Last May, Tatiana N decided she wanted a higher salary than the average journalist can expect.
After responding to an advertisement in the popular HeadHunter job-search website, she became a Kremlin-paid Internet troll. Tatiana — who, like others interviewed for this story, asked that her last name not be used — worked out of a 2,500-square-meter warehouse in the suburbs of St. Petersburg.
The job paid 40,000 rubles a month, significantly more than the 25,000-30,000 most journalists make. But it came, she said, “with pain.”
Tatiana joined a round-the-clock operation in which an army of trolls disseminated pro-Kremlin and anti-Western talking points on blogs and in the comments sections of news websites in Russia and abroad.
The operation, Internet Research, is financed through a holding company headed by President Vladimir Putin’s “personal chef,” Evgeny Prigozhin.
“So you write, write, write, from the point of view of anyone,” Tatiana, 22, says.
“You could be [posing as] a housewife who bakes dumplings and suddenly decides: ’I have an opinion about what Putin said! And this action by Vladimir Vladimirovich saves Russia.”
The roughly 400 employees work 12-hour shifts and are split into various departments. Some focus on writing up themes and assignments, others concentrate on commenting, and others work on graphics for social media.
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Internet Research, which is officially run by a retired police colonel named Mikhail Bystrov, was first exposed as a “#troll_farm” by the Independent Novaya Gazeta weekly newspaper in late 2013.
The hierarchical structure, former employees say, is as opaque as the makeup of the Russian bureaucracy itself.