A Girl on the Run
How a Russian-born New Zealander became Putin’s warrior on YouTube
Before becoming a YouTube star with ninety thousand followers, Inessa Sinchougova lived a normal life in New Zealand. But she never forgot that foremost she is Russian.
She was born in 1987 in Akademgorodok, the scientific center of Siberia. During the Soviet era, the town was home to sixty-five thousand top Russian scientists, representing wide-ranging fields, including high-energy physics, genetics, economics, sociology, and agricultural science.
The collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 left everyone struggling. Everything stopped. Research centers and hospitals closed down. The ruble lost value practically overnight. Thousands and thousands of people left, among them Inessa’s parents, an agronomist and a teacher. They decided on New Zealand, a country that nine-year-old Inessa had never heard of. It was 1996. No one ever asked her if she wanted to leave.
On the first day of school, she cried and wanted to go home. Russian was the only language she knew, and she had difficulty communicating with her class- mates. Once she learned English, she stopped feeling like an outsider and began to blend in. Today, it’s rare for people to pick up on her barely noticeable accent.
In 2010, Inessa received her BA degree in political science from Victoria University of Wellington. She was interested in politics and after school, she stayed in the city and interned at the New Zealand Parliament. Eventually, she moved on to marketing. For seven years, she worked as an advertising manager in an environmental management company. She promoted technologies reutilizing and conserving water, selling them to city councils.
In those days, Inessa didn’t have a fixed opinion on Russian politics. Both of her parents were Putin supporters, but Inessa herself observed the Russia leader with suspicion. She thought he would be like other politicians; he would fill his pockets and leave.
It all changed in August 2008, with the brief but significant Russian-Georgian war. The conflict took place in South Ossetia, the Georgian-controlled, self- proclaimed republic, where Russian separatists had demanded independence since the fall of the Soviet Union.
On New Zealand TV, Inessa saw news segments that portrayed Russia as the invader, a provocation that Putin had been planning for months. In print she read much of the same. “Both sides are to blame for the Russian-Georgian war, but it ran according to a Russian plan,” the Economist said of the conflict. “President Bush chided Russia for Cold War–style behavior in its territorial conflict with Georgia, accusing it of ‘bullying and intimidation, as international pressure grew on Moscow to withdraw its troops from the region,” CNN reported.
Even though it was unclear who was responsible for the first shots, the Western media rallied on one side. As Inessa saw it, these media outlets portrayed Georgia as a tiny country dreaming about NATO member- ship and in need of defending from big, imperialist Russia.
But when Inessa explored Russian-language news sources she found a completely different account of the conflict. It was as if there were two parallel realities. She discovered that in fact it had been the Georgian troops (supported by American money, military equipment, and advisors) who had first opened fire in Ossetia. Putin had responded with heavy artillery, and, before long, Russian tanks were in Georgia.
Inessa liked how Putin “put people in their place,” she told me during a Skype interview in January 2018. For the first time since he had come to power in 1999, she understood that, unlike previous leaders, this man had a long-term plan for Russia.
A couple of years later, in 2012, Inessa had a chance to travel to Russia. She visited her hometown of Akademgorodok for the first time since she had left.
It seemed to her a miracle. The town was once again teeming with scientists. Three hundred new companies had been founded between 2011 and 2015 alone, creating nine thousand new jobs. In 2004, Putin had visited India’s tech hub, Bangalore, and, inspired by what he saw, decided to repeat Bangalore’s success in Akademgorodok. The town was once again on its way to being a technological powerhouse, this time focused on start-ups. Sibnet (a mobile browser), Optiplane (developing unmanned aerial vehicles), 2GIS (a mapping app), and numerous other IT companies providing tech and engineering resources had set up headquarters there.
Inessa felt moved by the sharp differences she saw be- tween the impoverished Russia she had left behind as a nine- year-old and the resurgent Russia she visited fifteen years later. Her admiration for the Russian president deepened.
“I’m not saying it’s all due to one person,” she said.“ But I left a country that was a shithole. And the differences I found, when I got back, were extraordinary.”
Inessa returned to New Zealand, to her life — to hanging out with friends, to her cute little dog, to partying and being a big Rihanna fan. On social media, the earliest evidence of her engagement in politics are images of a demonstration against the Trans- Pacific Partnership she attended in August 2015 in Auckland.
Inessa liked her job but was bored with the routine: waking up at 6:20 am every day and sitting in traffic. Meeting with city council members and discussing new water technologies. Going back home, watching the 6 pm news in her bedroom. Whenever the news- casters talked about Russia, Inessa felt frustrated.
“Either I’m crazy, or they’re crazy,” she kept thinking to herself.
One night, on September 23, 2015, she felt so fed up with “some rubbish they were saying in the news” that she opened her computer and made a video.
She picked a fragment from the 2014 Russian Annual Press Conference, in which Putin, responding to a question by BBC journalist John Simpson, talks about tensions between Russia and the West. He points out that the US military budget is ten times bigger than Russia’s, asking, “Who is the real aggressor here?” Inessa added English subtitles to the clip, titled it “Does anyone even listen to us?” and posted it on YouTube. Her username was “Inessa S” — just her first name and initial, like the convention in the European media for identifying crime suspects and victims.
To her surprise, people watched the Putin video. So, two days later, she went ahead and made another, this time about the conflict in Syria. In the clip, made from footage of the 2014 Valdai International Discussion Club meeting, Putin suggests that the US benefits more than any other world player from the presence of ISIS in Iraq and Syria. She titled it: “Putin: Who created ISIS?”
A few days later, a Facebook friend informed her that the video was going viral. It had even been shared by progressive feminist Naomi Wolf, who called Inessa’s video a “jaw- dropper” and pointed out that Putin’s critique of the US is accurate. Within a month, the video had one million views.
—
YouTube is a bizarre universe filled with low-resolution cat videos, inadvertently recorded accidents, and teenagers twerking in the solitude of their bedrooms. It’s where high schoolers graduate and where toddlers make their first steps. It is a Mecca for unfulfilled divas who find there the ultimate thrill of singing in the privacy of their rooms and being exposed to the whole world at the same time.
YouTube is amateur by definition, and when, in 2006, stars like Oprah started opening their own channels, users were outraged. They preferred the savvy, homegrown five-minute tutorial for anything: Kim Kardashian’s smoky eyes, vegan chia pudding, decluttering a hard drive. Over time, YouTube has become a magnet for conspiracy theories and semiprofessional political commentary. While the political left seems to be absorbed with the poetics of Twitter’s character limitations, the US right-wing relies on YouTube’s visual directness.
The alt-right YouTube landscape is dominated by white men; long, loud monologues; bright colors; and titles screaming in all-caps. There’s the immortal Alex Jones, a beloved American right-wing radio host and conspiracy theorist, and the young face of InfoWars, Paul Joseph Watson. There’s the faceless Black Pigeon Speaks, mansplaining how diversity destroys social cohesion in the West.
Steven Crowden from Canada (1.4 million subscribers) tries to be the Jon Stewart of the right, mixing comedy and politics while yelling at his audience from his half-bar-half-studio. His countryman, Lauren Sauthern (461,000 followers), defends family values and the importance of religion against the threat of immigrants, who would destroy those values, and the far left, who doesn’t recognize those values to begin with. Mark Dice (1.2 million subscribers) specializes in making angry comments and angry faces alongside liberal news clips.
Some right-wingers are on YouTube for the money; some love the attention; others seem genuinely crazy. They have clearly defined enemies who they target or laugh at: the mainstream media, political correctness, social justice warriors, and“snowflakes,”i.e., anyone who is easily offended, too fragile to hear a word of truth, and in a need of “safe spaces”(in other words, which in their mind amount to being a liberal).
YouTube is also a place for play-acting, for pretending to be a savvy consumer, a brilliant survival- ist, or, in the case of politics, a brave and independent voice. It’s also a place to put on masks: of the more famous, the more outspoken, the more powerful.
—
Encouraged by the success of her first two videos, Inessa started to release a new clip every few days. Her third video was titled “Putin on how McCain lost his mind,” a 2011 monologue in which Putin explains that America doesn’t want partners; it wants vassals. He gets so worked up, he bangs on the desk with two fingers folded in a threatening gesture. The anti-Russia hawk John McCain is mentioned late in the video; according to Putin, the US senator had lost his mind while sitting in a hole as a captive in the Vietnam War.
The fourth video, “Islamic Legion’s Pledge to Putin,” shows the Chechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov walking around a stadium full of soldiers. He walks slowly, and as he does so the camera captures hundreds and hundreds of Chechen warriors standing at the ready with their guns. Kadyrov says his people are prepared to go and fight whenever Putin sends them. The video ends with disturbing close-ups of various military equipment Kadyrov has at his disposal. The video is frightening, as it is meant to be, and within the context of Inessa’s other videos it too serves as a kind of pledge: some people offer their weapons to Putin, while others can promise their YouTube channels. The video has received 40,000 views.
To create her videos, Inessa has from the first used content from traditional media sources, including snippets from Russian public TV and the RT network, a Russian international television network funded by the Russian government. To these excerpts she has added her own elements (typically subtitles), changing them, technically, into derivative works. This is what makes her posts legal. But her videos take a long time to make. First, she has to select the fragment. This means watching any number of Putin speeches to find the best quote. Often it takes her two hours to just find and cut a few minutes from a large news conference.
At first, Inessa seemed fully devoted to what one might call her “best of Putin” project, with the occasional clip of Gaddafi, or, for example, a video proving Putin’s in- dependence from the Illuminati. She never appeared in her videos. But in August 2016, after multiple online allegations of being a “Kremlin-dungeon troll” or a “hairy guy,” as she later told me, she put herself in front of the cam- era in what is now the introduction video to her channel.
In the video, titled “Girls don’t care about politics,” Inessa appears for the first time with her pretty face, long blonde hair, and full pink lips. She explains her motivation for her channel — she wants to counter incorrect perceptions of Russia’s foreign policy — and asserts that hers is a one-woman show. At one point, she jokingly turns the camera around to prove that Putin is not in her apartment.
In the video, she explains that this is a “quick” clarification and a shout-out to her fans, since she’s “never really intended for any of it” (the channel is “a mistake, or a coincidence” of some sort, she says). Then suddenly, after expressing her gratitude to her fans, Inessa addresses the problem of “crazy people on YouTube” (of course, not “you guys, who subscribed, and follow and want to listen to what I have to say in regard to my point of view”). She expresses no patience for her trolls who “lose their shit” on her channel, and says she deletes their comments. The outburst is unexpected coming from someone who has seemed on every other occasion to be in control of her situation. But she also seems to been joying it.
“Sit down, because I’m just going to block you,” she says, her voice rising. She threatens to remove their opinions from her website. “What, are you fucking retarded?,” she demands.
Inessa then expresses concern that she doesn’t have more female subscribers. She would like to see both genders watching her videos, not that she doesn’t appreciate her male fans, “each and every one of them” (wink, smile).
With time, Inessa has taken an increasingly editorializing stance. The titles of her clips have become more and more provocative: “Putin vows to ‘choke’ NATO in WWIII” and “BBC journo interrupts Putin — gets put right back in place!” are the names of videos she’s made in late 2016 and early 2017.
If you look up anything Putin-related on YouTube, you will encounter one of Inessa’s videos almost immediately. So far, Inessa has made 160 videos with titles like “Putin visiting his brother’s grave,” “How Putin raised the natural birth rate,” and “Will Putin take back Alaska?” She has watched so many clips of Putin, studied his body language and all his gestures, that by now she feels that she knows him. In the past few months, as research for this article, I have spent a lot of time watching Russia’s president speak, as translated by Inessa. At first, I was impressed — he appeared willing to explain the eternal misunderstanding between Russia and the West, to negotiate solutions, and to demonstrate that Russia follows the international law to the letter. With time, however, I began to notice certain rhetorical patterns.
Inessa’s most popular video so far is “PUTIN handles corruption LIKE A BOSS,” a compilation of fragments of Putin calmly bullying and humiliating people, typically Russian officials. The video features what seems to be his signature move: posing one rhetorical question after another for several minutes nonstop (no one ever dares to interrupt) before asking his interlocutors, again rhetorically, if they have lost their minds. As of this writing, the video has more than seven million views.
One of the funniest (and scariest) clips is titled “Putin’s death stare: snoozing officials poop pants.” Courtesy Inessa, Western audiences can glimpse the spontaneous exchange between Putin and his deputy finance minister, Andrei Ivanov, on “why the transition to a ruble tariff calculation [from the dollar] has not yet taken place.” It starts with Putin suddenly stopping his monologue and posing a question. Ivanov either hasn’t been listening or is too terrified to answer. He pleads with the president, promising to up- date him soon. Meanwhile Putin drags out the embarrassing situation, obviously enjoying himself (452,000 views).
It was only after six months of posting videos every few days that Inessa realized that YouTube members each have an AdSense account that accrues payments from advertisers. When she finally logged in to her account, she was surprised and delighted to find that she had made a substantial amount of money. This discovery changed her life circumstances.
—
Inessa’s rise to YouTube stardom as an interpreter and promoter of Vladimir Putin, who does things “LIKEA BOSS,” had won her fans but apparently lost her some friends: in an end-of-year message on Facebook in late 2015, she thanked everyone who had not defriended her because of her political beliefs. But she had gained some new friends too.
A day after her debut on YouTube, Inessa’s video was featured by Fort Russ, a website based in Belgrade “with a focus on Eurasia.” A short while later, Inessa was contacted by Fort Russ’s founder, a Mexican-American journalist named Joaquin Flores, also based in Belgrade. He really liked Inessa’s videos and started to put them on his website regularly.
In October of 2016, Fort Russ released an English version of a short documentary by Anastasia Popova titled Expulsion: The Plight of Christianity in Syria (originally made for the Russian television channel Rossiia). Inessa is credited as one of its translators.
Over the next months, Inessa’s posts on Facebook became more and more political. In mid-December, she announced that she had quit her job. She spent January 2017 in Indonesia and February in Thailand. In March, she moved to Belgrade.
The same month, YouTube changed its policy, starting a war on alternative media, censoring politically controversial content (after some big advertisers suspended ads for videos containing hate speech). Inessa and YouTubers like her lost 80 percent of their revenue (videos being flagged as controversial are not being monetized). Inessa turned to crowdfunding on Patreon, a platform where creators (artists, musicians, YouTubers) can run a subscription content service. It has become an important source of her income. She also started to give interviews.
In March 2017, Inessa participated in an online conversation with two American expats in Ukraine: Russel “Texas” Bentley and David Stickney. Both men are veterans of the US Armed Forces. After leaving the army, Stickney started an IT company in Crimea and has since become a “journalist,” “countering the narrative propagated by the Western media,” as Inessa introduced him in a short essay below the interview. Bentley, a lumber- jack from Austin, describes himself as an “information warrior” based in Donetsk (one of the centers of the 2014 pro-Russian conflict in Ukraine) a soldier in the Novorossiya Army who financed his combat through crowdfunding websites. In the conversation, titled “Inside the Kremlin Troll Army,” Inessa, Bentley, and Stickney laugh about the idea of being paid by Putin, discuss the Kennedy assassination, and the pain of dealing with their respective trolls.
In another online interview, Inessa exchanged words of mutual admiration with Brittany Pettibone, a 25-year-old science-fiction writer turned alt-right activist. Brittany is, according to her YouTube channel, “an independent journalist and Catholic” with seventy- eight thousand followers. She loves Trump and fights against globalization and the Islamization of Europe.
In addition to her new online friends, she has also, as her Facebook feed makes clear, made IRL friends in Belgrade. Among them, Joaquin Flores is the most important.
Flores, who did work for the far-right Serbian Radical Party, also runs the Center for Syncretic Studies, which he started in Belgrade in 2014. The center is a “public geopolitical and ideological education institution” promoting alternative media, the Donbass Independence Movement, and the fight against American imperialism in Syria.
The center works closely with another Belgrade institution, Katehon, a right-wing Christian think tank aligned with Vladimir Putin. In December 2016, the New York Times reported that Katehon was a part of the information war during the 2016 US presidential election. Its president is Konstantin Malofeev, a Russian oligarch who is under the EU sanctions for financing Russian separatists in eastern Ukraine.
Another friend of Inessa’s is James Porrazzo, also an expat, the founder of the anti-globalization organization New Resistance. According to the Southern Poverty Law Center, Porrazzo is the former leader of the American Front, a white supremacist organization started in 1984 in San Francisco. After internal fights and the arrest of ten members of the American Frontin 2012, Porrazzo started a new group, called New Resistance, in Boston. His new Fourth Position ideology (an attempt to meld together revolutionary nationalists and ethnic separatists of all backgrounds with Communist holdouts and anti-Zionists) takes its name from Aleksandr Dugin’s book, The Fourth Political Theory. Dugin is a Russian far-right political theorist and Porrazzo’s favorite writer.
More Belgrade friends? Jafe Arnold is an author publishing on Fort Russ, as well as the Katehon and the Center for Syncretic Studies websites. In 2013, Tim Steller from the Arizona Daily Star reported on his conversation with Arnold, at the time a seventeen-year attendee at the local communist meeting in Tucson, Arizona, and “a student at St. Gregory College Preparatory School who comes from a line of Communists in a family of Polish and Russian descent.”
Another person in Inessa’s circle is Leonid Savin, a former chief editor of the Katehon site and magazine and currently a chief editor of Geopolitica.ru, a platform that “cooperates with Katehon Think Tank” and “follows the principles of the Fourth Political Theory.” One more? Paul Antonopoulos, a former Sydney academic and a pro- Assad deputy editor of Al-Masdar News forced to resign over racist comments and activity on Nazi site Stormfront.
They all hang out together, drinking, preparing meals, and babysitting each other’s pets. Currently, Inessa Sinchougova is listed as an editor and journalist at Fort Russ News and as a researcher and a translator for the Center for Syncretic Studies. She has also once featured at least on the Katehon website (French edition).
—
I contacted Inessa in January 2018, and she agreed to be interviewed over Skype. She was a bit late for our meeting because one of her lamps didn’t work and the lighting was off. She finally appeared on the screen with her hair done and in full makeup. I explained that I would only be recording audio.
During the interview, Inessa was friendly. I think we both felt that we had a lot in common — two Slavic girls, both born on May 27, living abroad and interested in politics. We talked about the importance of journalism in a complex world (despite that Inessa herself is not a journalist) and Inessa’s love of classical music, which is like meditation to her. Inessa expressed her regret that tickets for the Plácido Domingo concert in nearby Slovenia are so unrealistically expensive. She is uncertain about her future. She might go back to school, maybe political science at the University of Belgrade. Maybe a career in politics? For now, she enjoys the YouTube adventure, and if she needs to, she can always go back to marketing.
I can see Inessa in politics. She’s good looking, charismatic, and persuasive. At the same time, I worry about her. I was struck, in listening to her, by the fact that she doesn’t seem to understand that she has become a public person. Inessa thinks she’s being neutral, and I believe her when she says she’s not “a Russian troll working from a Kremlin dungeon.” (She told me she had never met Malofeev.) But it is likely that a troll, and probably more than a troll, in a Kremlin dungeon or more likely a Kremlin office, is aware of the popular videos put together by the mysterious Inessa S. Inessa started out posting her videos from her bedroom, and now she’s doing it in Belgrade with her new danger- ous friends, and eventually it’s not crazy to think that one day she’ll be doing it, or something like it, from Moscow.
As a Russian child growing up abroad, Inessa was confronted early with anti-Russian sentiment, stereotypes, and even contempt from the West. At the same time, her parents taught her to be proud of her country and her language. The tension between these two worlds could have been a source of great frustration for Inessa. As a Polish American, I understand this frustration all too well. But it must have been tougher on Inessa. While many Americans think that Poland is a part of Russia, I’m at least spared the rhetoric of Russia as the eternal bogeymen.
Introducing Putin’s words to a Western audience must have brought Inessa tremendous satisfaction, maybe even relief. With Putin’s mask on her face, she is fearless. His anger expresses her anger, becomes for her anger a kind of outlet — not an easy thing to find for pretty blondes with long lashes and big eyes. And this anger is being met with the mass approval of subscribers on YouTube. It’s hard to not get addicted to such a dynamic. With the right proportions of resentment, narcissism, and loneliness, it could happen to any of us.
Thanks to YouTube, now Inessa knows that she is right about Putin and Russia and that she was always right. Like she was right on who started the Russian-Georgian war (she was). Now she knows that there are two sides of the story and also which is the right one. Ninety thousand followers confirm her worldview. With each new subscriber, she is more and more correct. She is a diva, a keyboard warrior princess. Armed with Putin’s words, she attacks Russia’s enemies, bullies them, and humiliates them. Just like Putin is drunk with power, Inessa is drunk with the power of words.
Her most recent YouTube videos are dedicated to the new Russian technologies in the nuclear sphere. On March 1, 2018, Putin delivered his annual address to the Federal Assembly. In the two-hour-long presentation, he demonstrated how the new weapon would work with a simulation attack on what undoubtedly is North America. Inessa’s video was titled: “Nuclear words: Putin’s FINAL warning to the West.”
In early May, without explaining why, Inessa removed all the videos featuring her talking. That includes “Girls don’t like politics” and “Inside the Kremlin Troll Army.” Her interview with Brittany Pettibone, “Young Americans against Fake News,” is still available on Pettibone’s channel.
In an earlier version of the article, Joaquin Flores was described as “a member of the fascist Serbian Radical Party.” He claims that’s he’s not in fact a member and that the party is not “fascist.” The article has been emended to reflect this.
