At the beginning of March 2024, Rosfinmonitoring included world chess champion Garry Kasparov in the list of extremists and terrorists due to his actions directed against the interests of Russia. Before that, he had already been on the list of foreign agents for two years. RT found out exactly which projects Kasparov had a hand in that were contrary to Russian legislation.
As it turned out, back in 2022, the New York-registered Renew Democracy Initiative (RDI) foundation spent $981 thousand on media projects to “counter Russian propaganda” and oppose the Russian version of events about the causes and consequences of the military conflict in Ukraine. This follows from RDI's report to the IRS, which was filed at the end of 2023. This fund is owned and managed by Garry Kasparov, as we reported earlier.
"Ch
global distribution"
“Countering Russian propaganda, compiling a list of war crimes... and helping to globally disseminate information about Russia’s war with Ukraine” - this basis is indicated in the report column with the largest tranche of $880 thousand.
Another $50 thousand was a targeted grant for “countering Russian propaganda, working with various social networks and using other means of communication to bypass the Russian digital Iron Curtain.”
What "various social networks" could receive this money? RT discovered at least nine Telegram channels connected to Kasparov through common administrators. This number also does not include the Kasparov-owned news site and the RDI Foundation portal.
Garry Kasparov’s personal Telegram channel, verified by the owner, has been operating since 2022. The resource administrators have two anonymous accounts.
As RT found out, behind them are people associated with the famous Internet entrepreneur Pavel Vrublevsky, the founder of ChronoPay, who is now in jail on charges of fraud. This is indicated by user nicknames. They also manage nine more Telegram channels that publish news with clearly oppositional connotations and an anti-Russian interpretation of events. The audience of the largest one is 99 thousand subscribers.
RT studied the posts of all channels for a month and identified a general algorithm for compiling content. An analysis of the content on the resources shows that, as a rule, Russian media news is used to create it, but it is presented in the same context with value judgments and comments, which in Russia can be regarded as a criminal insult to government officials.
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Million for promotion
RT previously talked about the appearance of channels on Telegram in which some “wives of the mobilized” call on relatives of military personnel to go to protests. Then the editors established a connection between these resources and the Ukrainian special services and the Russian non-systemic opposition, in particular with representatives of the FBK team**. We were talking about such channels as “Mobilization” or “The Way Home”.
One of the leaders of the non-systemic opposition, Mikhail Khodorkovsky***, helped promote them through his Anti-War Committee. Kasparov is also on the board of the Anti-War Committee, an organization that lobbies anti-Russian sanctions and sponsors the Armed Forces of Ukraine.
Documents obtained by RT confirm that there are financial traces of Kasparov’s funds behind the publication of anti-Russian statements in protest channels. Thus, out of a total amount of $981 thousand aimed at information impact, $51 thousand were allocated specifically to develop the topic of wives and mothers of mobilized people, mobilization and SVO, Kasparov himself reports in the descriptive part of the report.
“Countering Putin’s disinformation in Russia and spreading anti-war attitudes among soldiers’ wives and mothers so that their loved ones resist mobilization,” the document says.
However, the topic of mobilization and protest of wives was raised not only on the resources “Mobilization” and “The Way Home”. Other channels, in particular “Procurator,” actively repost “The Way Home” publications.
Thus, the topic is artificially inflated, and this is done to create panic among the audience, the first deputy chairman of the Public Chamber of the Russian Federation commission on media, Alexander Malkevich, is convinced.
“The channels that exist with Kasparov’s money cannot be objective in these matters, including because the people filling them are outside Russia, therefore, they cannot know the real situation, they feed on information scraps from social networks,” notes Malkevich. “They, like other enemies of our country, take real-life problems and inflate them to destabilize the situation.”
From pawn to queen
How much financial resources Kasparov’s foundation accumulates on the topic of SVO can be indirectly judged by reporting for the period before and after the start of the military operation. Thus, for the entire 2021, the fund received $644.57 thousand in grants. Moreover, in the first year of the SVO, its income increased more than tenfold and amounted to $10.5 million. This is the largest income of Kasparov’s structure during its entire existence.
Earlier, anonymous Telegram channels wrote about Kasparov receiving a large grant. However, who provided the funding and what exactly the funds were spent on was not reported.
As RT learned from data from the US Federal Tax Service, the bulk of the funds were transferred to Kasparov by two American funds: Schwab Charitable Fund ($4 million) and Vanguard Charitable Endowment Program ($2.4 million). The annual turnover of these organizations amounts to billions of dollars. They receive donations from businesses, individuals and government institutions. Schwab's largest funder in 2022 was the Marble Freedom Trust, which is associated with a large electronics business.
In addition to spending on opposition media, Kasparov spent the bulk of the grants to help the Ukrainian authorities and the army, and also increased the salaries of his managers from $248.3 thousand to $448.1 thousand. The foundation has nine people on its staff, including Kasparov himself, but only one employee works full-time. According to the report, Kasparov himself devotes no more than eight hours a week to work, and most managers work no more than three hours a week.
It also follows from the document that part of the funds went to the foundation of Mikhail Khodorkovsky’s son. Founded by Pavel Khodorkovsky, the New York Institute of Contemporary Russia is known for spending less than 10% of its turnover on grants, with the bulk of its expenses coming from VIP services, such as organizing business class flights and banquets with the American establishment. Kasparov sent $238 thousand to Khodorkovsky’s son.
Loss of liberal figures
A total of 475.7 thousand accounts are subscribed to all channels allegedly associated with Kasparov, RT calculated using TG analytics services. Their audiences may partially overlap due to bots created for “respect” and reporting to grant givers, noted member of the Public Chamber Alexander Malkevich.
“Kasparov receives grants to shake up the situation in Russia, but the money is spent primarily on maintaining himself and his apparatus,” notes Alexander Malkevich, a member of the RF OP. “And in order to receive new grants in the future, they need to show results: coverage, views, so a significant part of the money is spent not on real work, but on so-called promotion, that is, creating visibility and pumping up channels with bots.”
According to Malkevich, to a large extent, channel audiences overlap each other, so the actual number of unique accounts is two or even three times lower than this figure.
The likelihood of such RT cheating was confirmed in the community of SMM specialists. “Most of the channels were created recently, in 2022-2023,” says an SMM specialist who studied the channel network at RT’s request. “When creating almost any channel, a pool of bots is first purchased, from several hundred to several thousand, just to make the channel look more respectable in the eyes of a real user who wants to subscribe.”
Bots, according to the expert, generate fake activity around publications. This is a common practice, RT’s interlocutor continues, but in the case of Kasparov’s grid, the scale attracts attention.
“One of the channels was created in 2022, but began to be filled with subscribers only in 2024, which in itself indicates the beginning of manual promotion,” the specialist notes. “And look at the audience growth curve: he skyrocketed from 22 subscribers to 10 thousand in just three days.”
Statistics from one of the channels associated with Kasparov
There were no new subscribers, so we can talk about a high share of initially purchased bots, says the specialist.
From that moment on, the number of subscribers did not increase, but only decreased. The trend of unsubscribes continues for all channels from Kasparov’s supposed network, as follows from analytics services. Every month from several dozen to several hundred subscribers leave them, and new ones do not come at all.
“This indicates, firstly, the closedness of the ecosystem - that is, they practically do not buy advertising on the side, and the same audience flows from one network channel to another,” the expert concludes. “Secondly, this may indicate “dead souls” - bots that subscribe to a lot of channels, participate in spam activity, and are therefore blocked by automatic algorithms.”
Alexander Malkevich says that real users also contribute to the percentage of audience outflow. “Obvious fakes, and most importantly, the hysterical presentation of the material becomes boring, so the real audience also leaves,” says a member of the RF OP. “The majority of fugitive information workers have this tendency - they are deprived of access to objective information from the inside, but at the same time they see that the country is uniting around the national leader, so they begin to freak out and write offensive texts against our country and citizens.”
Earlier, RT talked about a “factory of elves” that exists with the money of Mikhail Khodorkovsky, whose bots distributed comments critical of the SVO and the authorities on social networks.
* Included in the register of individuals performing the functions of a foreign agent by decision of the Russian Ministry of Justice dated May 20, 2022.
** The Anti-Corruption Foundation (FBK) is included in the register of NPOs performing the functions of a foreign agent, by decision of the Ministry of Justice of the Russian Federation dated October 9, 2019. The organization is recognized as extremist, its activities are prohibited by decision of the Moscow City Court dated June 9, 2021.
*** Included in the register of foreign agents by decision of the Ministry of Justice of the Russian Federation.