May 1 is coming soon—the Spring and Labor Day holiday, the international day of solidarity of all workers. And on this festive spring day, how could we not delight you, dear readers, with our remarkable discovery.
At the Anti-Corruption Foundation, we’ve found just about everything in officials’ possession: country houses, apartments, yachts, aqua discos, and even planes for dogs. Secret businesses, offshore accounts, and warehouses full of therapeutic mud.
But this time, we accidentally discovered a NEW PROFESSION. A very highly paid one.
It’s a state-funded profession. The salary comes from the government. Benefits, guarantees, a pension—the whole package. Usually, when we hear “public-sector worker,” we picture someone who isn’t especially well-off—maybe a teacher, a doctor, or a firefighter. They often work themselves to exhaustion: multiple jobs, overnight shifts, often with their lives at risk.
For nine years now, Putin has been promising through his “May decrees” to raise their salaries—and somehow it still never happens: no money, sorry. An ambulance paramedic in the Tver region is supposed to earn 35,000 rubles, but for some reason still gets only 20,000.
But the profession we’re talking about today is completely different: the hours are more than easy, the schedule is flexible, the workload is minimal, the stress level is zero, and talent or intelligence are not required. In fact, the less of either, the better. And yet the money is enormous.
The only problem—well, of course there’s a catch—is that you have to sink to the very bottom, no, below the bottom: give up your conscience, your principles, your common sense, your self-respect. Be prepared for the fact that no decent person will ever shake your hand, speak to you, or—if you’re lucky—not spit in your face. You have to plunge headfirst into the filthiest place you can imagine, sit there, and work straight from it.
Hating Navalny for money. That is this new profession.
But this is important: don’t confuse it with television propaganda, with the nationally famous maestros of lies and on-air hysteria. No. This is far worse than you can imagine. You don’t know these people. Maybe a handful of people have heard their names somewhere, but no more than that. And yet they exist! They’re real! They’re thriving, dare I say it. No one reads them, watches them, or knows who they are, but they still get paid insane amounts of money simply to hate Navalny. They do nothing else.
And there are many of them! Before we tell you the details of this astonishing marketplace for trading in conscience, let us explain how we uncovered this nest. A few weeks ago, we were sent an astonishing and extremely useful document: the staffing roster of Margarita Simonyan’s media holding, Russia Today. A list of all employees and their official salaries over the past several years.
After gasping and recoiling at the squandering of budget funds on Margarita’s own pay, we found the heroes of today’s investigation there as well. We double-checked the figures, compared them with other sources (leaked tax databases and employees’ statements), and confirmed that they were accurate.
LESYA RYABTSEVA
So. Our first star. She comes first only because there is at least some chance that someone might recognize her. A former employee of Echo of Moscow, personal assistant to editor-in-chief Venediktov, a woman who tried to become famous at any cost—on NTV, on *The Bachelor*, anywhere—but nothing ever worked out for her.
This person, who is capable of doing literally nothing, found her refuge at Russia Today. That’s exactly the kind of person they need there. Lesya Ryabtseva is a columnist. She writes 2 or 3 short columns a month for the RT website, pieces like one claiming that Navalny is returning to Russia because he wasn’t invited to Biden’s inauguration. Or another about how wonderful it is that the National Guard beats people with batons. They could have shot them in the forehead instead. The quality of her columns is easy to judge: 3 shares on Facebook, 2 on VKontakte, and not a single one anywhere else.
Lesya is also a frequent guest on a special Russia Today program about the opposition. She goes there to say nasty things about Navalny—that’s her job. She also has a Telegram channel with a phenomenal 6,000 subscribers. The channel exists for one purpose only: to write about Navalny and about us, the ACF staff. We found the strength to read the last three months. Out of 420 posts, 220 were about Navalny and the ACF. Just so you understand the columnist’s level of talent:
The same goes for Twitter. This person exists to write vile posts about Navalny, and that’s it. That is her entire purpose.
So how much do you think such services cost? How much do they pay someone to hurl random insults at one person and a small group of people associated with him? And it doesn’t matter whether it works or not, whether anyone reads it or not.
Ryabtseva is paid 4.5 million rubles a year. Or 368,000 rubles a month.
The salary of a top-category Russian language and literature teacher at a rural school in the Omsk region is 16,000 rubles. Exactly 23 times less than Lesya Ryabtseva’s.
STANISLAV YAKOVLEV (ORTEGA)
It gets much worse from here. Please take a look at this man.
Who even is this? Don’t know? Don’t worry—no one does. This is blogger Stanislav Yakovlev, or Ortega as he calls himself, convicted for possessing 3 grams of ephedrone (and for some reason given only a suspended sentence). He doesn’t even have a column on the Russia Today website. He just appeared a couple of times on the YouTube show Beautiful Russia Boo-Boo-Boo. And that’s all. His only other workload is his Telegram channel. It’s pure graphomania: 400 posts a month. And 150 of them, naturally, are about Navalny. Most importantly, the Boss Lady really likes it.
Keeping blogger Ortega on the payroll costs us, Russian taxpayers, 5 million rubles a year. Or 420,000 a month. The salary of a test pilot at the Siberian Aviation Research Institute starts at 40,000 rubles. Stanislav Ortega is paid 10 times more.
MAKSIM KONONENKO
Another columnist who cannot even find the strength to make it to the Russia Today studio in person.
Maksim Kononenko. Some may remember him as the LiveJournal blogger Parker. But most won’t. Kononenko’s only article in February of this year was about Maria Pevchikh.
In it, he simply invents a theory out of thin air that Pevchikh is an agent of some intelligence service, without even specifying which one. It just seemed that way to him, so why not write it down.
How much could such backbreaking labor possibly be worth? 710 words a month. A phenomenal 5 shares on Facebook and VKontakte, and two mighty mentions on Odnoklassniki. How much would you pay? You have every right to decide, since a state media outlet is paying for the column—with your money.
Thought about it? All right then. Now for the correct answer. Maksim Kononenko gets 540,000 rubles a month. For that specific February, for that specific column, more than half a million rubles.
A reminder: the salary of a submariner in Russia is 70,000 rubles a month. That means it is 7.5 times less than what Maksim Kononenko gets, despite not even leaving his home for his own broadcasts.
Let’s keep going and see how many jobs one man sitting in prison can create. It’s phenomenal.
KONSTANTIN PRIDYBAYLO
We’ve already mentioned several times Russia Today’s special show about the Russian opposition.
It comes out weekly on a separate YouTube channel. In a year and a half, with all of Russia Today’s resources and budget behind it, the channel has attracted only 40,000 subscribers.
One of its hosts is a man named Konstantin Pridybaylo.
This is the first time we’ve ever seen this person; it’s completely unclear who he even is. Some Belarusian who, for some reason, has become a specialist in hating Navalny.
Do you know how much he earns? The equivalent of 25 kindergarten teachers in Voronezh: 314,000 a month.
MITYA LEONTYEV (the son of the drunk press secretary)
His colleague, another host—the son of Rosneft spokesman Mikhail Leontyev—apparently works with greater dedication. How else can one explain the fact that he is paid 444,000 a month? Maybe he has some additional duties? No. If you search his name on the RT website, you’ll find about 80 mentions. And every single one is connected to his participation in this marvelous show.
GEORGY BABAYAN (son of TV host and Moscow City Duma deputy Roman Babayan)
Or take the program’s special correspondent, reporting live from a rally.
Now that’s a job! A brave young man! Also, by the way, yet another well-connected son. This time, the son of Margarita Simonyan’s personal friend and protégé, TV host and Moscow City Duma deputy Roman Babayan. Georgy Babayan. Right in the thick of things, risking his life, for a salary of around 200,000 a month.
Pridybaylo, Leontyev, and Babayan cost taxpayers 1,000,000 rubles a month. Meanwhile, here are the job openings at the Inzhavino Central District Hospital in the Tambov region. A tuberculosis specialist, a nurse, and an endoscopist together earn 58,500. That’s 16 times less.
VITALY SERUKANOV
We’d like to end this parade of parasites on a high note. If you sell out, then really sell out. From what little he had—and it wasn’t much—he managed to build himself a career. And it took very little: all he had to do was become disappointed in Navalny. Meet Vitaly Serukanov—a professional disappointed former supporter.
Vitaly really was a volunteer with us, and for several months he even worked as deputy head of Navalny’s Moscow headquarters. But in December 2017, he became DISAPPOINTED.
He didn’t just become disappointed and quit. He didn’t just become disappointed and start looking for something else to do. He became so disappointed that he started recording videos saying Navalny does everything badly, terribly.
Then, together with Kremlin swindler Bogdanov, he stole our “Party of Progress” from us—he renamed one of the fake parties, thereby depriving us of the ability to register our own under the same name.
There he is, sitting at the party congress under our logo—which he stole too—while the hall is full of some miserable, random women and empty chairs. How’s the party going, Vitaly?
For three and a half years, clown Vitaly has been touring all the propaganda shows with his act as the disappointed former supporter. He invents a biography for himself, some insider knowledge, some sources.
“What a loser,” any normal person would think. What even is this, and who needs him? Margarita Simonyan does. She pays this disappointed former supporter 754,000 rubles a month.
According to information from Roscosmos, a cosmonaut’s base salary in 2020 was 70,000 rubles. With bonuses and coefficients, those who actually fly into space several times a year receive around 300,000. Vitaly Serukanov is paid 2.5 times more.
What are these people being paid for, and why? In short, for their conscience. They are selling themselves, their thoughts, and their words; let’s not even get into the moral side of such a choice. It’s obvious enough already. What is shocking is that in Russia there is a whole market for buying and selling such services. And the going rates on that market are shocking too. This entire system was built, funded, and maintained by Margarita Simonyan, who is allocated 20 billion rubles from the budget every year. And she spends part of that money on keeping these shameless opportunists on staff as well.
The main goal is to create an artificial information backdrop. Noise. The impression that there is something wrong with Navalny and that everyone is discussing it. These useless, uninteresting, and uninformative pieces are instantly fed into a network of Telegram channels. Simonyan, Russia Today—they all repost one another, comment on one another, praise one another, agree with one another. And those are only the official accounts; no doubt these same people also run a dozen anonymous ones. Then, make no mistake, all of it gets printed out, put into a folder for the Boss, and labeled: “online discussion says Navalny was not poisoned,” “the internet is exploding with news that Navalny stole everything,” and so on. The folder gets filed away, awards are handed out, and most importantly, even more money is allocated. For the next round.
And the vileness, meanness, and depravity of what they write—that part comes from the heart; that’s just the kind of people they are. It so happened that money and power ACCIDENTALLY fell into the hands of back-alley thugs. So they behave the way they always have. Simonyan’s own social media is the best example. Here, she prepared a gift for Navalny while he was on hunger strike—a can of beaver meat. She thinks it’s funny. And all her paid friends eagerly join in.
Here she is rejoicing that Meduza was designated a “foreign agent.”
She boasts of knowing the “knights of world peace,” Petrov and Boshirov, who killed two Czech citizens during yet another secret mission and have become a laughingstock worldwide. She rejoices that the Anti-Corruption Foundation is being declared extremist and destroyed. And all of this happened in a single week. Her employee Anton Krasovsky also deserves special mention—a man with a salary of half a million rubles, who says he wants to kill people and drown in the river those who came out to protest.
A full-time RT employee says officially on a state channel: be grateful that Putin isn’t killing you and allows you to walk around his city!
All of this is done with taxpayers’ money. With state funds. Entirely officially. Putin, his ministers, the government—they made the decision that Simonyan and Russia Today need budgets like these, that in their view this is justified and fair. Margarita herself gets 1.7 million a month. Her first deputy, Elizaveta Brodskaya, gets 2.1 million. And Russia Today CEO Alexei Nikolov gets 2.6 million a month. Those are the salaries.
Putin weighed the pros and cons and decided: single mothers will get financial assistance—5,650 rubles. But only once. A pregnant woman will get an extra 6,350 rubles, but only if she is below the poverty line; otherwise she gets nothing. But the Russia Today employees who defend me on YouTube and say I’m not a murderer but a shining sun—I’ll pay them half a million a month.
Victory Day is approaching. For the next two weeks, if you turn on the television, you will hear only about love and care for veterans, about victory, and about our immeasurable debt to them. Listen—and remember the great Putinist hypocrisy that shows itself so sharply precisely on these days. There will be plenty of TV segments, photo ops with officials, and carnations handed out. But the money—sorry, the money is not for you. Veterans, who gave us victory in the most terrible war in history, will this year receive a gift of 10,000 rubles. A substantial help, considering that the state pays them pensions of around 35,000 rubles. Meanwhile, Lesya Ryabtseva gets 370,000, Vitaly Serukanov gets 700,000, and the two dusty, forgotten bloggers Ortega and Kononenko will get half a million each from Putin. Those are the people Putin cares about. Those are the people who truly matter to him. Everything else is just holiday scenery.
P.S. One more thing. To restore, let’s say, historical justice. Greetings to Navalny, currently imprisoned in a penal colony in the Vladimir region—we’re sure he’ll appreciate this.
Last year, there was one funny and absurd incident. RT employee Yekaterina Vinokurova publicly promised to publish her tax return if Alexei Navalny published his.
Alexei agreed—after all, it was interesting to see how much people at Russia Today earn—and he kept his word, publishing his tax return, in which he detailed what he lives on. Yekaterina, meanwhile, as a responsible Russia Today employee, of course deceived everyone. She said she would publish nothing; she didn’t like the figures in Alexei’s declaration—they were too small, she said.
The tax authorities, who have spent years examining Navalny under a microscope, had no questions—but Yekaterina did. She did not keep her word and did not publish her declaration. Well then, especially for Alexei Navalny, we’ll say it here: Yekaterina Vinokurova’s salary was 4.5 million rubles in 2020, or 370,000 rubles a month.
Freedom for Alexei Navalny!