The investigative website “Important Stories (iStories),” working with the Wikiganda project, has identified how almost a hundred members of Russia’s elite have been editing their biographies on both Russian and English versions of Wikipedia in an attempt to distance themselves from President Vladimir Putin and his so-called “special military operation (SVO)” by removing references to their [Russian] citizenship, property, sanctions and ties to the regime.
Wikiganda is a non-profit organization that monitors information manipulation in the online encyclopedia. They believe that Wikipedia, is fighting a never-ending “war of edits,” with the Russian-language version edited by more than 10,000 people and hundreds of thousands revising the English-language encyclopedia each month.
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At the same time, the Kremlin has been trying to get rid of Wikipedia by way of fines and public claims that the encyclopedia is publishing fake news about the “SVO” and trying to replace it with Russian versions: “Knowledge.Wiki” and the “Ruviki” platforms.
The iStories report gives examples of the lengths some of the top men in Moscow and beyond have gone to obscure their past.
It tells how in March 2024 the EU lifted sanctions against Arkady Volozh, co-founder of Yandex, in exchange for him resigning as CEO, selling his part of the business and publicly condemning the war. He now lives in Israel where he says on his website that he is a Kazakh-born Israeli technology entrepreneur. Wikiganda says that a Tel Aviv IP address has tried to remove references to his past on Wikipedia several times.
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Another example is entries relating to billionaire Dmitry Pumpyansky, owner of the Pipe Metallurgical Company, where attempts were made to remove information about EU and US sanctions against him as well as seizure of his 72-meter superyacht.
The biography of Igor Altushkin, founder of the Russian Copper Company, was sanitized to remove information about his properties in the UK and that of billionaire and State Duma deputy Andrei Skoch, was censored to remove reference to seizing of his $90 million personal plane and his alleged connections to the Solntsevskaya organized crime group, were removed.
Attempts have been made to clean up Wikipedia entries relating to the unsavory aspects of the personal lives of Putin’s daughters, Maria Vorontsova and Katerina Tikhonova.
Entries for Russian billionaire Alexander Mamut have been massaged to minimize his links to Russia describing him as a London-based entrepreneur with Israeli citizenship.
Even closer to Putin attempts have been made to remove reference to an investigation Alexei Navalny's Foundation for the Fight Against Corruption (FBK) into the luxurious lifestyle of Nikolai Choles, the son of the Kremlin press secretary Dmitry Peskov.
The iStories report lists dozens of Russian businessmen and apparatchiks who, having once played up their entries on the encyclopedia, now seem desperate to remove the evidence of their past.
The article quotes an expert on Wikipedia who says some of them may have never wanted an entry to be made but someone did and now they have to try to get control of the message. He says that many of the sanctions imposed by European officials used the Wikipedia entry as the starting point for their investigations.
A Wikipedia editor says that for those Russian businessmen who live (or want to live) in the West, they want to totally delete their articles. It can cost thousands of dollars to remove a Wikipedia article and then there is no guarantee that it will not reappear somewhere else sometime. In the meantime, these oligarchs and others will do their best to: “Be lower than the grass, quieter than water,” in terms of their Wiki profile as the iStories expert put it.
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