Peskov’s Son: From an English Prison to Russia’s Elite

Hi, this is Navalny. Oh, and what's that—

what a beautiful car in this photo.

Let's zoom in. Wow, yes, that's a Tesla

Model X.

The famous car created by Elon

Musk.

The car of the future, brought straight to us in

Moscow from Silicon Valley. Cool

car, yes—but expensive. It costs around 10

million rubles (about $160,000, depending on the

configuration).

I’d bet that, unfortunately, very few of

the viewers can afford one like that. But

someone can.

Let's take a closer look at the lucky owner.

I've seen that mustache somewhere before.

I've definitely seen his PlayStation 3 and

4 in the background. Good heavens, that's Dmitry

Peskov, the press secretary to the President of Russia.

But there’s no Tesla in his asset declaration. Well,

maybe he just decided to stand next to it,

take a look at the car. It is a beautiful

car—wanted to admire it. I don’t believe it.

I refuse to believe that Peskov has an

undeclared car worth 10

million rubles (about $160,000). No—there he is, clearly behind

the wheel. He uses it, which means that under

the law he has to declare it. Just to be

sure, let’s check the declaration again. So,

there’s one car listed, and here are four more

belonging to his wife—but where’s the Tesla? It’s not there. I’m

wounded to the core, and that’s an excellent

reason to tell you a story we’ve all

been following for a long time. It’s a sad

story, really—about how you have

no prospects in modern

Russia. Yes, yes, I’m speaking to you

right now. Study hard, spend a couple of

years getting into university, try

to get top grades to keep your

scholarship, or maybe you’re juggling work

and study.

Sorry, but it’s all for nothing. Maybe you

work in an office from morning till night,

trying your hardest, grinding away—that’s pointless too. You’d be better off

going home, because modern

Russia wasn’t built for you.

Opportunity, money, a high standard of living—

all of that will most likely pass you by, regardless

of how much effort you put in.

In modern Russia, the rules are completely

different, and success awaits not people like you

but people like the owner of this

Tesla. Let’s finally

meet him.

This is Nikolai Dmitrievich Choles. What kind of

foreigner is that, and what does he have to do with Peskov,

you may ask?

I’ll explain: Nikolai Dmitrievich is the biological son

of Dmitry Peskov, Putin’s press secretary.

He has been married three times. You know his third wife

very well: that’s Tatyana Navka.

Before Navka, Peskov had another wife, the mother of the well-known

expert in

judicial PR—roughly speaking, someone who develops strategies

for

promoting court proceedings and the judiciary.

And before that wife, there was yet

another one—Anastasia Budyonnaya. They have a child

together, Nikolai. And it is to him that the Tesla

belongs. Nikolai has a different last name—

Choles, the surname of his English stepfather.

He moved with his mother to live in

the United Kingdom in the late 1990s, where

he stayed for more than 10 years. He returned to Russia

relatively recently, around

2011 or 2012—roughly

around the time his father suggested

smearing protesters’ livers across

the asphalt on Bolotnaya (Bolotnaya Square in Moscow, a major protest site).

Apparently Kolya thought: well, if in Russia

they smear the livers of the discontented, then this

must be a land of great opportunity.

It is in his name that the car is registered—the one

his father uses, skirting the laws on

asset declaration. But our story is still

about Nikolai. He’s even more interesting than his

father. He is an example of how, in Russia—where

for the fifth year in a row people’s incomes have been falling,

where 20 million people live below

the poverty line, where 70 percent of residents

dream of a salary of 45,000 rubles a month (about $700),

you can live splendidly, purely for your own pleasure,

at the very highest level, and at the same time

do nothing at all—or if you do anything, do it while sitting

on the taxpayers’ necks. Nikolai

Dmitrievich Choles could not help but attract

the attention of the FBK (Anti-Corruption Foundation). We noticed him

several years ago when we wrote about

the Peskov-Navka honeymoon aboard

the most expensive sailing yacht in the world.

Keeping an eye on him was easy—there wasn’t even much

to investigate, really.

To understand everything, it was enough simply

to study his social media carefully.

He uses only the best

cars. And it’s not just the Tesla that tells us that.

Nikolai himself drives a

Range Rover and, patriotically, decorates

the mirror with a St. George ribbon (a Russian military remembrance symbol). One like that

costs about 9 million rubles (around $145,000). And here

we see a Ferrari in his fleet, and here’s another

Mercedes, and a Harley-Davidson motorcycle.

Of course, he flies on private jets.

When not by private jet, then first class, and

sometimes even business class too—apparently on

bad, unlucky days. Everyone has those.

He parties, has fun, travels.

True, from court rulings we can see

that for some reason he refuses to pay

child support for his child.

But never mind, that’s a minor detail—he must have gotten caught up in

the whirlwind of high society life and forgotten. It happens.

Peskov’s son has a hobby befitting an

English aristocrat: equestrian sport. His

social media is literally flooded with photos

of horses, because by and large

that’s about the only thing he does.

This man's real estate holdings make him

quite well-off too. In his full ownership,

we see a 110-square-meter apartment

in central Moscow. A place like that costs

around 25–30 million rubles (roughly $400,000–$500,000 at the time). The view from

the windows is just fantastic. Besides that, he also

bought himself an apartment on Rublyovka (an elite residential area outside Moscow) for 7

million rubles, though this year he already managed

to sell it. This is a man who takes everything from life.

Moscow is at his feet. The capital has been conquered,

and he lives how he wants and does what he wants.

And if Nikolai has a Range Rover,

a Mercedes, or a Ferrari, he's not shy about it — he

puts the pedal to the floor while everyone else crawls along

behind pensioners.

Over the last 14 months, Nikolai Ch...

I'm pausing on purpose here — 116 fines

for speeding and other

violations. One hundred and sixteen. Do you understand? The infamous

Mara Baghdasaryan had about the same number.

All law enforcement agencies were chasing after her,

they kept jailing her, and the whole country followed

her escapades. But, for example,

she was held up as a terrible example of depraved golden youth

— rich kids whose daddies bought them

expensive cars. But with Peskov's son, everything

is fine. Neither the prosecutor's office nor the traffic police seems

interested in him. Nikolai can do as he pleases.

He's the master of this life. Now let's

pause and bring in the devil's advocate.

Sure, he's Peskov's son, but he's an adult,

a person who could very well have earned this

lifestyle himself.

After all, he lived in the UK. Maybe

he received a top education at

some

elite school and then at Oxford or Cambridge.

Maybe he made his fortune abroad

and came back to Russia to

serve his homeland.

Why did everyone suddenly decide that he must be

a fraud? What if he's actually a top professional

and a successful man? Then it would simply be

indecent to go after every

official's child just because we

found a Ferrari in their garage and immediately started making videos.

That's populism.

It's an important question indeed, and with it we

turned to the primary sources. Over in

England, we combed through various business

registers and lists of graduates from prestigious

universities. We looked everywhere, but somehow found

only one mention of him.

And not in the Oxford library, but in court records

and the prison of the city of Peterborough, in the county of

Cambridgeshire.

At first, of course, we didn't believe it. How could

that be? Maybe it was some kind of misunderstanding,

some mistake.

But British courts keep detailed

transcripts of all hearings, and we ordered

one so we could examine it in more detail.

The hearing transcript states

that in 2009, Dmitry Peskov's son,

together with two acquaintances,

attacked a teenager near a local

McDonald's, took his money, and beat him. And

a few months before that attack,

he had been given a 10-month suspended sentence for

stabbing a friend and attacking a girl from whom

he took a phone. From his lawyer's character reference

we learn that Nikolai does not even have

a secondary education and is highly

prone to violence.

The sentences in the two cases were combined, and

Nikolai spent more than

a year in prison. There is little doubt that this is the same

Nikolai Choles. First, it's a very rare combination

of a Russian first name and an English

surname, and second, the age matches.

Naturally, with a criminal

record like that, no work experience, and no education,

Nikolai had few prospects in the UK.

But guess where he had plenty of them.

Of course — in Russia. After all, his father is

the press secretary not to the Queen of

the United Kingdom, but to the President of Russia. And as

you can see, in Russia everything worked out. Here he

lives like a millionaire, not the least bit

embarrassed by it, and posts his

photos on social media.

That kind of lifestyle costs a lot of

money. Now let's call in the devil's advocate

for a second time, and he'll tell us: wait a minute,

this is all obvious. The guy came to

Russia, started a business, won a couple of

gas contracts; maybe his dad got him

a position at a state bank — that's where the money came from.

What, we don't know stories like that? Fine,

then let's look for where he works in

Russia.

Where did the money for the Range Rover, the Tesla,

the apartment, and everything else come from? He has no business,

at all. But here's what we did find out:

Nikolai was hired to work at

Russia Today, the English-language

propaganda channel that exists on

our taxpayer money. In other words, we

were paying a young man who had just gotten out of prison,

without even a secondary

education,

at least 100,000 rubles a month. Why were we

doing that? Because he is Peskov's son.

Despite the fact that Nikolai on

his Facebook page still claims that he

works for Russia Today,

that isn't true. His reports aired there for only

a couple of months; he didn't stay at the channel

for long. After 2012, not a

single video. We also see on Facebook

that he calls himself the creative

director at the company Fight Nights.

They organize fights, various shows, and

competitions. That doesn't strike us as

surprising at all. He really

could work there — as creative

director, lord of fights, or even

master of the ring, whatever he wants — because all of this

This whole spectacle is sponsored by Peskov's friend.

By businessman Ziyavudin Magomedov, the very same one

Magomedov who, as we claimed

two years ago paid for the honeymoon

of Peskov and Navka on the largest and

most luxurious sailing yacht in the world, the Maltese

Falcon.

So basically, the father simply asked a friend

to give him a job and pay him

a salary. There is just one small

problem: the father is a government official, and such

favors from a businessman to an official look very much

like a bribe. But of course, that's peanuts

compared with renting a yacht for

26 million rubles a week (about $440,000 at the time).

By the way, here is Peskov himself at one of the

Fight Nights matches, apparently coming to watch

the successes of his son, the creative director. But in

fact, Nikolai did not stay long at his father's friend's company either.

Since 2015, he has not

worked anywhere.

And we couldn't resist either, so

we called him personally and asked: hey, man,

do you work anywhere? Come on, admit it. And he

honestly told us: guys, I don't work

anywhere. So that means you are

unemployed, am I understanding correctly? Well, yes.

He doesn't work anywhere, yet he buys an apartment

on Rublyovka (an elite residential area outside Moscow), a Range Rover, a Ferrari, a Tesla,

watches, travel, and spends his days riding

horses. In short, you and I know what

this profession is called. It is called

the son of a corrupt official. In Russia, that is

practically a state position.

Soon they'll probably add it to the official pay scale and

start assigning pensions for it. That's why I began

by saying that this story is not about Peskov's son.

It is about the fact that you have no prospects.

Our country is built for people like

Nikolai. Just ask yourself

right now: how long would it take you

to earn enough for the same things, even if you

have an excellent education and lots of relevant

experience, even if you try very, very

hard? Sorry, but most likely you

will never earn that kind of money. There is no

social elevator in our country that will

take your education and hard work into account and then

lift you to the floor where wealthy people

live. And the part where

people like Nikolai live is

completely locked away from you. That's the story.

If you want, put up with it. Tell yourself that this

is how it is supposed to be, and that nothing can be changed.

I'm a small, obedient person; I'll just

sit and watch as the son speeds past me

in a beautiful Ferrari, and behind

him his father in an equally beautiful Tesla.

But if you do not want to put up with it, then act.

Sign right now in support of the

candidate

whose platform includes a provision on

combating illicit enrichment. If I become

president, Peskov himself, his son, and all

figures like them will have to explain

where they got the money for such a lavish

life.

And if they have no explanation, I will

send them to the dock, and then

to prison. Vote for Putin, and everything with

corruption will stay exactly as it is, including

Peskov's 37-million-ruble watch (about $630,000 at the time), vacations

on

a 26-million-ruble yacht (about $440,000) and a house worth 1 billion rubles (about $17 million).

Vote for me, and I will quickly fix

this situation. But in order even to

get onto the ballot—and of course Putin

does not want to let me in—this gentleman has latched onto

the very fashionable topic of fighting

corruption.

I repeat once again: in order to fight

corruption, first of all you yourself must

be absolutely honest. I need

your support, and right now, first and

foremost, your signature. The link is below.

If you have already signed for me, then

bring in a couple more people. And the second

thing you can do, without even

getting up from your chair right now,

is to share this around. In a normal country,

newspapers and television would already be shouting about Peskov's son.

Here, this video will be

the only source of information. And

surely you would agree that it would be nice if

every time during Putin's Direct Line (the Russian president's annual televised Q&A), people

looked at that mustached face beside him and

remembered yachts and Teslas. And when Putin

so much as mentions fighting corruption, everyone

would immediately turn off the TV and say:

we will never vote for these hypocrites and liars

again. Subscribe to

our channel. They tell the truth here.