Users of Russian-language Twitter have been discussing the story of Vladimir Maksimov, a lonely blogger from the Krasnoyarsk village of Boguchany, who for several years delighted his audience with stories about his cows and bulls. In September 2024, his subscribers noticed that instead of the barn for which Maksimov was collecting money, he built something similar to a bathhouse. They began to actively criticize Vladimir, but due to the remoteness of Boguchan (after all, 12 hours from Krasnoyarsk by bus), no one ever visited him. No one except journalist Ivan Kozlov, who personally met Maximov, stroked the bulls Benya and Max and appreciated the building, which caused so much discussion.
It turns out that bulls have very warm horns - this is necessary for thermoregulation. I had never thought about it before, but now I literally felt it. I mechanically grabbed Benya’s horn when the bull pushed Vladimir and me to the doors of the flock (that’s what they call a room for livestock in Siberia): apparently, Benya was upset that we showed up without tasty treats in the form of compound feed. The bull pushed us back gently, but such strength was felt in the movement of his head that it immediately became clear: if something had seriously angered him, neither I nor Vladimir would have been able to cope with him.
I also didn’t think that Benya and Max were so huge: it’s not very noticeable from the photographs, although Vladimir Maksimov posts pictures of bulls on Twitter every day. I must admit that these photos are quite similar to each other, and now, with the onset of cold weather, they have become even more monotonous: the owner of Benya and Max does not let them out of the flock until it gets warmer. But regularity is more important to Maximov than visual variety:
— In blogging about cows, stability is important, so that a person comes every day and receives his dose of content: a photo or a video. It's a kind of show.
In the last few months, everything that has been happening around Maksimov and his pets really does look a lot like a show. But it didn’t go at all according to the scenario that the author intended.
An unpredictable thing
In the village of Boguchany, stretching along the banks of the Angara, just over 11 thousand people live, and perhaps its only attraction can be considered a local history museum. Usually such museums in small towns look, to put it mildly, out of date, but here everything is different: the exhibition is designed very elegantly, quite at the level of metropolitan museums and galleries. This is explained simply: in 2005, the old local history museum burned to the ground, and in the new one everything was done from scratch.
The museum is named after Daniil Andon, a teacher, historian, social activist and intellectual, who ended up in these parts against his own will: in 1937, he was repressed and settled in Boguchany after several years in the Kolyma camps.
This is roughly how the ancestors of many local residents ended up here, including 60-year-old Vladimir Maksimov. In response to a request to talk about his relatives, he turns on the computer and conducts something like a mini-lecture, meticulously finding on Google maps every locality in question. This excursion begins with the Memorial website, where Vladimir found information about his ancestors - the merchants Kandybaevs, who once lived in Transbaikalia, and were then dispossessed and repressed. In particular, his grandmother was exiled to the south of the Krasnoyarsk Territory. Subsequently, already pregnant, she escaped from exile in search of her husband, from whom she was separated. She did not find a husband (nothing is still known about him), but she was caught and gave birth to a son - Vladimir's father - already in prison.
A non-governmental organization created in the late 1980s to study political repression in the USSR.
He, despite the harsh conditions, grew up to be an intelligent man and became the director of a school in the village of Shiversky, a few kilometers from Boguchany. Vladimir Maksimov was born there and lived his entire life in these parts. In the 70s, his father was appointed head of RONO , and the family moved to Boguchany.
District Department of Public Education.
Maksimov against the background of his household - a workbench and an old flock
Vladimir completed his studies, graduated from the Krasnoyarsk Pedagogical Institute, returned to Boguchany and worked for fifteen years as a physics and computer science teacher in the neighboring village of Angarsky, built by Germans from the Volga region. Showing it on the map, Maksimov breaks into his characteristic critical maxims:
— They built an oil pipeline here... Here the reserves of one field are equal to Russia’s annual exports! And the poverty is utter, oil alone could cover all the sidewalks in Boguchany with gold tiles. But no, they took money from the Chinese to build the oil pipeline, the oil has now been sold to the Chinese for 20 years in advance, and here only pennies remain.
In the late 80s, Maksimov decided that he needed to somehow spin, in keeping with the spirit of the times, and opened a video salon in Angarsk; He had to go all the way to Vladivostok to get the tape recorder. Then the fashion for video salons passed, and he organized a small television studio. The tower, for the foundation of which he poured concrete in the 90s, judging by Google maps, still stands in Angarskoe.
But the grocery store, opened by Maksimov a little later, did not survive: its owner managed to overcome the crisis and default of 1998, but a year later a less fortunate fellow villager burned the building out of envy.
The few archival photographs left by Vladimir became damp after the fire was extinguished. One of them depicts his father Gennady
Vladimir talks about all this for a long time and enthusiastically, showing points on the map, old photographs and archival records. His past looks especially bright against the backdrop of a rather faded present. The one-story rural house in which we are sitting is littered with rubbish and looks more like a large work shed, in which you don’t even have to take off your shoes. A year ago, Maksimov’s house was on fire, firefighters filled everything with water, which caused the ceiling and walls to become damp and bulge, the floor rotted, and many things became unusable. This is how Vladimir has lived since then - he has no money for repairs, and in general there is always not enough money.
Vladimir keeps telling stories: about how his friend bought an An-2 plane and at night delivered food to him for the store, guided only by a compass, about a local alcoholic prosecutor who was killed by his own wife, about bandits “watching” the area , and about much more.
“Why am I telling all this,” says Maksimov, at some point noticing my embarrassment. - Yes, because life is such an unpredictable thing.
First hype
The blogger himself is a living illustration of this thesis. It was impossible to imagine that a lonely man from a remote village would become a hero, and then an anti-hero, on Russian-language Twitter.
At the beginning of the 2000s, Maksimov moved to Krasnoyarsk, founded a small company there selling heating equipment, but did not achieve much success. In addition, a few years later, his mother fell ill, for whom constant care was required, and Vladimir returned to Boguchany. There, life first brought him into contact with animal husbandry, and there is also a dramatic story behind this.
His grandfather and grandmother, who lived in a nearby logging camp, once called a neighbor to help cut firewood with a chainsaw. Vladimir’s grandmother dragged a bucket of gasoline from the yard straight into the house (“Old people, what’s wrong,” Maksimov sighs), stumbled and dropped it near the stove. The house caught fire, the grandfather died in a fire, and the grandmother was transported to Boguchany. And with it - a cow. This is how animals appeared in the life of the Maximov family, which they eventually got used to caring for, and, more importantly, the first flock that Vladimir’s father built for the cow. Years later, the old flock fell into disrepair and a new one was needed - this started a scandal on Twitter that has not subsided to this day.
In Maksimov’s house, the consequences of the fire are clearly visible, in particular the damp and sagging ceiling
Life is an unpredictable thing, that's for sure. Vladimir divorced his wife a quarter of a century ago, one of his daughters lives in Krasnoyarsk and has little contact with her father, the other went to study in St. Petersburg, where she met her future husband and moved to Israel, Vladimir’s seriously ill mother, whom he literally spent the last few years of her life carried in his arms, died, his elderly father soon died, and by the end of the 1990s Maksimov was left completely alone in Boguchany, except for cows and stray cats and dogs.
After his parents died, he had to learn how to care for cattle. Gradually, Vladimir, who worked in Boguchany either at the local sanitary and epidemiological station or in the boiler room, finally concentrated on running the household, so he had no time left for full-time work - only for irregular earnings like installing heating or repairing woodworking machines (during our conversation customers from the sawmill called him twice).
From English full-time - full-time work (8 hours a day).
The cows eventually gave birth to offspring, in particular two bulls, whose names are familiar to tens of thousands of Russians today: Benya and Max. Benya was born in February 2022, and Max a year and a half later.
By the time the first bull appeared, Vladimir Maksimov already had a Twitter account: he opened an account there in 2010, when he first heard about the social network from the budding liberal President Dmitry Medvedev. True, unlike Medvedev, Maksimov was already truly liberal-minded even then: having started Twitter, the first thing he did was subscribe to various independent media. Now, 14 years later, only half of his blog consists of stories about bulls and everyday needs - the rest of the space is taken up by reposts of opposition accounts:
“There is a possibility that this will backfire,” he says, “but I don’t see the point in being afraid, I’ve already been so afraid that I’m not particularly afraid of any future events.” It is clear that repression will only increase - the whole logic of current events leads to this. But it’s impossible for everyone to be afraid.
In the corner of the yard, Vladimir stores building materials that will soon be used. There are not many of them yet, because there is no money.
However, in the first years of his passion for Twitter, Maksimov’s account did not contain not only cows and bulls, but also a clearly oppositional agenda: he read a lot, but wrote mostly about the everyday life of the company in which he then worked. He took a fresh look at Twitter in 2017, after a story with a truck: the driver of a Renault truck missed a turn three kilometers from Boguchany and got stuck tightly on the side of the road. By the time Maksimov, who was passing by, noticed him, the would-be driver had been sitting like that for two weeks. He was also robbed: he went to the surrounding villages for help, but not only did he not find it, but also discovered that during his absence money and electronics had disappeared from the truck. There was no special equipment in the area, so the police and the Ministry of Emergency Situations just threw up their hands.
Having learned about this, Maksimov described the situation on Twitter, the story reached journalists , and then the popular blogger Rustem Adagamov. He talked about it in his LiveJournal account - that’s how it all reached the Moscow police officials, and from there it went down to Krasnoyarsk.
“That was the first time I realized that Twitter is a huge force,” says Maksimov. — When Moscow called Krasnoyarsk, the regional general called our area and gave everyone a hard time. Back then there was some kind of holiday like Police Day, so the cops came running around, all beautiful and dressed up.
As a result, help was found on the same day, the truck was pulled out, Vladimir, together with other residents of Boguchany, brought food and a phone charger to the driver, and covered the whole situation on Twitter.
“That’s when I first caught the hype,” he laughs.
Fire
Six years later, Vladimir himself needed help. In July 2023, his house caught fire: the fire spread from a neighboring building before firefighters even arrived on the scene. The neighbors had almost nothing left of the house at all, Maksimov was a little more lucky: the roof and all the things stored in the attic burned down, the ceiling and part of the premises were damaged, and what was not damaged by the fire was either smoked with smoke or flooded with water during the extinguishing process . In short, it became impossible to live there.
Then Maksimov was already a relatively popular blogger: for several years he talked daily about life in Boguchany, about a domestic cat named Pushkin, about stray cats, about cows Yana, Silva, Zlata and Zos, and about his village life. His account was followed by approximately 2,500 people. Back then, Vladimir was still everyone’s favorite on Twitter, because he didn’t abuse donations, and if he posted details, it was more likely for fun and for various small reasons, for example, on the occasion of Benya’s or Max’s birthday. There were always people who wanted to please the bulls and their owner, and no one was outraged by this.
Benya the bull feels quite comfortable in a flock
But after the fire, Maksimov realized that he had no other choice but to announce a collection of money: he somehow made a temporary roof, but there was not a penny left for anything more substantial. Vladimir calculated that 200 thousand rubles are needed for normal roof repairs, and about the same amount to make the house at least relatively habitable. In the first days, it was possible to collect almost half of the amount thanks to the fact that local media and some top bloggers like Oleg Kashin and the same Rustem Adagamov spoke about Vladimir’s situation.
As a result, people's love and sympathy for Maksimov only intensified, and his subscribers increased significantly. The new arrivals watched how the pets grew up, how Vladimir put up a temporary roof, how it was blown away by the autumn winds, how he conflicted with a neighbor who refused to admit responsibility for the fire, how he tried (unsuccessfully) to find a non-drinking team of craftsmen and eventually found Old Believers in the village of Kondratyevo on the border with the neighboring Irkutsk region. They agree to help him with the repairs, and a year later - with the construction of a flock of bulls. The same one.
"My bulls, bulls"
At the beginning of September 2024, Vladimir admitted that he did not know what to do with the bulls Benya and Max: in theory, they should be slaughtered for the winter, because there is no money anyway. You can keep them as pets, loved by Twitter, but then the bulls need new housing. Subscribers generally supported the second option, and Vladimir began building a flock, while continuing to collect donations.
And when he posted a photo of the finished building, the user “Princess Cabbage” noticed that there was no flock in the photo. Plastic windows, thresholds, insulated floors - all this confused users. Maksimov himself added fuel to the fire: in the project file that heposted , “Bathhouse” was clearly written.
After that, a real nightmare began on Twitter: literally every tweet from Vladimir began to be dismantled piece by piece, looking for and sometimes finding more and more suspicious inconsistencies.
Subsequently, he explained that the flock was registered as a bathhouse according to the documents, so that he would not have problems with the inspection authorities. But users who looked at Maksimov from a different angle could no longer stop. Too many things fit perfectly into the newly discovered image of a careless owner: constant requests for donations, and Maksimov’s unpreparedness for external challenges (for example, he, having taken care of the animals, was unable to provide them with food for the winter, but wrote about this when the food had already ended, and placed this problem on the shoulders of the donors), and manipulation (when no one donated money to the cat Pushkin for treats, Vladimir wrote that you will have to eat crackers), and other, smaller sins.
Many of these doubts were justified, but soon - including due to the fact that in response to uncomfortable questions Vladimir sent people obscenities or simply banned them - Twitter hate reached some unprecedented proportions, turning into entertainment for some, and for some it’s an obsession. Some users began to calculate the location of Maksimov’s house on satellite maps, others began to draw diagrams of the bull’s turn in a flock, and still others began to analyze photographs of scratches from the horns on the walls and claim that the blogger himself picked out the marks for the sake of content.
Along the way, Maksimov began to receive threats: some users threatened to imprison him for discrediting the army, others for fraud, since he never posted reports on the funds spent.
I am not ready to support accusations of fraud, but Maksimov can indeed be suspected of having a rather peculiar attitude towards the very concept of donations.
Screenshots from Vladimir Maximov's Twitter
“[When Vladimir had a fire], I wrote a post and talked about his misfortune,” recalls the editor-in-chief of the Krasnoyarsk publication Borus, journalist Viktor Samusenko. “Then I came to him and asked how much he collected. He said: “Well, 200–250 thousand.” It’s funny that he couldn’t answer exactly: fees are such a thing - as a rule, out of a feeling of gratitude, you account for every penny. Then I asked Kashin and Adagamov to repost his story, and they gave him even more money. And, apparently, then he slipped: he realized that the money is gratuitous, that they can come from people as much as they like - there are enough compassionate, and you can just sit on the ball of photos: "My bulls, bulls."
Viktor Samusenko met with Vladimir Maksimov back in 2016, when he worked as an editor in the Krasnoyarsk edition of Mira Avenue: it was interesting for the journalist to observe a blogger who covered his life in Boguchans and periodically threw up the non -obvious regional info -fours. In addition, it turned out that Samusenko was familiar with the husband of the eldest daughter Maximov, so that they had a rather warm relationship, and when Vladimir burned the house, Victor tried to help him. But over time, watching Maksimov, Samusenko from his supporter turned into one of the most intelligible and consistent public critics. After the story with a flock, their relationship completely deteriorated.
“His position is as follows:“ I am a blogger, bloggers will be supplied, it’s normal that they help us, ”says Samusenko. “But at the same time, he himself does not see that he is standing with an outstretched hand.” And on Twitter it became clear that he actually stopped working: once a month he would harden on a Chinese pilram, twist some wires-and he has no constant work.
According to Samusenko, after the Princess of Cabbage Princess on Twitter, he looked in a new way at all the stories of Maksimov: for example, at the one where he wanted to take a loan to help the Old Believers who had once helped him with construction. For a person who himself could not make ends meet, he was a rather strange gesture.
And although the blogger could not get a loan, this case left Samusenko an unpleasant besides: he doubted the rationality of Vladimir. By the way, he confirms the story with the Old Believers, but explains it simply - the desire to help good people who, for religious reasons, abandoned many state payments and live hard work. In the situation itself, Maksimov and Samusenko have no discrepancies, they just evaluate it differently.
Bull Max, younger brother Beni
“Then the flock happened,” Samusenko continues, “everyone began to discuss his other requests, I scrolled his tape and realized that he simply collected money for his living.” And this beloved phrase “without you can’t survive” ... why do you need bulls? If you want to raise them, like in a zoo, then come up with another concept, not at the expense of other people. Not to mention that it is dangerous to keep the bull alone. One of them will sooner or later put him on the horn, despite all love. This is a bull, damn it! They are clogged by young people so that there is meat and there are no problems. But this is: “I won’t give them to anyone, and don’t even joke with me about steaks” - well, this is absurd.
Maximov does not deny the danger of bulls, but, firstly, it refers to her as his posts on Twitter (“already anticipated”), and secondly, the ability to be next to them is still outweighing any fears.
“Jokes about steaks” for some time became a trend among Vladimir’s haters: they photographed different food from meat, playing in the signatures a joke that Benya and Max still had to be launched under a knife. At some point, it came to the point that the Twitter ones remembered the old chip-to start accounts on behalf of certain hovering phenomena-and registered on Twitter Benya and Max. After that, jokes about steaks became even more popular, because Fake Benya came to the referma to the photographs and threatened to fill the author of the Ebasin to the state of the Well Done for such jokes.
A message on social networks, which is a response to another message (from the English reply - answer).
“In general,” Samusenko summarizes, “Volodya slipped on the donates and decided that you can sit on Twitter and do nothing.” And the main result of this whole story - I see on Twitter that they began to utter less Vladimir. I think it’s not bad that we raised and discussed this topic. It is necessary to help, but thanks to such stories, people become more experienced and more profitably study the issue when someone asks for help.
The same flock
Vladimir does not agree with such optics radically. In any case, the donates from the compassionate people, even if the sloppically used, it seems, did not help him to improve his life too much. At the third hour of conversation with him, we go out into the street. In the yard, the situation is no better than in the house. Most of the territory is littered with the affected things and other rubbish and scrap metal: part of Maximov expects to pass, some are not thrown away, because before the end of the lawsuit with the neighbor, material evidence may be required, some of the logic “everything will come in handy in the village”.
Finally, a flock falls into my field of vision. At the sight of the building, which the entire Russian -speaking Twitter discusses longer and more actively than the restored cathedral of the Paris Mother of God, I am covered by an almost prominent thrill. But when this first impression passes, it becomes clear why everyone was so bored with Maximov. However, this was also clear from photographs on Twitter.
In the opinion of the non -professional (that is, me), the construction with a small veranda and two sets of plastic windows is really associated with anything, but not with a flock for bulls. In the opinion of professionals, the same thing comes out: since the beginning of autumn, the entire Twitter has been retrained to the construction specialists, but very competent threads come across among leisure discussions. Formally, the construction of Maksimov is clearly not a flock in the classical sense.
How it happened, we will never know for certain. If you side with the critics of Vladimir, it can be assumed that he was tired of living in chaos and devastation and decided that it would be more effective to declare the ginger gear than to ask for himself, but in the end he still planted Benya and Max in the “bathhouse” to prove to the haters to be wrong.
“I don’t know, maybe he really decided to take a bath project from some of his beliefs in order to turn it into a flock, but all this looks, of course, comical,” Viktor Samusenko believes.
By the way, it is to this that the supporters of Vladimir appeal to this: a person who does not position himself as a professional farmer can build a flock on his site, as he sees it, and not as described in textbooks.
Vladimir against the backdrop of a legendary flock. He stands on the ramp, which was supposed to serve the answer to Twitter questions about why the porch was in a flock
Maksimov himself responds to the main complaints about the flock like this: he will put a net over time on the windows so that the bulls could not damage them with horns, and the concrete floor with drains will have to be abandoned in favor of undergrounds and insulated wooden floor:
- The foundation cannot be put here. Or it had to be done below the depth of freezing, and then one foundation would have cost me like this flock.
According to him, the flock is in the lowland, and under it water accumulates from the surrounding areas, so the option with a concrete foundation had to be excluded in favor of a lightweight version. And instead of concrete runoff, constantly add to the bulls of sawdust and hay, taking them out as needed:
- I only remove the poop every day, and moisture spills under the floor with a heater and outward. In the spring, all this will thaw, and then it will dry.
Well, let's see.
Whatever plans, Maximov nurtured at the very beginning, now it is a de facto flock: bulls constantly live in it for a month, the floor was saturated with a dung slide, and it will not work to turn a flock into a summer house or into a bathhouse.
Bene and Max, apparently, are quite comfortable: the glasses in the flock are intact, there is no unpleasant odor, the maxims are changing the sawdust properly, and the bulls themselves look clean and well -groomed. At the same time, it is very warm in the flock: even without additional heating, two bulls are released so much heat that Vladimir recently noticed a new problem: condensation is formed on the windows, it must be removed.
Strictly speaking, all these problems could be foreseen, but Vladimir has one argument: he is the owner of a small household, which he got largely on the whim of fate, and not a professional farmer. It doesn’t sound very convincing. On the other hand, as a person who has lived in the village of fifteen years, I can testify: in Russian realities, few people do something from the textbooks. Yes, even by the mind, few do something. Once my grandfather decided to breed Nutria and put them in a wooden log house, in which pigs used to live. After a day, the nutria pricked the log house through and fled, which, in general, was not something particularly unexpected. On Twitter over his grandfather, probably, would have made fun of a week.
PlayStation for bulls
-Well, imagine how I will be wrapped right now? - says Vladimir, stroking Benya for the scruff of the scruff. - With such popularity, it is simply unrealistic to score them. It will be a complete disaster. Still, such a hi will raise. Yes, and sorry for them, of course.
I recall Maximov of his manipulation: he often writes that if one or another amount for the needs of the bulls will not be able to collect, they will still have to score them. In response, he only shrugs:
- Well, theoretically think, if you are left without a penny - what to do? Where to get this thousand a day to feed them?
With such a contradictory approach, it is clear why the Hayite wave and discussion of the flock and new needs and requests of Vladimir does not weaken on Twitter for the fourth month. But, in addition to this seething, which Maximov himself fuels, he sees the deeper causes of such universal bitterness:
- Look what has been going on around for a year. Military operations, murders, constant violence-all the same, at some subconscious level, a person changes. Therefore, I try to make a blog in my own way: here is a simple rural life, here are the two muzzles are glorious. A person switches - and it becomes easier for him.
In the light of the latest events, this thesis also does not seem indisputable: the incessant mutual negative in the reclames of Vladimir pretty spoils the impression of photographs of bulls, and in addition, it badly affects the donates:
“Now we can say that their stream has practically stopped,” Maximov complains, “well, a percent by ninety, he definitely fell after this whole story.”
Vladimir goes in a flock, Benya looks into the camera and waits for delicious
Since Vladimir is easily and with pleasure annoyed by the Haters, they came up with a special method of trolling for him: they began to throw fake notifications about the transfer of money, which he first rejoices, and then, realizing that he was joked, angry. As a result, the threads, in which Maximov responds with obscure to allegedly good replai, fly to screenshots.
But the memes that appeared during the gate barn were far from always offensive or offensive. Some bloggers and politicians adopted phrases from Twitter Maksimov about grateful satisfied bulls to raise funds for their own projects.
“There is no cooler than the blogger than the one that made from Hayt such memes that they are now used to collect the donates. My respect @vgmax, you create a story! " - one of the supporters of Vladimir wrote on this occasion.
In fairness, Maximov himself also learned to troll well during this time. The stream of complaints and questions to him took him so that he began to openly mock the haters and recently announced an urgent fee for a garland to decorate a flock. Some of his critics did not understand the humor and decided that Maximov was already in a large way.
However, in the end, all this turned out to be not such a joke, because the garland was still presented to Vladimir. Now he announced a new fee - at the PlayStation 5 Pro, so that Bene and Max were boring to winter in a flock.
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