How We Made “Dimon”: Answers to Questions and Behind-the-Scenes Insights

news about a recipe at a St. Petersburg palace

it was a separate, very refined

pleasure to read the negative

conspiracy-theory reactions to our

investigation *He Is Not Dimon to You*

commentary column observation opinion

from informed sources on anonymous

Telegram channels—there was every kind of claim imaginable there

that the investigation had been leaked to us, that we

copied it, that filming the residences with drones

was impossible, that it was commissioned by the FSB, Sechin,

or Putin himself, because supposedly something like this is beyond

our abilities—and that our film alone cost many

millions of rubles. So I decided

to tell all of you how

the investigation about Dimon was made and how much it

cost. To do that, we put together a selection

of the most common questions and

theories connected with the film *He Is Not

Dimon to You*. Let’s begin.

Navalny’s investigation is a sign

of the beginning of an active phase in the struggle of factions

of influence around the president for a place

in the new power structure and

the distribution of resources, meaning

the president’s inner circle. The investigation

by Navalny is, for the first time, publicly and on a large scale

accusing Prime Minister Medvedev, his wife

Svetlana, and his close circle of St. Petersburg friends

of corruption. Oh yes, “for the first time.”

There was a video about Plyos six months ago with a detailed

ownership scheme.

The analyst apparently missed it, as usual.

Navalny avoids making direct accusations against

the president, just as mentioning him

in the context of corrupt ties, as

always. True, as always—but I’ll repeat

this peasant woman

2

watched the film

by Lyosha (a familiar form of Alexei). This war—clearly, they had been preparing it

for a long time and decided to throw it out after the events at

Gazprom. What were they afraid of? And I’ve been telling you

for a long time that there’s a war. I’d also like

to clarify: what events at Gazprom

are we even talking about?

the conflict over Plyos, the Ossetian takeover

by Timerbulatov, Kerimov, and Medvedev’s people

will come back to haunt them

with yet another Navalny investigation

it’s all a bit too openly giving away

the agent

which means Sechin has already shown up too. The most interesting thing is who is not

in the investigation

—people from Medvedev’s inner circle.

The investigation looks like a strike against

a specific link in the coalition

of Medvedev’s government.

I would pay attention to the Gazprom

trail and connect this with the reshuffling

there. No, after all, that means it’s

the Gazprom trail. This whole

observation—that a crowd of boring

kids is helping Igor Ivanovich (Sechin) take down

Alisher Burkhanovich (Usmanov)—come on, wake up. Medvedev

is just a pretext, and a free one at that

—especially online, where the biggest and most important

investment is precisely Alisher

Burkhanovich.

Sechin again, but the target is different: a 50-minute

film about Medvedev that isn’t really about Medvedev

but about Usmanov. Well, okay.

Navalny is a tool for settling

scores among the members of Politburo 2.0 (a modern informal term for Russia’s ruling elite)

with each other. They have to sort things out somehow

among themselves, and since there is no real public politics and they

can’t do it directly, accordingly they

send messages to each other through Navalny.

Hi everyone, hi. Let me explain about

the supposed client. In the first month, the video

of a simple drone flight over Medvedev’s dacha, which we

published in September,

was watched by 3 million people. Then on

Odnoklassniki (a Russian social network), we found another 7

million views. Those were simply other

users copying and uploading our

video. So tell me yourselves, what conclusion

can be drawn from that? In my view,

there is only one: the topic of Medvedev’s property

is simply a gold mine for any

journalist, for any investigator.

People want to watch stories about it, they’re interested in it, and

the Odnoklassniki audience is too.

too.

And here even a junior deputy

editor of a sewing and handicrafts magazine would

understand

that Medvedev is a subject worth continuing to write about. And

it was exactly then, in September 2016,

when we saw those millions of views, that we

said to ourselves: we’ll keep developing

this topic further as a priority. That’s

all there is behind it—absolutely nothing more.

No leaks from any Kremlin tower (a Russian political metaphor for rival factions),

no subtle analysis about exactly which group

has grown stronger or much weaker right now. It’s ordinary

logic. And most importantly, we fairly

quickly discovered that there was something

to investigate there: real corruption.

There’s a story, and people want to see that

story, and we don’t need anything else

here.

Navalny’s investigations always

appear at the right time. The new

investigation into the prime minister’s assets

comes amid talk and

the beginning of a search for a new prime minister,

a decision that is supposedly to be

made in July-August.

Good luck with that search. Actually, the analyst

missed the fact that I published the investigation

right on the eve of Eurovision, Holy

Easter, and just before Dmitry

Anatolyevich came down with the flu. I would

link this story to competition

in the energy market and

point out that in terms of timing it

coincided with personnel reshuffles in

Gazprom — can someone finally explain

what personnel reshuffles at Gazprom

everyone keeps talking about, really?

Why now? Why is the chair under

Medvedev rocking more violently on this day

than usual, like the moon in the third

house? Let me explain in detail why.

We released the investigation on exactly the

date when we released it.

On September 15, half a year ago, we

published “Rolex in Passing” about the dacha

of Medvedev in Plyos.

It laid out in detail the ownership scheme,

talking about the Dar Foundation and about

the Gradislava Foundation, which was gifted the dacha.

From the Gradislava Foundation to the Sotsgosproekt Foundation,

in any database like SPARK or

Kontur.Focus, it’s two clicks — and that’s not

a figure of speech, really two clicks. You click on

the name of the foundation’s owner, Leonid Rubtsov, and

you see that he heads a company called Green

Earth. You click on Green Earth,

and there it is — the Sotsgosproekt Foundation. Everything

Naturally, our investigations department found all

of this back then and verified it. That is,

the main line of the investigation was ready

already half a year ago. But in order to

gather all the material for the film and

our huge article, it took a great

deal of time — simply because of the volume and

the details. Some little things you

might not even have noticed in the film

required a lot of work. For example,

no one had ever published a photo of Medvedev’s brother before,

no one knew what he

looked like. People wrote about the fact of the relationship, but without

proof, and we had to conduct

a separate mini-investigation. Dmitry

Medvedev

and his cousin Andrei

have the same surname, which normally

would mean that Medvedev’s father

must have had a brother. We turned everything upside down

looking for that brother, but found nothing

because he didn’t have a brother. What mattered for us was that

and, in complete desperation,

we started studying the entire family tree

and discovered the prime minister’s aunt,

who simply had not changed her maiden

surname and remained Medvedeva. And this is

just a microscopic example. There were also

searches for alumni lists

of Leningrad University for all years,

identifying them in videos with dancing,

searching for the silhouette of one specific yacht in

hundreds of minutes of fireworks footage

from the Scarlet Sails festival (a major annual celebration in St. Petersburg). Just to

find those stupid sneakers,

we had to look through thousands of photos

of Medvedev in every possible photo archive, and

it wasn’t just sneakers we were looking for there — in the

clothing orders there were no fewer than 300 item names.

All of this took several months.

At the same time, we also had to film all

the properties on Rublyovka (an elite residential area outside Moscow). We filmed there in early

October; a few weeks later, in Kursk

Region; in December, Shurshal Burov

kindly went on his first

foreign work trip, to Italy. We filmed the mountain dacha

in Pshekhako in

February of this year, on the eve of the film’s release. And

we still had to write the script for the

film,

build a big website with a great

interactive diagram, attach documents everywhere,

and back up almost every word with screenshots,

then shoot and

edit the film. And I’ll let you in on a secret:

there were two versions of the film. The first time, we shot it

in mid-December last year. There was

a great —

or what seemed to us at the time like a great — idea to shoot

everything against a green screen, chroma key,

onto which we would later

add beautiful landscapes and infographics.

It all took many months, and it started with things like these

sneakers and shirts, which allowed

us, step by step,

to piece it together. While we were gathering information about

the St. Petersburg palace — not according to some recipe, but

remember the hackers? — and following clear clues,

we realized that all the “charity” was directed

only toward Dmitry Medvedev himself

and his family. What emerged was simply monstrous.

We rewrote the script from scratch,

came up with a new shooting concept, and recorded it already in

February. All in all, it was probably for the best that they

didn’t end up doing anything on the green screen,

especially since later my creative

idea was brilliantly realized by

business ombudsman Boris Titov with his

chair flying around Moscow. All of this

took us half a year. I don’t know whether that’s a lot

or a little. Probably a lot could have been

done faster, but we’re not television,

and we’re not journalists. We’re actually the Anti-Corruption Foundation,

and it was fairly difficult for us

to create all that graphics for the

film ourselves. And we simply couldn’t outsource it

because we had to maintain secrecy.

And we published it exactly

when it was ready — even a little

earlier, as you can tell from some

small but obvious mistakes in the film. And let’s

be honest: on that day,

or even that week, nothing special happened.

There were no news hooks, nobody was

writing about mysterious reshuffles at

Gazprom or about the search for a new prime minister.

One set of holidays had ended, the next had not yet

begun, the weather was good, and Thursday

is a wonderful day.

What is concerning is the filming of properties: if they

belong to Medvedev,

then they fall under the responsibility

and protection of the FSO (Federal Protective Service), and therefore filming them

should be explained and investigated.

The source base itself, for now, looks like a leak.

compromising material from interested

parties who have access to restricted information

very, very restricted information in

Rosreestr (Russia’s state real estate registry), but to consider the investigations

by Navalny against Medvedev his personal

initiative is ridiculous, if only because simply

flying quadcopters around like that, let alone

over or even near FSO facilities (Federal Protective Service sites)

is not something every amateur can pull off

with modern technology. Oh, actually we

filmed them, and FSB people by the dozens

and in whole clusters

I think no one who has ever worked on

journalistic investigations, looking at

the Mont Blanc-sized mountain of information obtained by Navalny and his

colleagues, would assume that

all of this could be the result of

nothing but the private efforts of three

dozen staffers, or that they themselves

managed to film highly protected

sites and gain access to quite restricted

documents, and so on—moreover, unlike

the hacker Assange, do it

using exclusively legal methods, without

hacking or other criminal activity

Reading this comment, the staff of

our investigations department are simply shaking

with laughter from happiness. In general, the line of thinking

is clear: Navalny and the FBK (Anti-Corruption Foundation)

could not have done this themselves; the information

was brought to them in a folder

with Rosneft’s golden logo on it, or at

the very least slipped anonymously into

the black box. I’m a pawn in someone else’s clever

game, and our quadcopter

has a full-time FSB officer assigned to it

who regularly polishes it, patches it up, and

drives it out to the filming location. Not without

some pleasure, and with full responsibility,

I declare the following: this investigation was

done without a single tip-off, without

any documents sent to the black box, and

without even hints from knowledgeable

sources. Every step, all 100 pages

of text

all the materials were collected mainly from

three databases

— Rosreestr and the Cypriot corporate

registry. All of them are accessible to anyone; except for

Cyprus, they are free, while in Cyprus you just pay for extracts and

annual reports

For Ilya Yeliseyev’s offshore companies, we had to

shell out a whole €10, and I almost forgot—here

it is, the main source of our investigation

this profile page

of Ilya Yeliseyev on the Gazprombank website. It

actually lists everything we

wrote about in the investigation: the Sotsgosproekt foundation

and Dar, and the Olympic fund for the Psekhako project

and even Svetlana Medvedeva’s foundation. What especially

outrages me is that when people talk about a

leak, some journalists and even

people who claim that they

do investigative work—you could

simply make a list of such figures and

title it: incompetent

idlers unwilling to work, whose

opinions should never be listened to

Take, for example,

the story with the sneakers: the hacked mailbox

of Medvedev has been publicly available for two and a

half years. All this time, right up to

today, its contents have been accessible

to anyone—just go in, download, and study them. Why

has no one properly analyzed it yet?

How could no one have looked properly at

who this mysterious man Dyachenko is, in whose

name the prime minister makes purchases for himself

and not figured out properly what he owns? And then

to turn around and reproach us because we

managed to do it. The only thing

we can really be blamed for here is that we

didn’t do it ourselves earlier. Or take

the quadcopter issue, another common theme

Friends, first of all, you think far too highly

of them. For years—we have, I

stress, for years—been filming from the air

the estates of Russia’s top officials

We film them with drones, we film them

with actual people on paragliders, we

film them in all sorts of ways. When a shoot

doesn’t work out, we go back and film

the same site a second or third time. We have

filmed Medvedev’s dacha in Plyos from the air

where, incidentally, there is officially located

an FSO unit, and we encountered no

problems. We filmed the palaces

of Volodin, Nesterov, Chemezov, and Patrushev

with dozens of FSB officers in Serebryany Bor

Chaika, and the terrible, fearsome Sechin—we

filmed them too. We filmed Shoigu as well, and he is, let me remind you,

the defense minister

and we filmed him several times, and

not

for just one year. So why is it that with Medvedev these

analysts suddenly broke down and started seeing

a conspiracy in all of this? I don’t understand. And why

does the security detail allow it? Well, that part

is actually clear: simply because they

can’t do anything about it, because

these corrupt

officials have accumulated so many palaces that if you

want to ban filming over half of

Russia, you would simply have to install

jammers

and bring in an army of trained combat

birds to catch our drones

This was discussed quite a lot in

journalistic circles, and it is rather

sad because it shows that

many people didn’t even manage to properly read

our investigation. Two weeks ago, about

Dmitry Anatolyevich, Sobesednik (a Russian newspaper) published

a piece with names and real estate properties

and foundations, and today exactly the same thing was written by

RBK (a Russian media outlet)

but without mentioning Sobesednik. It looks

like some kind of bad movie—what is this?

Of course, one could assume that the FBK (Anti-Corruption Foundation)

and Sobesednik's investigations department

two years after Medvedev's email was hacked

simultaneously discovered in it

the sneakers I identified in official

photographs. But much more likely is

that information about Medvedev was

leaked some time earlier, in the summer of 2016,

by ill-wishers to several

recipients at once, with the expectation of its later

dissemination. And if you had at least glanced at Sobesednik's article,

you would have seen that there is

not a single word there about sneakers

or about hacked email. In other words,

Navalny and his team published

their investigation while ignoring other people's work

and after that decided to lecture

professionals on craftsmanship in a rude and

dismissive manner, essentially

sending journalists the message: well, guys,

write your investigations, and then we'll come

and use your texts for our own purposes in

a rude

and dismissive manner. First,

the investigations are not the same at all; you just need

to read them to understand that. At Sobesednik,

where, by the way, the excellent journalist

Oleg Roldugin works, and we follow his work,

some of the foundation's assets are mentioned: the estate,

Gosproekt, the vineyards, and Mansurovo

the St. Petersburg palace is mentioned, as is the management

company of the Dar Foundation. In addition to all

of the above, we have Usmanov and

the gift on Rublyovka (an elite residential area outside Moscow)

yachts, vineyards in Tuscany, a Cypriot

offshore company, Gazprombank loans, and orders from

online stores, and much, much more.

The overlap in the material is,

maybe 20 percent, and that does not include

the detailed on-location filming. Second,

Sobesednik published its article two

weeks before our film came out, and

the funny thing is that we read the announcement of their piece

on the evening of February 14, right on

the set of our film, and I

think that

even the most sophisticated conspiracy theorists would not

suggest that we made a 100-page

text and an hour-long video in two

weeks, and also somehow turned time

backward and filmed Rublyovka in winter with

green trees, and the Kursk region without

snow. I saw that there were complaints against us

about citation, and here I can say for certain

that everywhere we used materials from

the media

— and we did use them — there are links everywhere.

That's a strong statement; of course I won't check it,

for example, take Eliseev's quote

about Mansurovo — we had to take it

from the, forgive me Lord, disgusting newspaper

Izvestia.

Third, unfortunately we had to

redo the work of many media outlets that

had previously written about Medvedev's property.

Take the story of his dacha on Rublyovka,

for example. Sobesednik wrote about it, then

Novaya Gazeta wrote about it too.

But all of these investigations contain

the same recurring mistake: they write that

Gosproekt owns the Eurasia mansion, and according to

Forbes, it is practically the most

expensive property on Rublyovka.

But that is not the right estate, not the right plot.

I don't know where journalists got this

information. Even after our film came out,

many quite reputable media outlets

kept mentioning the Eurasia mansion. I do not

know why — perhaps they simply looked in the wrong place

on the cadastral map and then

repeated the mistake after one another.

Medvedev's Gosproekt never

owned Eurasia, and if we

had used information from the media instead of

doing all this work over again, then our

investigation would have contained that mistake too.

But fortunately, it does not.

First, this excellent investigation

costs serious money, and let's not kid ourselves

that people work on enthusiasm alone. Work this

professional and on this scale is not done

on enthusiasm alone. I estimate this investigation

cost at least 77 million rubles (about 77 million RUB)

— wow, what an idea this person has

of budgeting. And here I'm afraid

to cause pain to everyone who commissions and

shoots similar videos and films, because

the entire film *He Is Not Dimon to You* and the whole

investigation cost us 415,000 rubles

(about 415,000 RUB), and most of that money went

to travel and filming at the locations.

On top of that, we hired a camera operator twice

and rented a studio to record the film.

Why was it all so inexpensive?

Because a great many people help us

for free, or at rates far

below market price. This is a major advantage

of our foundation.

Most people around us are deeply

dissatisfied with the level of corruption in Russia

and want to make at least some contribution

to the fight against it. So where someone else

might pay 100,000 rubles (about 100,000 RUB) to rent equipment,

we'll get it for 30,000; where an operator would charge someone

50,000 rubles (about 50,000 RUB) for the job, he'll charge us

10,000. Besides, we remember whose

money we live on: your money. The FBK exists

only thanks to citizens' donations,

and we try to spend your money

carefully and frugally. We would be very glad,

I'll tell you honestly, if right now you

say to us: guys, I personally am satisfied with

how you made this film, satisfied with how

you spend my donations, and therefore

I'm sending you more for your good

work — then do it, the link is below.

And rest assured, we will not give crooks

an easy life. And let me remind you: on March 26, at

Rallies will take place in many cities across the country.

At the anti-corruption rallies, we will demand

that both Medvedev and the authorities in general

answer the accusations we have made.

We are not satisfied with their silence. In the description

there is a link with a list of rally groups

in cities all across Russia. Be sure

to come — don't begrudge

this one hour of your time. If we

stay silent, they will continue

to rob us. Subscribe to our channel

— this is where the truth is told.