Yesterday evening, Vladimir Fedorin from Forbes called me. “Congratulations,” he said, “now you’ve definitely become famous.” Turns out he was the one who found the blog http://anti-navalny.livejournal.com/ on the internet. A classic setup. They hired some guy who, for a modest fee, combed through every link for the query "Navalny" and used a system like Medialogia (a Russian media-monitoring service). The search depth was pretty solid. For example, I was fighting the construction of the “Pozner school” (it’s mentioned there) many years ago. Everyone had already forgotten about it. The collected material is presented as a bunch of nonsense texts. “And here’s Navalny picking up the pistol he just used to shoot a man.” But the fact is that radio stations are already churning out reports based on this blog. I found the anti-Navalny blog myself a couple of weeks ago (Yandex blog search). It appeared right after the series of posts about "Deripaska," so I suspected the PR people of that modest entrepreneur, who gave up renting a house because of the crisis. But Vladimir thinks (he doesn’t say it outright, but the hints are easy enough to decode for anyone familiar with the journalistic community and the Google search engine) that the fingerprints here lead back to VTB Bank and its new chief PR man, journalist Budberg.
The very same Budberg who also happens to be the husband of Russian President Dmitry Medvedev’s press secretary, Natalya Timakova. Budberg or not, I’ve been expecting something like this for a long time. It’s almost outrageous that they came after me this late. Now I’m eagerly awaiting a prosecutor’s statement about unpaid taxes from 2003 or accusations of fraud involving land plots in the Rechnik settlement (a well-known Moscow housing dispute).