Convicted for no crime

The decision can be considered a victory for the Tesak defense. Martsinkevich's lawyer Alexey Mikhalchik asked to send the case for a new trial, or to change the classification of the charges, since there are no victims in the case. If the sentence is upheld, he asked to commute the punishment.

OVD-Info looked into the adventures of “Tesak” - on the one hand, one of the most ardent promoters of violence among the ultra-right, on the other, looking almost like a political prisoner in the dock.

"Format 18"

Martsinkevich - born in 1984. “Both my mother and father are engineers, my grandparents are engineers, one grandfather is even a scientist,” writes “Tesak” in his autobiographical book “Restrukt.” One of the grandmothers, according to Tesak, “is a liberal and went to pickets in support of Khodorkovsky.” Martsinkevich himself also studied to become a civil engineer , but was expelled from the university in the heat of political struggle. Leads a healthy lifestyle and has been involved in sports for many years. He was drafted into the army, but was discharged with a “white ticket” for Nazi antics.

In his youth he evolved from Tolkienists to Nazi skinnies . “Tesak” took part in many fights and described his adventures online. In addition to street violence, Martsinkevich is a veteran of Nazi propaganda projects.

Martsinkevich started in the People's National Party (PNP) of Alexander Ivanov-Sukharevsky (a film director with a failed career), and was in the leadership of the youth section of the PNP. The second half of the nineties and the first half of the 2000s were replete with dwarf parties who wanted to represent the interests of Nazi skinheads . The type of their leader is a middle-aged man with numerous complexes, who recognizes himself as a “Russian Fuhrer.” Such “Hitlers” easily fell for the provocations of law enforcement officers and political strategists, and their parties collapsed under the weight of criminal cases.

The NNP was the largest in this spectrum, had a network of regional branches and contacts with a couple of State Duma deputies. When Rodina was hastily created for the elections in 2003, members of the NPP were used as grassroots assets. Apparently, under certain promises to Ivanov-Sukharevsky , which were not going to be fulfilled, many ultra-rightists were thrown out of the Rodina list on the eve of the elections.

Sukharevsky’s associates associate this conflict with a small explosion that occurred in October 2003 in the NNP office, located in an apartment on the first floor of a high-rise building near the Belorussky railway station. As a result of the explosion, the party leader was blinded in one eye. By the middle of the 2000s, the NPP had withered away from hopelessness and squabbles.

In 2005, Martsinkevich launched his own project - the creative association “Format18” with Hitler on the logo. "18" is an international Nazi code for Adolf Hitler. At first, Alexander Potkin helped Martsinkevich with hosting and video equipment, but they soon fell out.

“Format18” had an active forum, several dozen of whose users played sports together, communicated, and held camps in nature. A number of characters from this company later found themselves behind bars for racist crimes.

Martsinkevich writes in his book that behind bars he met young men convicted of racist murders. They told him that they killed, inspired by his videos. One of Martsinkevich’s cellmates even nicknamed him the imam: they say, “Tesak”, like a Wahhabi imam, conducts propaganda, and then young people commit murders and get imprisoned for life. And “Tesak” does not repent of this at all. Martsinkevich writes that “Format18” at the peak of its popularity was the most popular far-right portal in the world. We can talk about dozens of racist murders committed by young people who constantly visited the website of the “creative association.”

The main products of the Tesaka studio were racist videos that relished and promoted violence against the “Untermensch”. The videos were wildly successful among the target audience. Many of Martsinkevich’s stories were staged or recorded minor fights with his participation. But fans also sent him their footage, and these videos showed real beatings, often clearly causing severe injuries to the victims.

Martsinkevich concluded an alliance between Format18 and the National Socialist Society (NSO). At the end of the 2000s, members of the NSO found themselves involved in cases of dozens of racist murders - apparently, this was one of the reasons for the police’s interest in Martsinkevich.

NSO and Format18 waged a strange and aggressive campaign against competitors Alexander Potkin and Dmitry Demushkin. Swearing texts on the Internet, smearing the door of Demushkin’s apartment with shit, distributing a porn video with one of Demushkin’s associates (and Tesak’s ex-girlfriend) , etc. These activities strained the current leaders of the “Russians” movement. As it later became known from Alexei Navalny’s correspondence posted online, Alexander Potkin, who communicated with him, sought to land Tesak.

Martsinkevich also worried people more influential than Potkin: “Tesak” managed to gather almost a thousand people to oppose the liberal anti-fascist rally on Bolotnaya Square on November 4, 2006. Riot police dispersed the Nazis. And in the summer of 2007, Martsinkevich became the main network PR man for the “arrow of Russians and Caucasians on Manezhka”, which ended in a mass brawl near the Kitay-Gorod metro station . In the summer of 2007, Tesak was arrested.

First terms

The trials of Martsinkevich are examples of the incompetence of the Russian law enforcement system. They tried to obtain testimony from him about the subversive activities of Boris Berezovsky in Russia, without investigating the real crimes in which “Tesak” could have been involved. The police could not find anything at all about the violent actions in which Martsinkevich participated before the creation of Format18.

No one from Format18 was brought to criminal charges regarding the raider war for the house at Skhodnensky Deadlock, 4 (about a dozen of them were opened). There, NSO and Format18 had an office and a gym provided by one of the parties to the conflict for a multi-story building near the Tushinskaya metro station. Anatoly Sher, director of the organization for helping the disabled, from which this building was taken away, repeatedly wrote statements to the police about attacks committed by the Nazis. Sher died in December 2011: while getting off the bus, he received a push from a man getting off after him. Sher fell, hit a nearby car and died in the hospital. The man who pushed him has not been found by police.

Martsinkevich participated in the attack on anti-fascist Ivan Khutorsky (later shot dead in the entrance of his house). He suffered bodily injuries, including a cut wound to the head. Khutorskoy wrote a statement to the police, but it disappeared at the Yakimanka police station.

Martsinkevich posted dozens of videos of brutal beatings of “non-Slavs” online for propaganda purposes. Obviously, “Tesak” could be tried as an accomplice in all these acts. The beatings were carried out and filmed for extremist propaganda purposes. By posting these videos, “Tesak” became an accomplice in the crime. But law enforcement officers did not take this route, although they banned Format18 as an extremist organization in 2010, when the “creative association” no longer carried out any activities.

Martsinkevich served 3.5 years in two strange cases - about shouting “Sieg Heil!” and obscene insults at the debates in “Bilingua” (a statement to the police was written by Alexei Navalny, Ilya Yashin and Maria Gaidar, and, for example, Yulia Latynina, who was present at these debates, refused to testify, considering it beneath her dignity) and a video about the “Russian Ku- Klux Klan " with the re-enactment of the hanging of a "Tajik drug dealer." A video about the KKK was ordered by Tesaku for money from the REN-TV channel (when ordering the video, the TV crew could not help but understand that there is no KKK in Russia). The TV crew broadcast the video and immediately wrote a statement asking them to check the video for extremism.

The devil of a protest

"Tesak" was released on December 31, 2010. Until December 2011, he was mainly involved in helping the far-right in prison, but with the beginning of the white ribbon movement he became politically active again.

Both the Nazis and the Antifa started talking about the fact that Tesak had high-ranking patrons. Indeed, the story with “Bilingual” looks dubious: first, the club, which had a couple of hundred people, could not expose the rowdy “Tesak” with a dozen associates, then they wrote a statement against them, according to which Martsinkevich received a prison sentence. The statement was written by Navalny, the new opposition leader. Martsinkevich had a grudge against Navalny, and, apparently, this was beneficial to one of the “curators”.

Martsinkevich and his friends at the end of 2011 and 2012 made minor hooligan provocations against the “white ribbon activists”, launched trolling campaigns such as promoting Martsinkevich in online voting for preferred speakers at protest rallies, and tried to register him as a candidate for the Opposition Coordination Council. Martsinkevich made videos about how, they say, “United Russia,” of course, “sucks,” but the “white ribbon people” are no better.

Martsinkevich became a TV star. Then several anti-pedophile initiatives appeared that used correspondence with pedophiles on the Internet on behalf of children in order to lure them into meeting, but it was Martsinkevich’s “Occupy the Pedophile” that became the leader among these projects. Almost professional filming equipment was used at the rallies, reports about Martsinkevich began to be shown on federal television channels - known for strict censorship - and in the mirror of Russian TV he turned from a neo-Nazi into “a tough representative of civil society, a fighter against depravity.”

Far-right businessman

Promoted on TV, “Tesak” acquired a brutally glamorous gloss and began appearing in commercials for the Internet. He advertised a lot - from sports nutrition for bodybuilders to overnight delivery of alcohol. Due to trolling the opposition, he became friends with Sergei Mavrodi, the creator of MMM. Tesak launched his own small pyramid scheme on the Internet - Tesakmoney - and also advertised other pyramid schemes. Shortly before the appearance of a new criminal case, he made a series of videos calling for help in becoming the Russian representative of the Finnish company Kyäni, which operates on the principle of network marketing and sells dietary supplements. “Tesak” promised that with the help of Kyäni he would seriously increase funding for far-right projects in Russia. This could have caused law enforcement concern about Tesak’s activities.

At the same time, Tesak has reduced its activity in trolling the opposition. Even when Alexei Navalny, his main target, became a candidate for mayor of Moscow, Tesak only made a couple of videos, and, as Nikolai Lyaskin, head of the Moscow organization of the Progress Party, told OVD-Info , he only once tried to protest “offline” at Navalny’s headquarters .

In the fall of 2013, a new criminal case was opened against Tesak, and magically for TV, Martsinkevich again turned from a “fighter against pedophiles” into a Nazi. Although in 2012–2013, Martsinkevich did not renounce his views and, in parallel with “Pedophilia,” he created the National Socialist movement “Restrukt.”

In addition to the versions that “Martsinkevich got lazy and stopped fighting the opposition,” as well as interest in the financial activities of “Tesak,” among the possible reasons for the emergence of a criminal case is that “Pedophilia” actually caught a couple of middle-ranking officials in unpleasant situations level, and revenge on their part is not excluded. Tesak’s associates also repeatedly became involved in criminal stories, which could tire the police. However, none of the versions has confirmation.

Xenophobia again

In the case of the current criminal case against Tesak, history has repeated itself. The police did not take on his “Pedophilia”, whose activities obviously may raise many questions, but again accused “Tesak” of promoting xenophobia.

OVD-Info will not provide links to the videos for which Tesak was convicted, but those interested can find them - they are in the public domain. These are reviews of the films “Stalingrad” and “Okolofutbola”, as well as the video “Throwing Out the Chock”. Reviews of films were made as part of a commercial project: one cinema hired Martsinkevich as a reviewer of the films shown there.

The videos contain xenophobic appeals, but how many of them were there during the election fight for the post of mayor of Moscow? And after the events in Biryulyovo? Even considering that this is Martsinkevich’s third conviction under Article 282 , was it appropriate to first seek his extradition from Cuba (where “Tesak” was hiding) to Russia for the sake of these videos? Is a sentence of 5 years in a maximum security colony fair for them? (Tesak received this amount in August 2014 in the Kuntsevo District Court).

The SOVA Center does not classify Martsinkevich’s case as “illegal anti-extremism.” In a conversation with OVD-Info, Sova director Alexander Verkhovsky noted that, of course, the sentence is as harsh as possible, but possible. This position is clearly vulnerable.

“The examination of the videos was carried out by the Institute of Cultural Studies, which is not a state expert institution, which is a formal violation,” told OVD-Info . Tesak lawyer Matvey Tseng

“Experts Natalya Kryukova and Vitaly Batov are not experts in the required areas. Kryukova is a teacher, Batov is a psychologist. Not being professionals in either philology or linguistics, they use “innovative” methods for identifying meaning, which boil down to this: “he said something against blacks, which means it’s incitement.” The examination that was carried out on Martsinkevich has serial number 389 and was carried out on December 30. It is known that examination numbers are updated once a year. It is absolutely clear that it is impossible to conduct more than 300 high-quality examinations in a year,” the lawyer notes.

Experts Kryukova and Batov really do not have the best reputation. For example, their activities are criticized by Alec Epstein, author of the book “Thought Police,” a detailed study of “extremist” criminal cases.

Here is one of the examples cited by Epstein of their expert activity in criminal cases against the National Bolsheviks in the 2000s: “And here are the conclusions that Natalya Kryukova and Vitaly Batov came to regarding the leaflet “Kill the Slave in You”: “Only the word “Kill!” is graphically underlined, which - due to the graphic location of the exclamation mark, it is read primarily as a separate one. The rest of the text is not expressive [sic!] and is read only by the especially inquisitive [sic!]. The background of the poster is silhouettes of armed people in aggressive poses. Thus, the entire meaning of the poster is a call to violence (murder).”

Even before Martsinkevich’s “disgrace,” signatures were collected calling for an end to the activities of “Pedophile,” whose activists carried out reprisals of varying degrees of severity against homosexuals and people suspected of pedophilia. Law enforcement officers did not give clear answers to those who signed the appeal whether Martsinkevich’s activities would be investigated.

PS At the end of October, was opened another criminal case against Martsinkevich - for one of his videos of numerous videos with humiliations of their heroes. This looks like a belated and incomplete, but still an attempt to give a legal assessment of the work of “Tesak”.