Remembering Jovan Savović, creator of the invite-only sites Dirty and Leprosorium, which gave the RuNet ‘Preved’ and popularized writing Russian in deliberate misspellings. He was 43.

Web designer and IT entrepreneur Yovan Savovich died at 43 after a long illness. According to people close to him, he had multiple sclerosis. Savovich is best known as the creator of the Leprozorium and of Dirty, one of the first collective blogging platforms on the Russian-language internet. It’s fair to say he was one of the people whose projects shaped Runet before the age of social media. Meduza looks back at what Savovich will be remembered for.

Savovich was born in 1982 in Sarajevo, the capital of Bosnia and Herzegovina, which was then part of Yugoslavia. He first arrived in Moscow in 1991, at the height of the August coup attempt — an experience he later recalled in an interview:

The war led the Savovich family to move permanently to another country. “My mother was an interpreter, and I moved with her from Yugoslavia to the Soviet Union, and then both Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union ceased to exist, and we just stayed,” he said.

By the end of fourth grade, Savovich had mastered Russian. He went on to enroll at Moscow State University’s School of Computational Mathematics and Cybernetics before continuing his studies at the university’s School of Journalism.

In November 2001, Savovich launched Dirty, an invitation-only collective blog that anyone could read. It hosted everything from news and long-form writing to funny pictures and links to interesting material.

The platform had rules about what could be published. Three years later, it created a private section called the Leprozorium for users who broke them. Three years after that, the section became a site of its own, even more closed off and “elite” than Dirty. Lepra, as the site came to be known, still requires an invitation to register — even for readers.

In a 2017 interview with the Russian news outlet Bumaga, Savovich said he had never set out to grow his platforms’ audience:

Both Dirty and Lepra built loyal followings, but their closed nature meant neither site ever reached a mass audience. One Dirty presentation put the community at about 100,000 members by 2013, the year the site drew 5.7 million unique visitors. By April 2014, the Leprozorium had around 65,000 registered users.

Even so, the two sites had an enormous influence on all of Runet. They popularized “Olbanian” (Russian written with deliberate misspellings) and gave rise to “Preved!” — the meme that took off in the second half of the 2000s. And they’re the sites to thank for countless photoshopped images on every topic of the day.

Savovich founded the company Futurico back in 2004, and it eventually owned all of his projects, among them Dirty, Lepra, and the Blogistan cafe, which opened in 2010 and lasted only about a year.

Savovich joined Yandex in April 2018 as a product manager for the content platform Yandex Zen, where he helped develop communication tools and, as the company put it, “brought a lot of ideas to that work.” He didn’t stay long — by December of the following year, he had quit for personal reasons. “Now I’m going to get married, go on vacation, and start something completely new. More or less in that order — I’ll keep you posted,” he said of his departure.

A message announcing Savovich’s death appeared on the Dirty website on August 20, 2026. “His young heart couldn’t bear the weight of existence,” it said. The exact cause of death is not known. “He had been sick for a very long time, but he held on until the end,” people close to Savovich told the Russian state news agency RIA Novosti. The Russian Telegram channel Mash, citing people close to Savovich, reported that he had multiple sclerosis.

Savovich occasionally mentioned his health problems in interviews, without elaborating:

In April of this year, Savovich posted a video on Facebook that showed him in a wheelchair; in the comments, he said it was “temporary.” A few days ago, he shared a hospital photo on his Telegram channel that his wife, Anastasia Zabrodina, had posted. Another photo in the comments shows an intravenous catheter.

Yuri Sinodov, a journalist at the outlet Roem.ru, wrote that he met with Savovich last September. “He’d been diagnosed with multiple sclerosis long before that, and on that particular day he wasn’t walking and was getting around in a wheelchair,” Sinodov wrote. Savovich still did not have Russian citizenship at that point, according to Sinodov, but he wanted it to access the country’s mandatory health insurance system. Whether he ever did is unknown.

Dirty and Lepra are both still running in 2026, even though users now have plenty of other, far more popular places to trade memes and post their own material. Savovich himself never saw that as a problem:

Dirty’s users remember Savovich fondly. For some, his projects opened up a new way of seeing Runet; for others, they were the very first websites they ever visited.

“In 2003, d3.ru became the first page on the internet that I bookmarked to read. I’ve been coming here almost every day, for more than ten years now — to my own blog. I have the site’s creator, Yovan Savovich, to thank for that habit. Yesterday, he passed away. A deep bow and eternal rest to the master,” one member of the community wrote.