Anastasia Nemchenkova used to be a reasonably popular YouTube star, but she hasn’t posted anything to her account, TheNemnastia, in more than a year. Earlier this week, however, a new video briefly appeared on her channel promoting Moscow city’s “My Street” beautification project, featuring busty, glistening women doing remodeling work in a montage that recycles visuals from Benny Benassi’s infamous “Satisfaction” music video.
Nemchenkova told the website TJournal that she isn’t responsible for the “My Street” advertisement, insisting that hasn’t uploaded anything to her YouTube channel (where she has more than 13,000 subscribers) for more than a year. The Volgograd resident also says she’s been locked out of her YouTube account. “Apparently I’ve been hacked,” the 20-year-old woman told TJournal.
On August 7, Russian Twitter users first started noticing the video on Nemchenkova’s channel. In the 60-second clip, passersby stop to admire a team of construction workers — all scantily-clad, voluptuous women wielding power tools, performing remodeling work on a Moscow city street. The beginning of the video features quotes from Moscow Mayor Sergey Sobyanin, and it concludes with the hashtag/slogan “#MoscowBuilds to be beautiful.”
The video gained wide publicity in Russia after opposition politician Alexey Navalny tweeted about it on August 8, calling it “a video filmed by Sobyanin’s PR team in response to the general outrage about [Moscow’s] endless, absurd construction.” Navalny also accused the mayor’s office of buying traffic to inflate the video’s view count.
In less than a day, the video published on TheNemnastia attracted roughly 100,000 views. Just a few hours after Internet users noticed the video, however, it disappeared from YouTube without any explanation. If you really want to watch it, though, you can still find copies republished on Vkontakte and YouTube.