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First video interview with an ex-employee of the foreign desk of the «troll factory»
Alan Baskaev spent six months with the American desk of the infamous «troll factory» HQ’d at 55 Savushkina str. In an exclusive video-interview to Dozhd, recorded in Thailand, Alan let us in on how we found a way around the «factory» KPI, on how to work from multiple accounts at once, and on who “the Kremlin Chef” Evgeny Prigozhin was to him. Evgeniia Kotliar asked the questions.
Alan Barkaev is hurrying home from work. The «troll factory» for him is a thing of the past: he now lives in Thailand teaching Russian to the locals. Two years ago he left the foreign desk of the «troll factory», HQ’d at 55 Savushkina str. He was there though the most heated times of the Internet wars, from November 2014 to April 2015. He wrote comments, created threads and posted messages on political forums. Alan is an ex-troll who agreed to talk about his work for the American audience masks off.
THE INTERVIEW
«I called and told them I wanted to work for them. They asked me if I had any idea of what they were doing. I told them I did, I actually told them I had a better idea than they did. Just a trick I used. I got there. They asked me what I was counting on. I said I was counting on a job with English. The boss showed up, we chatted for about 15 minutes, and he told me I could start the next day».
THE CASH
«I needed the cash, don’t we all? I was getting a scholarship of about 1200 rubles (~$20), mum and dad chipped in a little, but that would only cover my food. At 21-22, you don’t just want to eat, you want to party, you want to have a good time. And these guys, they were offering 50,000 rubles for nothing. All you had to do was show up, do something almost effortless, and get the 50k. I decided it was a great deal, no morals involved».
THE FORUMS
«I worked on American forums. 90% were on politics, 10% were about other stuff, with a “Politics” section. Why did we need to stir up trouble? That was the best way to trigger a reaction: comments, likes, dislikes, reposts».
THE DRILL
«I looked around, looked at the people around me, where the cameras were, who the bad guys were, who the good guys were, figured it all out and got on with it. Naturally, they were monitoring all the computers, and the cameras were possibly even recording sound. But that I have serious doubts about because we would frequently listen to the ISIS hymn (ISIS is banned in Russia), and greet each other with “Glory to Ukraine, Glory to the Heroes”, I think that means there was no sound recording».
THE BOSS
According to RBC Magazine, the foreign desk was headed by Dzheihun Aslanov, referred to by some of his ex-employees as «Jay-Z». Three different people that had worked at the «factory» at different times confirmed to us that «Jay-Z» was and perhaps still is the head of the foreign desk. Dzheihun himself told us he «had nothing to do with it and we must have got him mixed up with someone else». There are two companies in his name: Azimut LLC and Reputation Management Center LLC. Both are located in Saint-Petersburg, but we has no luck tracing any signs of life at either of the stated addresses.
«A great guy, really cool. He helped me out a lot, if ever I needed to skip a day, or turn up late, or stay home sick, he was always supportive. I don’t even think he took anything off my salary for stuff like that. Just the bonus would get cut. Jay wasn’t a bad manager: not the most competent in the field, not competent at all, frankly speaking, but he had assistants (of sorts), some other guys… shift leads, seniors… smarter and more experienced… they got all the work done. Jeez, we even had an analytics team, so that Jay could hang around, smile and deal with our weird shit from time to time».
TRIPS TO THE USA
«Even if there was a trip, it was a way for someone to pocket some money, they couldn’t have done anything serious on the trip. They probably just went out boozing and partying, and then reported back that yep, the meetings went great. I just know these guys, we met and chilled together. They aren’t capable of anything serious, I wouldn’t worry about this at all, if I were you».
IP
«Naturally, the guys that build websites, that are sitting there making sure the sites are working properly, can easily track your IP, and if you are a Sergeant MacAllan from Saint Petersburg, that’s just weird. Of course, we had to connect from elsewhere, somewhere other than Saint Petersburg, from Seattle to Florida, you could pick any spot from Seattle to Florida, or Alaska and Hawaii, all great. Of course, we had to connect through there, but that’s something that’s so easy to do with technology, in fact, you could do it right here and now».
THE RUSSIAN DESK
«I’ll start from the last question: yes, that’s true. You see, we had young guys, recent graduates, or even students. Ambitious, smart, fun. While the Russian desk employed a bunch of real wackos. I think I saw some schoolkids there, even, and then these weirdos over 45 that were seriously turned on by Mr Solovyov. The kind of people I wouldn’t want to be around, the kind that like to talk shit about the Americans on their smoke breaks…»
BLOCKED ACCOUNTS
«First you gotta be a redneck from Kentucky, then you need to be a white guy from Minnesota, and you’ve slaved away all your life, and payed your taxes, and now you can barely make ends meet. And then 15 minutes later you are from New York posting in some black slang. That’s how it was all set up. But then again, it was a shitty set-up, all these proxies and what not… it would all break down all the time. Accounts would get blocked. For one of the forums, I think I had about 20 accounts going from 20 different cities, just because 18 of them were banned! It’s a really really shitty set-up».
EXECUTION OF THE QUR’AN
«You know, there was this funny joke… I got this youtube video with an African American, well, an African, as it turned out, dressed up in an American uniform, shooting at the Qur’an! I was told it was our guys messing around. Can you believe it? And the uniform was all messed up, it was just totally wrong. Then they hired a black dude and shot a video with the black dude having sex with a prostitute. And if you got really drunk and blurred out your zoom, she could possibly pass for Hillary Clinton. Can you believe it? And it was supposed to be some sensational viral shit! No one would buy it, clearly… And that’s so typical for all that they were doing, so amateur».
STAYING UNDERCOVER
«If I had a feeling that I was doing something top-secret, for a top-secret organization, a big and powerful one that’s into serious business, and if I knew they would punish me for getting in their way, I wouldn’t be talking to you».
EVGENY PRIGOZHIN, «PUTIN’S MATE»
«Turns out he is a man of many talents, so diverse. A very versatile man. But I only knew him in his capacity of our boss, our lead, whatever it was he was to us… the guy that pays us cash, there. And then I heard mention of the word “chef”, don’t know what to make of it, is he really a chef? Can he cook? All I knew was that this wonderful man was paying me money, I hold nothing against him, he’s never been bad to me».
GETTING FIRED
«Working at the “factory„ wasn’t something Alan enjoyed doing. He openly admits to cheating: he would come to his shifts prepared. He would get some comments ready in advance that fitted his topic, and once at work, he would just copy-paste these into the right forums and discussions. For 4 months they all thought of him as the best employee on his team. But then the bosses got to the bottom of his cheating and asked Alan to leave.
«Have you seen this meme about the troll factory, with all these people sitting around in black helmets and masks, Putin’s portrait and the Russian flag in the background, and they are all so tense. Well, with us it was the exact opposite: we would have real mess at nights, do all sorts of crazy shit, just like you would expect from a bunch of 20-year-olds who like to have fun and know what a funny place they’ve ended up in.
They noticed that this one shift I whizzed through my workload way too quickly, getting it all done just 30 minutes before going home. They had a look at how I managed to get it done that fast, and they saw that I was really good at "ctrl+c"/"ctrl+v", so they called me in for a chat the next day. I don’t know what went on after that. The six months that I was there it was all more like a parody, a buffoon fest. Some postmodernism in the making. Postmodernism, Dadaism, and surrealism».
