Theft, mistresses, and U.S. passports: The double lives of the Russian MPs building a “digital GULAG” while preaching “traditional values”

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Sergei Boyarsky: A faithful family man and his mistresses

The head of the Duma’s information policy committee, Sergei Boyarsky, built his political career thanks to the networking help of his father, iconic Soviet-era actor Mikhail Boyarsky. In the 1990s, the actor’s family lived in the same building as then-mayor of St. PetersburgAnatoly Sobchak, and the young Sergei was the first boy whom future socialite Ksenia Sobchak kissed. “Serezha timidly put his hand on my knee, and I liked it,” she recalled in a 2010 interview.

Today, Boyarsky and Sobchak are together again: the MP has proposed labeling critics of the state-backed messaging app Max as “foreign agents,” while Sobchak urges her 1.5 million Telegram followers to switch to the new Russian platform.

Sergei Boyarsky supports blocking not only messaging apps operating beyond Kremlin authorities’ control, but also films that discredit the values of a “strong family.” According to the legislator, “Family is the most important thing in any person’s life. For the sake of our relatives and loved ones we are ready to do anything. We all greatly value the warmth of family comfort and cherish family traditions.”

And yet, after obtaining access to civil registry data, The Insider found that in June 2024 Boyarsky divorced his wife, Yekaterina — a development that appears to have been connected to the fact that a different woman gave birth to sons of Boyarsky’s in December 2020 and May 2024. The children’s mother is listed in documents as Oksana Maslova, whom Boyarsky has known since at least 2015, when they traveled together on vacation to Spain. All those years, the deputy remained officially married and promoted family values, which he claimed required censorship to protect.

The Insider established that two apartments in St. Petersburg were purchased in Maslova’s name, with a combined value of 85.5 million rubles ($1.1 million) — one in the Skandi Klubb residential complex in 2017, and the other in the Botanica residential complex in 2021. Her own income in the year before the most recent purchase amounted to only 663,000 rubles (just over $8,500).

Boyarsky owns three old family apartments — on St. Petersburg’s central Nevsky Prospekt and on the Moika River Embankment — that are now valued at a combined 220 million rubles ($2.85 million). His children from his marriage to Yekaterina own a 179-square-meter apartment in the Paradny Kvartal residential complex.

“The national flag is something that, at the sight of it, the heart of a Russian person, a citizen of our vast, great Motherland, will be wrapped in awe and warmth wherever he may be,” Boyarsky wrote on Telegram in August 2023 while vacationing in Turkey despite a public campaign against lawmakers taking trips abroad. “United Russia MPs spent their vacation tracking the implementation of the national program,” members of Boyarsy’s party claimed at the time.

Fans of going abroad

Information policy committee member Marina Kim backed the restrictions on Telegram, justified a ban on making calls in WhatsApp, and urged that children be “protected” from the American gaming platform Roblox. Notably, however, in 2016 the future MP explained in a promotional video how her two daughters had been born in the United States. The Insider was able to confirm that fact: one of Kim’s daughters was born in 2014 in Los Angeles, while her second daughter was born in 2016 in Miami.

Miami is a “corner of paradise,” and the United States has “the best level of medicine in the world,” Kim said before she became one of Vladimir Putin’s official campaign representatives, a host on the Solovyov Live propaganda channel, and a State Duma MP from the party “A Just Russia — Patriots — For Truth.” Now, unsurprisingly , she does not like America and maintains that the West should learn from Russia.

Lawmaker Alexander Yushchenko has already been the subject of an investigation by The Insider. We previously found that he staged a sham divorce, listing property located on the shore of Lake Como under the name of his “ex” wife while filing official asset declarations.

The parliamentarian denied the accusations. But now, thanks to a leak of border service data, The Insider can confirm that Yushchenko repeatedly flew to Italy together with his “former” wife.

Additionally, Artyom Yushchenko, the 25-year-old son of the patriotic lawmaker, is not opposed to spending time in Europe. Since 2022, he has crossed Russia’s land border with Estonia and Finland, and was also in Switzerland.

The daughter of another information policy committee member, Oleg Matveychev, has settled in Switzerland as well. Matveychev himself, meanwhile, uses his partner for illegal enrichment. Matveychev is known as a political strategist for the United Russia party, but his private business dealings are less visible: using his secret wife Natalya Evseeva to funnel out money that his foundation receives from the Moscow mayor’s office.

Before he was put under sanctions, Matveychev liked traveling around Europe — as did his committee colleague Yevgeny Popov, who, as The Insider found, recently acquired a mansion in an elite residential area outside Moscow.

Sanctions hit Popov’s foreign travel habits hard. Before the restrictions, he made multiple trips to Austria, Latvia, Poland, the United States, Germany, France, the United Kingdom, the Czech Republic, Belgium, Spain, Sweden, Hungary, Italy, Lithuania, Norway, Switzerland, and Cyprus.

Secret business interests

The father of IT committee chairman Sergei Boyarsky, Mikhail Boyarsky, is known as a lover of vodka, and Sergei Boyarsky’s first deputy on the committee, Anton Gorelkin, is linked to the vodka business.

Gorelkin’s wife heads Siberian Trading House JSC (АО «Сибирский Торговый Дом»), an asset of the family of another lawmaker, Pavel Fedyaev. The holding produces vodka under the brands “Siberian” and “Yarich,” among multiple others.

Property worth hundreds of millions of rubles has been linked to Gorelkin. When taking a break from his fight for state censorship, Gorelkin likes to vacation in Dubai. Since 2022, he has been to the UAE at least six times, despite MPs promising not to visit foreign resorts during the so-called “special military operation.”

Another of Gorelkin’s colleagues in the drive for a “digital GULAG,” Andrei Svintsov, registered a stake in BK LLC (ООО «БК») in his wife’s name. The company is the official developer of the elite “Reki” residential complex.

Svintsov’s wife, Marina Romakhina, is also involved in a business of her own: she paints portraits of presidents, sheikhs, prime ministers, and lawmakers. Among her better known works are portraits of Vladimir Putin and of Russia’s Communist Party leader Gennady Zyuganov.

There is also a security services officer on the IT committee. Anton Nemkin graduated from the FSB Academy with a specialty in “Computers, complexes, systems, and networks,” and he worked in the security services after completing his studies.

Nemkin and his closest relatives own IT companies that, among other things, created the domestic messenger Serafim. Nemkin is also linked to the Vladex crypto exchange.

Another committee member, Vyacheslav Petrov, also has his own interests in the IT business. His business is controlled by his relatives.

Petrov attempted to explain the logic behind the restrictions: “You often hear that we must fight in the information war — that we should not shut down Facebook and Instagram, but spread the truth there with the help of our talented bloggers. However, the reality is that fighting on the enemy’s information platforms is the same as playing against a card sharp with marked cards.”