Team Navalny uncovers Russia’s ‘most classified people’ Property registered to state officials is disappearing on paper after years of recordkeeping tricks

Working abroad in exile, Alexey Navalny’s team of researchers has released a new investigative report revealing that Russia’s Federal State Register has completely hidden from the country’s Unified State Register of Real Estate all records pertaining to the property holdings of several high-ranking government officials, Federal Security Service officers, and their families. The findings, presented by Maria Pevchikh and Georgy Alburov, were published on Navalny’s website, which is now blocked inside Russia.

Navalny’s researchers have been tracking efforts to obscure the wealth of Russia’s senior elite for years. In 2016, the team learned that then Attorney General Yuri Chaika’s sons, Artem and Igor, had re-registered real estate in the Federal State Register under “LSDU3 and YFYAU9” instead of their real names. These “encrypted” owners were later changed to the phrase “No Value” before being restored to the Chaikas in November 2020. Other prominent officials and their families have registered their property under the phrases “Individual” and “Russian Federation.”

More recently, data for property owned by “the most classified people in the country” have started disappearing altogether from Russia’s Federal State Register. The apartments, houses, and land plots still exist, but you wouldn’t know it, based on the updated public records. Team Navalny says it managed to identify these twilight zones by comparing the current data to its own accumulated archives and then working backwards where records suddenly vanished.

In their investigation, Navalny’s researchers listed more than a dozen people whose real estate was removed from the federal registry, including several FSB agents allegedly involved in the attempt on Navalny’s life in August 2020, such as Oleg Tayakin (suspected of coordinating the operation) and FSB Special Equipment Center director Vladimir Bogdanov (the supposed “poisoner team leader”). Property once registered to another five FSB agents tied to the poisoning is now owned by “Russian Federation.”

Other prominent figures whose real estate has disappeared from Russia’s Federal State Register:

• former Prime Minister Viktor Zubkov
• former Interior Minister Rashid Nurgaliev
• Alexander Kolokoltsev, son of current Interior Minister Vladimir Kolokoltsev
• former head of the Moscow City Court Olga Egorova
• Federal Tourism Agency director Zarina Doguzova
• Marianna Ushakova, daughter of former FSB deputy head Vyacheslav Ushakov
• Anastasia Zadorina, daughter of FSB Support Service head Mikhail Shekin
• Yulia Kupryazhkina, daughter of State Secretary — FSB Deputy Director Alexander Kupryazhkin
• Marina Saushkina, daughter of FSB Scientific and Technical Service head Andrei Fetisov
• Tatyana Menshchikova, daughter of FSB Counterintelligence Service head Vladislav Menshchikov
• Nadezhda Khoreva, wife of Andrey Khorev, advisor to chairman of the board of Gazprombank, former head of MVD economic security department
• Lyudmila Popova, mother of Moscow Prosecutor Denis Popov

It’s unclear on what grounds these records disappeared, but a law adopted in December 2020 could explain the vanishings. That legislation permitted the concealment of personal information about anyone working in Russia’s judicial, law enforcement, regulatory, or military sectors, including data about their close relatives. The law requires any “personal data operators” (including the Federal State Register) to ensure the confidentiality of these records.