Prigozhinsky millions: how Putin's chef created an army of Kremlin trolls

Today, the correspondence of the leadership of the "Agency for Internet Research" (AII)-an office engaged in the organization of pro-Kremlin trolling fell into open access . Recall that the AIA belongs to the “Putin’s cook”, the founder of the Concord holding Evgeny Prigozhin (personally familiar with the president), and Maria Kuprashevich carried out the direct management of the company (known for being settled in the liberal media for the purpose of espionage).

A hacked correspondence allows you to evaluate the real scale of the trolling business and learn more about some “promoted topics”.

Judging by the accounting reports at the disposal of The Insider, AII is growing rapidly. The total monthly budget grew from 25 million rubles in December to 33 million in April. Moreover, if in January the “Information Bloc” consisted of 207 people (6 journalists, 125 “Bloggers-commentators” in the office, 40 commentators working remotely during the day and 36 commentators working at night), then already in April-313 people. The salary of most of them ranges in the region of 37-40 thousand rubles (at a load of about 100 comments per day). True, many of them are most likely dead souls. Kuproshevich, apparently, had a lot of handed over from her boss - in any case, in an “merged” audio record, the executive director Mikhail Burchik reproaches her for pulling her pocket at least 10 million:

The topics that trolls were involved are also curious. They are not directly indicated in the correspondence, but some surnames still pop up: for example, in January, AII collected monitoring according to the Black PR Dvorkovich and Khodorkovsky. The report says, for example: "The network is promoting video materials that compromise the activities of Dvorkovich <...>, as well as the Bilal and Magomedov brothers."

The fact that AII itself was the author of orders about Dvorkovich is confirmed by a letter from an employee of Mikhail Abramov to his colleague Alexei Soskovts: “At work in February, I propose this format: you are fully responsible for the subject of the courtyard and go to the boss to report for it (recently he wants to communicate with people who are responsible for persons).” It is noteworthy that the scrap in a response letter sends a report where, among other things, it reports: “They wrote texts for“ D ”and against“ D ”(“ D ”is understood to mean Dvorkovich, which follows from other letters). Why did AII employees simultaneously worked on two fronts is completely unclear, and the only reasonable explanation - they at once mastered two budgets at once.

But the AII report for the period from January 1 to January 10, 2014 in which some topics also slip (spelling saved):

“Over the past period, 9 posts were written. 1 post on the topic of Putin New Year's appeal, 3 posts on the topic of terrorist attacks in Volgograd, 2 posts on the topic of drunken driving Navalny, 3 posts on the theme of Putin. Three posts were brought to the top.

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Also over the past period, work on Twitter was carried out. On January 10, through Twitter, a link to the post “Navalny drove drunk at the wheel” was widespread through Twitter. More than 1100 tweets with reference http://fotoksi.livejournal.com/147828.html on this post were indexed by Yandex (Appendix No. 14).

On January 2, a hashtag about the New Year's appeal of Putin was displayed in Twitter's trends. The hashtag was lifted to 15th place, but it was the top 10 that is important. The reasons why it was not possible to raise the following: a) the whole team went to the New Year holidays; b) in this regard, I had to work on what it hit, and not on my prepared working machines; c) In the trends, various Heshi has been about the Sherlock series all day, which replaced each other, which indicates a well -prepared and professionally executed order for PR of the new series of the third season of the series. ”

The following topics include the following topics: “Sochi”, “Maidan”, “Doctrine 2050” (orders about the fictional plans of the US State Department), “I am a patriot” (orders against Khodorkovsky, Navalny, Alferov, Pussyriot, Prokhorov, Khakamad and Nemtsov).

If the current rate of expenses is preserved, then the “trolley farm” will cost a boot about $ 10 million per year. And this is not all expenses. In correspondence, other projects are found with the same organizers. So, for example, the Kharkov News Agency (Nah) costs Prigozhin a little more than a million rubles a month, the Nevsky News newspaper is 3 million, and the agency of the same name is a little over 2 million a month.

It is curious, by the way, that in November 2013, when Euromaidan was just beginning, the branch of Nah in Simferopol has already developed a “project to organize activities aimed at strengthening the influence of the Russian Federation in the Autonomous Republic of Crimea, southeast of Ukraine (Novorossia), as well as Ukraine as a whole”. The aim of the project was: “At least a victory in the elections to the local councils in the Autonomous Republic of Crimea and the southeast of Ukraine (Novorossiya), an active part and a significant impact on the situation in the struggle for the presidential chair, the formation of a numerous faction in the Supreme Council of Ukraine, as well as the appointment of their supporters for key posts in state authorities and local self-government.” Thus, the idea of ​​Novorossia, which controlled by Moscow, was actively advanced even with the living Yanukovych, more than three months before the revolution.

The case with Evgeny Prigozhin largely resembles the situation with Konstantin Malofeev (seeMarshall Malofeev material. How the Russian raider captured the southeast of Ukraine ). Both businessmen solve their business problems, financing important “patriotic” problems.

But what does this financing look like in numbers: