If I’d known all it took to flush out the Russian Adnow bots and their ruble-hungry, crypto-starved attack dogs was a little dig at JD Vance, I’d have done it ages ago. I had a blast the other day blocking and reporting the living daylights out of every useful idiot and Russian bot on X—pure chaos, pure fun. But let’s peel back the curtain on this greasy Russian propaganda machine and see how it ticks.
The Kremlin’s disinformation game is a well-oiled beast, honed over decades. Take a trip back to Kennedy’s assassination—right after the bastard got plugged, the KGB was already churning out rumors that the CIA did it. Check Active Measures (2020) by Thomas Rid if you want the dirty details. Then came their 1983 hit, Operation Infektion, a masterstroke of bullshit where they planted the idea that HIV was cooked up by the Yanks at Fort Detrick. They fed the lie to an Indian rag called Patriot via a nameless “scientist” interview. The story snowballed, picked up by gullible Western outlets, until 1992 when SVR boss Yevgeny Primakov—whoops—let slip in a rare truth-bomb that it was all KGB fiction. Infektion was their training wheels for today’s antivax lunacy and COVID-denial clownery, plus a crash course in exploiting distrust and dumbassery to push conspiracies—like denying climate change while the planet chokes.
Influence agents have been their MVPs. Take André Ulmann, editor-in-chief of La Tribune des Nations. For 24 years, this schmuck spewed Soviet paradise propaganda and wild conspiracies, pocketing 3.5 million francs—about 4.5 million euros today—and even snagged a KGB medal. Imagine the cash they’re funneling now into bigger fish like Trump, Orbán, and their corrupt ilk. Then there’s Pierre-Charles Pathé, son of a French film mogul, recruited by the Soviets in 1961. With KGB bucks, he spawned fake publications and wrote under the alias Charles Morand in legit outlets like Libération and France Observateur. He peddled gems like “West Germans are just Hitler redux”—a tactic recycled to slap “Nazi” on Putin’s foes today—plus “France is under U.S. economic attack,” “NATO’s useless,” and “America’s a racist police state.” Sound familiar? French intel nabbed him in 1979, locked him up, but the poison stuck.
Another gem: Jean Clémentin, top dog at Le Canard Enchaîné. His dirty laundry didn’t air until 2022 when 1,500 secret docs got declassified. From 1957, he spent 12 years churning Soviet propaganda, dropping 300 notes, and running three “active measures.” He dodged jail when French intel’s 1973 tail job got splashed in the press—google the “les micros de Canard” scandal for the juicy bits. Election meddling? In 1974, the KGB went balls-out to stop François Mitterrand in France, per defector Ilia Dzirkvelov’s 1987 spill. Boris Ponomarev, a Soviet bigwig, decreed, “Any bourgeois politician beats a social-democrat or socialist for our interests,” so they rigged the press to crown Valéry Giscard d’Estaing. The Mitrokhin archive backs it up—backing right-wingers isn’t new. When Mitterrand finally won in 1983, he booted 47 KGB goons.
Fast-forward: skip the well-worn 2016 U.S. election meddling for Trump or Ukraine’s 2014 Maidan mess—let’s hit 2021. French influencer Leo Grasset blew the whistle on “Fazze,” a shady media outfit trying to recruit him. His script? Push that Pfizer’s vaccine kills triple the rate of AstraZeneca’s, play the “concerned citizen,” hint at mainstream censorship, and let suckers connect the dots—all for up to 50 grand, off-the-books, screwing YouTube and Facebook rules. With hundreds of thousands of followers, he smelled a rat and exposed it. Others, like Everson Zoio with 12 million fans, admitted taking the cash to parrot the line. Ring any bells—like Romania 2024 with Călin Georgescu?
Fazze vanished from its London digs at 5 Percy Street, but its digital stink led to Adnow, another outfit at the same address, cooked up in 2014 by Russian Stanislav Fesenko. Real HQ? Moscow, where hundreds of trolls rake in 340 euros a month to spew garbage. Behind Adnow lurks 2Wtrade, run by Yulia Serebryanskaia, a Putin-circle journo. Percy Street also hosts Always Efficient LLP, a crypto scam tied to BTC-e and unmasked as a front for GRU’s Fancy Bear hackers—yep, the 2016 U.S. election crew. Bellingcat (10/01/2019) pegged them to money laundering too. Adnow’s fingerprints are all over Georgescu’s Romania campaign last year.
This bot-farm-plus-useful-idiots-plus-influencers racket is a bastard to counter—even fancy social media algorithms can’t keep up. Platforms would need to team up, actually want to (fat chance, it’s lost revenue), and state agencies would have to piece the puzzle together. So far, it’s a shitshow—just look at the bot-and-idiot avalanche lately. Cue Musk and Zuck whining that controls are “censorship” and choke free speech. Nah, mates—controls hit their wallets and might spotlight cozy ties to hostile anti-democracy creeps. Tough luck.
So here we are, knee-deep in Russian troll piss, laughing and blocking while the machine grinds on. Next time you spot a bot, give it a middle finger for me—cheers to that.
Ink And Reason 