Putin's personal chef owns a company that oversees an army of social media trolls [Flashback]

Business Insider - 2015 ^ | March 16, 2015 | by Viktor Rezunkov

[Oldeconomybuyer]

ST. PETERSBURG — Last May, Tatiana N decided she wanted a higher salary than the average journalist can expect. After responding to an advertisement in the popular HeadHunter job-search website, she became a Kremlin-paid Internet troll. Tatiana — who, like others interviewed for this story, asked that her last name not be used — worked out of a 2,500-square-meter warehouse in the suburbs of St. Petersburg.

The job paid 40,000 rubles a month, significantly more than the 25,000-30,000 most journalists make. But it came, she said, "with pain."

Tatiana joined a round-the-clock operation in which an army of trolls disseminated pro-Kremlin and anti-Western talking points on blogs and in the comments sections of news websites in Russia and abroad.

The operation, Internet Research, is financed through a holding company headed by President Vladimir Putin's "personal chef," Evgeny Prigozhin.

"So you write, write, write, from the point of view of anyone," Tatiana, 22, says.

"You could be [posing as] a housewife who bakes dumplings and suddenly decides: 'I have an opinion about what Putin said! And this action by Vladimir Vladimirovich saves Russia."

The roughly 400 employees work 12-hour shifts and are split into various departments. Some focus on writing up themes and assignments, others concentrate on commenting, and others work on graphics for social media.

[Oldeconomybuyer]

Indicted today by Muller and his progressive pro-Hillary henchmen.

[a fool in paradise]

How queer that such KGB activities among US labor, civil rights, and antiwar rallies are forgotten and supressed and current NeoCommunist organization of unrest in America is ignored.

[GoldenState_Rose]

Playing devil’s advocate here and will say: Trump, like many conservatives even on this board...and even I before living in Russia...spoke carelessly when he lent his praises to Vladimir Putin on the campaign trail.

Putin is NOT our friend and modern Russia in its current socio-psychological state can never be until big CHANGES occur there.

They are not the reason why Ohio, Pennsylvania, Florida, Wisconsin swung for Trump for him to win the election — but their anti-American propaganda and grip on global-historical narratives hold weight for conservatives disenchanted by Bush/ Obama. Just like Soviet revisionist narratives held weight for U.S. liberals in the Cold War exhausted by Vietnam and the like...

albeit to a lesser extent today.