Alexey Volin resigned from his post as curator of Internet and media

Prime Minister Mikhail Mishustin dismissed 56-year-old Alexei Volin from the post of Deputy Minister of Digital Development, Communications and Mass Media. In this position, Volin oversaw all Russian media and the Internet. “After leaving the ministry, Volin will continue to work on projects in the field of digital development,” the report says.

Volin was replaced by 35-year-old Bella Cherkesova. After graduating from MGIMO in 2008, she immediately began working in the press service of the Russian government, and then moved to the presidential administration, where she headed the media development department of the public relations and communications department. In the AP, Cherkesova oversaw the financing of state media, business trips for journalists to the Olympics and the Crimea, as well as the transfer of on-air television broadcasting to digital format.

According to Kommersant , Cherkesova's father, Mukharbi Cherkesov, is the founder, co-owner and general director of the Chesiko Firm LLC construction company. According to MBKh-Media, Cherkesov's companies received state contracts for 1.1 billion rubles, including from the Ministry of Education and Science, Peoples' Friendship University of Russia, MGIMO and MGSU .

“I have known Bella for a long time, and for the past five years we have worked closely with her on most media issues both domestically and abroad. She is well known and respected by the leaders of the leading media,” told Volin TASS. According to him, in his position he completed the main tasks, including the transfer of TV to digital broadcasting. “I won’t have anything bigger here,” he said.

Volin, one of the founders of the modern RIA Novosti, former deputy head of the government apparatus for media and PR, one of the oldest propagandists in Russia, was appointed deputy minister of communications back in 2012.

Volin's detailed profile is published by Meduza. The publication points to his connections with the KGB of the USSR, participation in the victory of Boris Yeltsin in 1996 and the role of PR-accompanying the second Chechen war as the founder of Rosinformtsentr.

Volin was an associate of the former press minister Mikhail Lesin and opposed the stateization of the media sector in the early 2000s, when he decided to leave the civil service. Returning to civil service, Wolin supported anti-piracy laws, as well as a law to limit foreign media ownership.

Volin's main words were spoken in 2013 at a scientific and practical conference at the Faculty of Journalism of Moscow State University: “The task of a journalist is to earn money for those people who hired him. We clearly need to teach students that, having gone beyond the walls of this auditorium, they will go to work for their uncle, and the uncle will tell them what to write, what not to write, and how to write about certain things. And the uncle has a right to it, because he pays them.