Hi. Navalny is serving his 30 days in a special detention facility, and we at the Anti-Corruption Foundation keep working.
Putin is also continuing to work (though not as well as we are), and yesterday he gave a nationwide address about pension reform. The “savior” was shown on every channel, but somehow he didn’t end up saving anyone. He proposed that women retire at 60 instead of 63. And that was basically it. The pension reform remains what it was from the start: robbery and abuse.
And what does that mean? It means we keep going. Today on the agenda is the Pension Fund, and specifically its head, Anton Drozdov.
The Pension Fund of the Russian Federation is a gigantic bureaucratic machine employing 110,000 people. That’s almost three completely packed Fisht Stadiums (the Olympic stadium in Sochi).
In essence, these people decide nothing. They invent nothing and earn nothing. Most importantly, they have no “money of their own” that they generously share. They simply CALCULATE our pensions. It’s a giant accounting office you can come to and ask something. “Why wasn’t I paid the extra 500 rubles (about $8 at the time) on top of my miserable pension?” Here’s your answer: “You’re not entitled to it. Sign here, here, and here.”
In theory, they’re supposed to make life easier for the people who actually need it—older people, benefit recipients, the needy. This is a SERVICE organization. A public service we are entitled to in return for our taxes.
Imagine who might run a service like that. You picture some mega-bureaucrat, a tedious miser with a “there are many of you and only one of me” attitude, a worn-out chief accountant in glasses and a shabby jacket.
But not at all. At the head of our Pension Fund is a BILLIONAIRE.
A lifelong bureaucrat: Anton Viktorovich Drozdov. He started working at the USSR Finance Ministry in 1986. We assume many people watching this video weren’t even born then. But Drozdov was already in government service.
Drozdov is not a minister, not an adviser, not an ideologue. He simply heads an accounting—or treasury—agency that calculates how much of our own money to pay back to us.
So let’s do some calculating ourselves. Let’s see how much money Drozdov has accumulated over 32 years as an official.
1. AN APARTMENT AT PATRIARCH’S PONDS — 490 MILLION RUBLES
Let’s start with the apartment at Patriarch’s Ponds, a prestigious central Moscow neighborhood. In 2008, the Drozdov family bought a seven-room(!), 335.5 sq. m apartment in a luxury building on Maly Kozikhinsky Lane.
Incidentally, State Duma Speaker Volodin also lives in this building. We wrote about Drozdov’s apartment back in 2014 and estimated it then at 240 million rubles. Today, based on the average price per square meter on Cian (a Russian real estate site), it is worth around 490 million rubles.
2. UNDERGROUND GARAGES — 8 MILLION RUBLES
We’re keeping a full tally. So let’s add two underground parking spaces in the same building. Private underground parking in the very center of Moscow is expensive—4 million rubles each. For reference, that’s his official annual salary.
3. CARS — 12 MILLION RUBLES
What does Drozdov park in those garages? His wife’s two cars—a Mercedes-Benz GL and a Lexus LS, both worth 6 million rubles each. Total: 12 million. But for the head of the Pension Fund, that’s small change—just the family’s declared income for a year and a half. Family income, meaning including his wife’s earnings too.
4. TWO APARTMENTS ON DOLGORUKOVSKAYA STREET — 60 MILLION RUBLES
Next item. Not as impressive, but let’s include it for completeness.
An 87 sq. m apartment near the Garden Ring on Dolgorukovskaya Street. It belonged to the Drozdovs, but in 2007 it was transferred to Anton Drozdov’s mother, who was 69 at the time.
The building is not especially elite, but it is central Moscow, so the prices reflect that—around 30 million rubles.
And while we’re at it, let’s add another 30 million here too: in the same building, on another floor, there is an apartment belonging to Drozdov’s father-in-law—his wife’s father.
Very convenient. All the elderly relatives in one building, and not far from the apartment at Patriarch’s Ponds either. About a 15-minute walk.
That brings the running total of the Drozdov family’s assets to 570 million rubles at market prices.
5. A DACHA ON RUBLYOVKA
By now you’ve probably guessed that we can’t leave you without the crown jewel of our accounting.
You’d think this story had to be invented—if it weren’t officially recorded in Rosreestr (Russia’s state property registry).
Now let’s move to the elite country-home settlement of Nikolino, on Rublyovka (the wealthy suburban area west of Moscow).
And let’s take a close look at this 600 sq. m house.
Its owner is Natalya Andreyevna Demchinskaya, born in 1939. And she is... Drozdov’s mother-in-law.
And as often happens with the elderly relatives of senior officials, her life only began after retirement. On December 30, 2009, at the age of 70, she received as a gift a plot of land measuring 33 sotkas (0.33 hectares / 3,300 sq. m), a house measuring 617 sq. m, and a garage measuring 128 sq. m.
She received all of this from her daughter Olga Demchinskaya—official Drozdov’s wife. The date of this New Year’s gift was not chosen by accident: if the official’s wife had owned the property for just one more day, the house and land would have had to be declared. And why expose property in a declaration when officially you don’t have anything close to the money to pay for it?
And now for the jewel of the jewel. The cherry on top of the jewel. In short: to understand that this is not some vegetable patch with garden beds but a super-elite location, all you have to do is look over the fence. Boris Rotenberg is building there. One of the richest men in Russia and one of Putin’s closest friends.
What could be more symbolic? The retired mother-in-law of the head of the Pension Fund shares a fence with one of Russia’s richest men, who made his fortune on state contracts.
A similar house in this settlement can be bought for 400 million rubles. Add that to the subtotal from item 4, and you get the final figure. Without much effort, using only open sources, we found nearly 1 billion rubles’ worth of property belonging to the head of the Pension Fund—970 million, to be exact.
By the way, Drozdov’s official salary is a little over 300,000 rubles per month, about 4 million rubles a year. His family’s total income over the last nine years—79 million rubles—is ten times less than the value of their real estate.
There is a major problem with Drozdov’s income and spending in general: the numbers do not add up. His lifestyle and expenses simply do not match his salary. A perfect example is how much he spends on his children’s education.
For many years, he paid 2.5 million rubles a year to educate his two children at the Moscow Economic School. And that, just to note, is the lion’s share of his annual salary.
Now only the son is still in school; the older daughter has gone abroad to study at the prestigious Scottish University of St Andrews, where, for example, Prince William, heir to the British throne, also studied. The cost of tuition per year, converted into rubles, is 1.5 million—and that does not include housing or other expenses.
The man has not spent a single day outside government service. Not one. And yet he has a seven-room apartment at Patriarch’s Ponds, children abroad, and a mother-in-law on Rublyovka. And this is the HEAD OF THE PENSION FUND.
This is an Orwellian plot—you couldn’t make it up on purpose—but it is true. This is what we, our families, and our elderly relatives live with every day. Former teachers, doctors, or engineers, often forced into poverty after 40 years of grueling work, walk the same streets as the billionaire head of the Pension Fund.
This is not just corruption. It is outrageous injustice. Barefaced brutality.
This government—Putin, Medvedev, the ministers, and the deputies—has held power in the country for 20 years. In that time, they have acquired yachts, palaces, planes, and vineyards. They have squandered all the money on pointless wars and endless mega-projects. And now they say: we have no money left. So we’ll take it from you. We’ll raise the retirement age and steal the last thing you have.
On September 9, we have the chance to take to the streets and ask this government: how did this happen? And to say: we do not want to keep funding you. Start with yourselves. Sell your villas, yachts, and Mercedeses; put your sneakers up on Avito (a Russian classifieds site). Finally stop stealing. We are not going to believe crooks who stole and squandered everything, and now run around lamenting that there is no money left. If you think the same and do not intend to pay for someone else’s theft, then come out into the streets of your city on September 9 and take part in the nationwide protest against raising the retirement age.
Links to rallies in different cities are here:
Group for events on Facebook Group for events on VK
If you are in Moscow, come to Tverskaya Street at 2:00 p.m.
Tell the authorities to start with themselves.
People