What an Assassination in St. Petersburg Tells Us About Moscow
The strange death of a pro-Kremlin blogger leads us down the rabbit hole of conspiracy and counter-conspiracy.
The first thing you need to see this week is the golden statue that blew up and killed pro-Kremlin propagandist Maxim Fomin.
Fomin is better known by his alias Vladlen Tatarsky. He was a cafe in St. Petersburg on April 2 giving a talk in front of a massive photograph of himself silhouetted by weapons when an explosion killed him. The blast injured 32 other people.
Fomin’s death at the hands of a golden bust of himself is a surreal moment in Russian history, one with so many weird connections and details that it serves as a great launch pad to talk about what’s going on in Russia today. That’s what I’m devoting the entire newsletter to this week: the small golden statue and its strange connections.
First there’s the incident itself, which was taped by multiple witnesses. There’s video of the explosion, its aftermath, and the moments leading up to it all over the internet. Just before the explosion, a woman delivered a cardboard box to Fomin. He opens it up to find a golden bust of a man in military gear. “Oh, what a handsome guy! Is that me?” Tatarsky says while inspecting the statue. “It’s golden!”
In a video allegedly showing the moment of the explosion, Fomin is packing the statue back into the box when the blast goes off.
Fomin was at the cafe giving a talk in front of a group called the “Cyber Z Front,” a pro-Kremlin troll army. Cyber Z Front is organized on Telegram and headquartered in St. Petersburg. Its stated goal is fighting western disinformation campaigns and it often does so by flooding information spaces with its own Kremlin friendly brand of disinfo. Cyber Z Front connected posters have shared, for example, memes about Kyiv developing bioweapons that are delivered by birds trained by the U.S.
Some western media outlets have called Fomin a “journalist” and have leaned on using his nom de plume. One of the early New York Times stories referred to Fomin as “Mr. Tatarsky” throughout. Fomin is not a journalist and “Tartasky” is the equivalent of calling someone by their internet handle in an obituary. He got this name from the protagonist of the novel Generation P by Russian novelist Victor Pelevin. Pelevin writes surreal political fiction books and Generation P chronicles the journey of a man named Tatarsky as he experiments with drugs during the Yeltsin years and learns just how screwed the members of Russia’s Generation X are. It’s from this character that Fomin lifted his name.