Your money or your life Why did the Kremlin orchestrate a nationally televised property dispute and ensure the ruling went against an elderly fraud victim?
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In March 2025, a Moscow district court did what Russian courts usually do: it sided with the seller in a real estate dispute. Larisa Dolina — a celebrated pop singer, now a septuagenarian — had been conned out of 287 million rubles ($4 million) by scam artists posing as federal agents who convinced her that selling her home and transferring away her savings were necessary to protect her assets and catch the men trying to steal them. The court nullified the sale of her Moscow apartment under a civil code provision protecting those who act under significant misunderstanding. The ruling was consistent with legal precedent in Russia, but what the Supreme Court did next was not.
In December 2025, Russia’s Supreme Court moved at record speed, reversing the lower courts in an open session with unusually intense national press coverage. The decision to overturn the earlier verdicts and award the apartment to Dolina’s buyer came just three months after former Prosecutor General Igor Krasnov joined the bench as chief justice. In an updated edition of his book on private life and ownership (published in Russian by Meduza’s imprint and excerpted on our site this week), journalist Maxim Trudolyubov examines what the Dolina case reveals about private property — and why the story became so prominent.
The Supreme Court’s ruling against Larisa Dolina looks like a rare moment of popular will prevailing in a Russian courtroom. Trudolyubov cites widespread condemnation of Dolina personally and surveys showing that roughly 90 percent of respondents sided with good-faith buyers even when sellers had been deceived into parting with their homes. But he argues that the public conversation about the case was neither spontaneous nor grassroots.
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Together, national news outlets and flagship talk shows seized the story early on and built a narrative with two stock characters: the scheming seller feigning incapacity, and the blameless younger buyer left holding nothing. TV networks framed it as a crisis for property law — though the actual number of defrauded buyers nationwide, Trudolyubov notes, likely runs to only a few hundred.
The scam’s effectiveness, Trudolyubov argues, rests on a feature of Russian political culture. In societies marked by high deference to, fear of, and expectation of the state, invoking state authority is an especially potent form of manipulation — and Russians have been conditioned to believe the authorities are all-seeing and capable of acting on their behalf, even when daily life offers little evidence of either.
The Kremlin understands this, Trudolyubov argues. State media were deployed so aggressively, and the Supreme Court hearing staged so publicly, because what was at stake — owning an apartment — is a defining life achievement in Russia and proof that a person has built a stable life and secured a future. He traces the significance through centuries of Russian history, from peasant allotments under the tsars and Soviet-era housing assignments to the urban apartment that emerged as private property after 1991.
With the Dolina case, the Kremlin reaffirmed its promise to maintain conditions for honest transactions and the relative stability of formal property rights, in exchange for citizens accepting limited autonomy. These guarantees have their limits. Truly powerful players can take property, and political disloyalty can trigger confiscation. The state promises neither affordable credit nor a favorable economic climate. But it will protect your home, probably.
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