Russian investigative journalist claims popular comedian is making re-election propaganda for Moscow's mayor

Russian journalist Alexey Kovalev, the brains behind the muckraking website NoodleRemover, has published evidence that the stand-up comic and videoblogger Danila Poperechny is responsible for a viral advertising campaign to promote Moscow Mayor Sergey Sobyanin’s re-election. The animated videos celebrate various urban improvements throughout the capital in recent years, lauding Sobyanin’s qualities as a mayor.

In May 2018, NoodleRemover offered $100 in cryptocurrency to anyone who could provide information that would identify the authors behind a viral ad titled “Sobyanin's Lover Talks About Expensive Presents, PG-16,” where a woman's voice seductively describes the city's infrastructure projects as if they were gifts to the mayor's mistress. Kovalev says he obtained the information about Poperechny from an anonymous source and paid an undisclosed amount of money for the evidence. (Meduza does not pay its sources for information and considers this practice to be unethical, though we made an exception in December 2017 for this story.)

Kovalev says two of 12 planned videos have reached YouTube, so far, attracting several thousand views and dozens of supportive comments. An entire “animated documentary film” is apparently on the way, too. Pro-Kremlin media figures like Rossiya 1 talk show host Vladimir Solovyov and Komsomolskaya Pravda correspondent Dmitry Steshin have also shared the videos.

According to the information Kovalev obtained, the videos are the work of a YouTube studio run by Danila Poperechny and Ilya Fadeev, who previously served as press secretary for the pro-government projects “Stop Kham” and “Khryushi Protiv.” Kovalev says Poperechny is also responsible for a video last year that compared the anti-corruption activist Alexey Navalny to Adolf Hitler. (The public's reaction to the video was so negative that its creators quickly deleted it from YouTube, but not before others saved it and shared copies.)

Responding to Kovalev’s allegations, Poperechny ridiculed the idea that he runs “some secret propaganda studio,” denying that he is involved in the Sobyanin videos and arguing that the advertisements look more like the work of Yuri Dyagterev’s My Duck’s Vision studio (read more about this project here). Poperechny confirmed that he did work briefly with Ilya Fadeev at the studio Davai Laima, but he insists that he quickly ended this collaboration when Fadeev started giving interviews claiming to be one of the studio’s co-founders. Poperechny says Kovalev's investigative report is clearly a “planted story” designed to tarnish his reputation.

Danila Poperechny launched his career as a screenwriter and animator for the videoblogging association Spasibo, Eva! (Thanks, Eve!), but he left the project after it became known that the creators had ties to the Kremlin. Today, Poperechny is widely considered to be a moderately oppositionist blogger. His YouTube channel has almost two million subscribers.