Friends, we are deeply concerned and alarmed. One of Russia’s top officials, a distinguished statesman, and a regular subject of our investigations appears to be showing suicidal tendencies. Professional help is needed.
Dmitry Rogozin proposed executing by firing squad those who steal from the defense sector.
The illness progressed for a long time. And we should have, absolutely should have, noticed the warning signs, the red flags telling us: this man is suffering, this man needs help. It all began with shooting himself in the foot. It was as if he had been trying to tell us all along: guys, I’m not okay! But we didn’t notice. Then came more self-harm — pulling out his own teeth. And again we let it pass. We paid no attention. Inevitably, the illness reached its peak: threats of self-execution. Worse than that — threats to execute himself and members of his own family.
Of course, no one should be executed, but admit it: there is a grain of sense in what Dmitry Olegovich is saying. Corruption in Russia’s defense sector is simply phenomenal. At the Vostochny Cosmodrome, over which Rogozin still owes us a tooth, every deadline has been missed, every promise broken, and everything has been stolen. And the waste of money at Roscosmos goes on: the Accounts Chamber identified violations totaling 30 billion rubles (about $400 million at the time) in just one year alone. The space industry has been turned into a circus under the leadership of the robot Fyodor. Defense is in constant trouble too. The defense minister is basically an oligarch. And he is clearly not quite right in the head with all these giant churches, star-shaped museums, cloning Scythians, and combat Old Believers (a reference to a traditionalist Russian Orthodox group). His generals also live better than any businessmen. And they keep pouring, pouring, and pouring money into defense, at the expense of other budget spending, while claiming that Russia is simultaneously threatened by every danger in the universe.
But on the other hand… Dmitry Olegovich, for heaven’s sake — anyone can lecture about corruption, but not you. We’ve lost count of how many times we and other investigators have caught Rogozin engaging in corruption. And not even sophisticated corruption — just brazen, stupid, painfully obvious corruption.
Look how simple it is. Dmitry Rogozin lives on Starovolynskaya Street, in this beautiful building. He acquired this apartment in 2013, and it is worth around half a billion rubles.
Rogozin has been a government official his entire life, and his income is known from his asset declarations. In the two years before he acquired this property, his family income totaled 11 million rubles. So where could he possibly have gotten half a billion?
Nowhere. Rogozin later tried to explain it away and said that he hadn’t bought the apartment — he had traded for it. He gave up his apartment on Bolshoy Tishinsky Lane, which had been provided to him by the state and then privatized by him. That apartment was one and a half times smaller and worth several times less. Right. So the person on the other side of that swap somehow lost at least 200 million rubles.
Naturally, it later turned out that the other party was an old acquaintance closely connected to the family. In fact, the apartment was registered to an offshore company, so it most likely belonged to Rogozin even earlier. The “swap” was apparently invented to avoid paying taxes.
Five years passed. Rogozin’s income was still reliably known. And then he acquired a DACHA (country house): an 800-square-meter main house, a half-hectare plot, and a huge bathhouse.
And right here, just across the fence, there is another dacha, also 800 square meters. It is registered to Rogozin’s 83-year-old father-in-law, his wife’s father — who obviously could not have had that kind of money himself.
The dachas are worth 350 million rubles. Over his entire lifetime, Rogozin earned 92 million rubles together with his wife. How is that even supposed to work?
Dmitry Olegovich reacts to all these entirely fair and logical questions about a public official with pain and aggression. He calls us lying scumbags. Then, admittedly, he deletes the tweets.
On Solovyov’s show, he called us loudmouths and said we were carrying out some kind of targeted attack on officials who serve Putin with particular zeal.
On Twitter, he made an ominous threat:
Well then, we’re waiting. And so the wait doesn’t get boring, let us explain why we’re not all that worried about Rogozin’s own life — but the person who really is in serious danger is his son.
Alexei Rogozin. Thirty-seven years old. A classic daddy’s boy: first he worked for his father in the Rodina party. Then his father became deputy prime minister overseeing the military-industrial complex — and Alexei went to work in the military-industrial complex too. First at the Aleksin Chemical Plant, where they make gunpowder. Then at the Ministry of Defense.
It’s a unique kind of talent — one that reveals itself only when daddy the official gets appointed somewhere. Daddy was put in charge of defense, and suddenly the son’s career took off. After the Ministry of Defense, at age 33, young Rogozin was made director of the legendary Ilyushin aircraft plant and vice president of the United Aircraft Corporation. He immediately swelled with self-importance, gave interviews about how sanctions meant nothing to him, and ordered himself a luxury car at state expense for 8.5 million rubles, with a panoramic roof and massage seats. A real public servant, just look at him. But then daddy was removed from the post of deputy prime minister. And that was it — this one got kicked out too, both from the UAC and from Ilyushin. Now he works for Azerbaijani property developer and oligarch God Nisanov, building shopping centers by metro stations instead of airplanes.
But back to the main point. No matter how useless a consumer of state funds young Rogozin may be, he is facing serious danger.
Let’s start with his income. We don’t know it for every year, but we have enough to work with. These figures we know for certain, from declarations. In 2016 and 2017, he worked at the Defense Ministry as deputy head of the property department. He did not disclose his salary. But we can assume that if his boss earned 5 million rubles, then Rogozin himself probably made, let’s say generously, 4 million. In 2017, he was placed at the Ilyushin plant, where, according to leaked tax database records, he was earning an astonishing 2 million rubles a month — 24 million a year.
Now let’s take a look at this property record.
Oh. Do you hear gunshots, or at least smell gunpowder? This is actually just one of our usual documents — an extract from Rosreestr, Russia’s property registry. But in the opinion of our hero’s father, it amounts to a death sentence. Rogozin, Alexei Dmitrievich. Date: 26.08.2019. Residential premises. 208 square meters. Moscow, 3 Chapaevsky Lane.
Triumph Palace. One of the most famous new residential developments in Moscow, an elite complex designed in the style of Stalin-era skyscrapers. It is located in northwest Moscow, in the Sokol–Airport district — a prime area.
A pompous marble-finished entrance hall, columns, fountains, gardens, security, a five-level underground parking garage, and even its own swimming pool, fitness center, and clinic. Nearly a thousand ultra-luxury apartments occupy floors 6 through 38, and above them are a lavish hotel and apartments for the capital’s wealthiest guests.
And it is there, on the top residential 38th floor, almost up in the clouds, that we find Alexei Rogozin’s 208-square-meter apartment — one he bought literally just a couple of months after leaving his post as a state manager, director of the Ilyushin aircraft plant.
Young Rogozin’s apartment comes with an open floor plan. In 200 square meters, you could fit four bedrooms, several bathrooms, and a large kitchen — or you could tear down all the walls and place the legendary Il-2 ground-attack aircraft right in the middle, or a giant trampoline, or dig trenches here like in Sloviansk, where his father once dreamed of being.
The average price per square meter in comparable apartments on high floors is about 860,000 rubles. Right now, a neighboring apartment with a smaller area is listed for 155 million. So Rogozin’s 208-square-meter apartment can be valued at 180 million rubles.
Now let’s go back and add up his income. In the 8.5 years before buying the apartment, by the most generous estimate, he earned 55 million rubles. And obviously he spent money during that time — on food, drink, purchases. Yet the apartment costs 180 million.
And do you know what charms and moves us even more? Even though young Rogozin now builds shopping centers, deep down he is still an aviator. A man of the skies. An inventor, a visionary, a conqueror. He even chose an apartment right by Chapaevsky Park — also known as Aviators’ Park.
Here, right below his windows, stand monuments to the great aircraft designer Yakovlev, to aviation scientist Nikolai Stroyev, and a memorial to the pilots who died in test flights nearby on Khodynka Field — among them perhaps the most famous of all, Chkalov.
We can just picture Alexei Dmitrievich sitting by the window in the evening in his 180-million-ruble apartment, looking out over Aviators’ Park and thinking: “They’ll put up a monument to me here too — to me and my dad. After all, I spent almost two whole years so brilliantly bringing Russian aircraft manufacturing back from its knees.”
But of course no one is going to put up any monument to them. Right now, the main thing is to save young Rogozin’s life. Because what did his father say? That people should be shot for corruption in the defense sector. And what is corruption? It is using one’s public office to enrich oneself.
And here, for example, is corruption. We return to our Rosreestr extract and look at the apartment’s previous owner — the man who sold it to young Rogozin. His name is Sergei Aleksandrovich Saruyev.
And he is the owner of one of Russia’s largest manufacturers of… space equipment: the Arsenal Machine-Building Plant in St. Petersburg. It is one of the oldest enterprises in the country. It was founded in 1711 on the basis of the Cannon Foundry Yard established by Peter the Great. Back then, the plant cast cannons, bells, and even the monument known as the Bronze Horseman was made here. During the Great Patriotic War (the Soviet term for World War II), the plant produced anti-tank guns, machine guns, armor plating, and mortars. In the late 1960s, it was repurposed and began manufacturing space vehicles for radar and radio-technical reconnaissance — and it continues to do so to this day. For example, it developed a Defense Ministry reconnaissance satellite capable of detecting even very small objects and guiding precision weapons systems to them. It also manufactures artillery systems and launchers for Navy ships. Reports say that every second Russian warship is equipped with artillery systems made by the Arsenal plant.
This major defense-industrial enterprise was bought by oligarch Mikhail Gutseriev. At the time, it was reported that the plant accounted for about 10% of the region’s entire state defense order volume. The new shareholder, Gutseriev, was personally introduced to employees by Dmitry Rogozin himself. Later, Gutseriev came under sanctions and, whether nominally or in reality (it makes no difference to us), sold his stake to Sergei Saruyev, the former owner of Rogozin’s apartment.
It is on the basis of this very plant that the Arsenal Design Bureau operates — an organization that belongs to Roscosmos and that, very recently, less than a year ago, received more than 4 billion rubles from Roscosmos for yet another Rogozin project to conquer the universe. No, not for building another robot Fyodor, but for developing a nuclear space tug. The main thing Rogozin has already done is give the future tug a name — “Zeus” — and it is supposed to be sent to Venus and Jupiter by 2030.
Remind us — what was it Rogozin said again?
We’re not exactly howling with laughter, but we are rubbing our hands together — and, incidentally, they’re not sweaty at all. Because we have a situation here. Let’s call it “Rogozin’s trap.” Rogozin’s son could not have earned 180 million rubles for an apartment in Triumph Palace over the course of his entire life. He doesn’t have anything close to that kind of money. But that is what the apartment is worth — it’s the market price, and there are plenty of comparable listings in the building. So maybe he bought it for less? Negotiated a discount? But if he bought the apartment from the owner of one of Roscosmos’s and the defense sector’s main contractors for even *one kopeck* below market price, then that is already a bribe — corruption. And as we remember, not just corruption, but aiding the aggressor. Which means — execution. The only question is whom: young Rogozin, or his father, who is responsible for space and defense. Or both.
And there is a wonderful lesson here for all of us. Dmitry Rogozin’s salary at Roscosmos amounts to more than 60 million rubles a year. He is an extremely wealthy man, every last kopeck of it paid from the Russian state budget. Not because Russian taxpayers want that, or because they are so thrilled by Rogozin’s managerial genius. It is simply because Rogozin serves Putin so faithfully that, to him, Rogozin alone is worth more than doctors, teachers, or even test pilots. But the problem is that it is still not enough for Rogozin. It is still not enough for his family. We can pay him 60 million, 160 million, however many millions we like — they will still go on stealing.
You and I have a duty to put an end to this utterly rotten, corrupt system — a system where, wherever you spit, you hit either a clown, a thief, or a murderer. You can’t just snap your fingers and make Putin and his whole gang disappear tomorrow. But you can work to make it happen as soon as possible. To do that, take part in Smart Voting. Even one, two, or three additional non-United Russia deputies in the Duma would already be a good thing. Right now, you can take a minute, download the app from the App Store or Google Play, and on election day check whom Smart Voting has selected in your district — the candidate with the best chance of defeating the United Russia nominee. Then vote for that person. It will be your very simple but very important contribution to the beautiful, happy Russia of the future.
Freedom for Alexei Navalny.