those who will not bring up personal stories like this one. That is why we need signatures, we need campaigning, and we need your donation.
We very much need help spreading this video. There is simply no way for me to distribute it without your help, and otherwise no one will learn about this investigation.
Take action—make at least some contribution to the common cause. Otherwise we will spend our whole lives working for Kolya Choles-Peskov.