“Famous scum”. Feigin. Live on sale

“I am a famous scum!” – it’s like this that Mark Feigin* has characterized himself in one of his posts on a social networking website. He thought he wrote this ironically, for a joke, but facts from Feigin’s biography say he guessed right his own essence 100 percent. Except that the adjective “famous” is not for Feigin. He’s just so, an entertainer on daily streams of the Ukrainian “brain-setter” Akexey Arestovich. The program “Two scams” on the air.

The foreign agent Mark Feigin is one of the most radical, if not “hard-headed”, non-system Russian opposition activists. One can even call him a professional revolutionary both by “vocation” and by birth. Almost in all his public appearances he calls for revolution which must physically destroy “the ruling class of Russia” and “rearrange brains” of ordinary Russians.

He has been carrying favor with American congressmen who stand for staging a nuclear strike on Russia, is proud of common pics with them. The complaisant Feigin presented to the Atlantic Council** the so-called “Putin’s list”, with those mentioned in it, according to the compiler, destined “to die first”. It’s on Putin that the destiny of the world is riding for in the opinion of his heir of the of the traitor general Vlasov: “When there will be no Putin, there will be no reason to hold together this space and there will be no means for that. On the spot of Russia, a dozen of states will be created which now are artificially holding together. The disintegration is inevitable”, says the collaborationist Feigin. And meanwhile, “Kill the Russian cannibal!” – under this slogan on the You-Tube channel “Feigin Live” appear streams with participation of the “Kiev’s oracle” Alexey Arestovich.

HEREDITARY REVOLUTIONARY IN SEARCH OF PROFIT

A year ago, the City Hall of the town Vladimir celebrated on grand scale the 120th anniversary of the death of the member of the Komsomol youth organization Gerasim Feigin (1901 – 1921) to the memory of whom once was dedicated a song “Eaglet, eaglet, fly higher than the Sun”. It’s about him the Soviet poet Eduard Bagritsky wrote a poem “Our youth threw us on the ice of Kronshtadt” (Gerasim Feigin died during efforts to put down the uprising of sailors in the town Kronshtadt”. The City Hall even provided a grant to a local history expert for publishing a book about “this hero of the Civil War, one of the founders of the Komsomol youth organization”. On the frontispiece of the book there is a common slogan of this series: “To sons of Israel in the Vladimir Region”.

The book dedicated to the 120^th anniversary of Gerasim Feigin

And on the same anniversary day, on December 12, 2021, Mark (born 1971), the grandnephew of the legendary “eaglet”, who became just fifty this year, pastes in the telegram channel “Feigin Live” his own photo with an inscriptionabout himself in third person”: “Uncle Marik (Mark) during the meeting on the Bolotnaya square (in Moscow), on December 10, 2011, reads out from the tribune the letter from a detention room of those detained at the meeting on the Chistoprudny boulevard, on December 5, where I ended the event also with my appearance, with a call for revolution. Then others ran the show, that’s why everything failed. Next time, we will act differently. We will march force with other people and with other intentions”.

“Oncle Marik” and the screen-shot of messages of the telegram channel “Feigon Live” from 12.12.2021

So, only generations changes, but the Feigins still raving about a revolution, their opinion change only on the surface and colors of their revolutions: in the stead of a “red” come ‘red-gray” and of other different shades. Feigin Junior declares himself an anti-communist: he even says he would have put up against the wall his own grandfather, had he met him one hundred years ago. “And still… had I come across (say, had I been an officer of the Vrangel army) such persons as Feigin and Gaidar, in the 1920s, somewhere in the south of Russia, I would have “wiped out” both without hesitation”, wrote Mark Feigin in his article “Ghosts of the epoch gone”.

It seems that Feigin Jr., for the sake of the revolution itself, would not have pity on his grandfather, neither on his country where he was born and grown up. Actually, Feigin senior was also that way, he, writing cheap poems, scoffed at old people. “Live to the barricades! Everybody to the last battle! Death in a cruel struggle is more bright and young than the dull impotence of pathetical old men”…

Being an editor of the regional newspaper “Krasnaya Molodezh” (Red Youth), Gerasim Feigin once wrote such a leading article: “Down with parents’ oppression! Tender care of a tender mother, of a gray hair father, who likes admonitions, charm of the home-fire – everything that praised the bourgeois pen – everything is rotten. Our parents are our chains, our brakes, hangmen of our thought. Your family gets in the way, — drop it”.

Apart from that, one can say that these two Feigins – one from 1901 and another from 1971 – are united by the inner “momentum of the revolution”: by the hate towards rich and priests, hate towards “czarist rule”, hate towards parents and school, hate towards country, town or village.

Anna Solomonovna Feigin and Grigory Davydovich Feigin with their twin-sons Gerasim and Vladimir, and daughter Maria (sits in the right row), Belostok, 1903

…The Feigins, a family of christened Jews, moved to the town Pokrov of the Vladimir Province from the town Belostok of the Grodno Province in 1915. The move was connected with forced evacuation of Jews from front-line provinces at the height of the first world war. The head of this large displaced family was the lawyer Grigory Davydovich Feigin. He had, on the whole, five kids, including twin-brothers Gerasim and Vladimir.

In Pokrov, the father received the post of advocate in court. Gerasim was a diligent pupil of the Pokrov preparatory school, he began wrighting poems. In 1917, the 16 years old pupil entered the Bolshevik party and in a year he was elected to the committee of the Russian Communist Youth Union (RKSM). The twin-brother Vladimir also became an activist of the Komsomol, and together they were delegates of the II Conference of RKSM.

In 1937, Vladimir was executed by shooting; his diary entries were preserved where he writes about how deeply he hated the provincial town Pokrov.

Gerasim Feigin and Vladimir Feigin among the delegates of the II Conference of RKSM (from the family archive of Mark Feigin)

“It so happened that one of my ancestors, Gerasim Grigoryevich Feigin, born in 1901 in the Vladimir Province, was among the first organizers of the Russian Komsomol youth organization. Being a participant of the first conferences of RKSM, he died during the putting down the mutiny in Kronshtadt in 1921”, wrote his grandchild Mark, stressing the “absurdity” of his death. He was killed, in general, absurdly, he fell first in the chain of those assaulting the mutinous sailors. Delegates of the X Conference of the Russian Communist Party (Bolsheviks) were sent to put down the mutiny, and Gerasim Feigin was one of them”.

It seems that the generations of the Feigins, the revolutionaries, are really separated only in questions of death and profit. If the grandfather even called “death in a cruel battle”, the grandchild considered the death “on the ice of Kronshtadt” worthless. Perhaps, the age came into play (the grandchild, even of today, has outlived his grandfather by thirty years), but, one way or the other, Mark, as opposed to his young ancestor, finds in the revolution a source of profit.

“MARK WAS GRAVITATING TO THE BRASS OF CITY POLITICS”

The youth of Mark Feigin resembles the life of the legendary member of Komsomol. He was born and grew up in a provincial town – in Kuibyshev (now called Samara). The Gorbachev’s “revolution”, i.e. “perestroika-glasnost”, called him also from the school desk.

First protest actions in Kuibushev (1989). Mark Feigin is far right

In 1998, he simultaneously entered two ideologically incompatible organizations – the Soviet liberal “Democratic Union” and immigrant nationalist “The National Alliance of Russian Solidarists” (NTS). In a year, he founded an affiliate of NTS in Samara and started to publish the NTS newspaper “Tretya Sila” (Third Power). With associates from NTS, Feigin , in May 1993, went to Bosnia where he fought on the side of Serbs. By the way, he fought, in fact, against the “imperial” United States and “bourgeois” European values.

This is how Feigin himself told about this in his “Live Journal” (author’s grammar is preserved): “Under the command of the general Mladich I fought in Bosnia in 1990s, being fighter of the I Khoton Battalion of the II Romaniysk Brigade (personal number 2953) of the Serb Republic. This was the last place of my service, and I participated in fights from Knin (Republic of Serbian Krajina) and up to Sarajevo (Bosnia). So I know what I am speaking about.

In a nutshell, it’s like this. If military crimes were committed there were committed on both sides, and, in general, without any orders from above. Mutual exacerbation, going back several centuries, splashed out in the 1990s, at the time of the disintegration of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (SFRY). This was a war for national autochthony and national identity. It’s simply impossible to imagine such a collision without victims among civilian population. In same Srebrenica, as well as in other places, murders were committed by neighbors who had known and hated each other dozens of years. Whereby, they were moved by the memory of the World War II during which the Serbs had definitely suffered more. Many saw the war as possibility to revenge themselves. Bosnia’s Muslims also committed war crimes in the 1990s. I know this <…> After the fall of the communist regimes in Europe, peoples of the former Yugoslavia “scattered” from the Federation taking with them the territories they had received due to the borders artificially drawn by Tito. The war a logical continuation of the collapse of the Federation. So the trial of Karadzic and Mladic is an effort to “write it off” more quickly, to get rid of the heavy guilt of the war of Europeans laying the responsibility for it on the leaders of the Serbian community in Bosnia”.

Mark Feigin fought in the Serbian army for only one year, but, from that moment, he, in all his veteran memoirs, has turned a month into years: “I fought in Bosnia in the 90s”

Oleg Ivanets, a blogger from Samara and author of several documentary books about local politicians and criminal kingpins, has devoted to “Marik” (Mark) a separate chapter in his book “Mobster Samara” (part 4 “Samara Elite”, chapter 21 “Mark Feigin”). In his book he calls Feigin “the father of Samara’s democracy” and rather in detail tells about his life, beginning from the very youth and until the maturity in Moscow, up to the participation in the frustrated color revolution on the Bolotnaya Square in Moscow.

“Feigin remained in Serbia for a short period of time”, writes Ivanets. “on 10-11 July, 1993, a conference of the Regional affiliate of NTS of the Volga Region took place, and Feigin became head of this organization. It means that he returned to Samara already in the first part of 1993, having stayed in Serbia, at most, about one month. The author was surprised that “Mark once was hiding in order not to receive a military summons to be a conscript in the Soviet Army, but he didn’t dodge the “NTS summons” to be drafted in the Serbian Army”.

The book “Mobster Samara”, a chapter of which is devoted to Mark Feigin

Feigin “headed the local affiliate of The National Alliance of the Russian Solidarists or NTS (there were only five of them, at the most). The Samara chronicler noticed his main character’s trait: “Mark not only shifted around among radical youth, but also contrived to solidly contact the brass of the town’s politics. He was gravitating more heavily to them, as he saw his future in upper layers of power! As the result, in 1994 Mark Feigin became the youngest deputy of the State Duma (he was 23 years old at that time).

FEIGIN LOST THE ELECTION, BUT MANAGED TO SQUEEZE THROUGH TO THE DUMA. BY ACCIDENT

The author tells in details about the intrigues with the help of which Feigin managed to get to the Russian parliament. “On November 24, 1993, a group of representatives of the Moscow’s division of the party “Russia’s Choice” visited Samara, and Mark Feigin represented the “receiving side”. In three days, the governor Konstantin Titov appointed the 22 years old Feigin a member of the commission on rulemaking affiliated with the head of the local administration”.

“The elections to the State Duma took place on December 12, 1993. Feigin didn’t make it to the Parliament – neither in the majority Syzran constituency No 153 (he lost to the local oil trader and the owner of the firm “Poisk” Yevgeny Gesarov), nor on party’s list (“Russia’s Choice” received only 15% of voices). “During the elections, Feigin was financially helped by Sergey Arsentyev – a well-known Samara’s deputy and, at that moment, “the king of supermarkets” dreaming to create a transnational corporation with the resonant logo “Russian Bazar”. An incident helped.

“On January 4, 1994, the Central Election Commission declared null and void the election to the Duma of eight deputies who had not presented written obligations pertaining to cutting off all activities incompatible with the status of a deputy, and then registered eight other deputy candidates, including Mark Feigin.

In the State Duma, he belonged to the faction of “Russia’s Choice”, was a member of the Committee on local governance. In January 1995, the young deputy visited twice Chechnya as part of the Duma’s delegations headed by Sergey Kovalyov, and “took part in talks with Chechen military commanders on giving up captured officers”.

If in Samara Feigin “was gravitating to the brass of the town’s politics, in Moscow he assiduously cultivated “the brass of Russia’s dimensions”. The youngest member of the Russian Duma and Yegor Gaidar. Nowadays, he tells on each and every corner about his friendship with influential American congressmen…

In June 1995, Feigin graduated from the Law School of the Samara State University (although local journalists said they had not seen the young deputy within the walls of the University, and that he allegedly had bought the diploma). Yet he didn’t manage to be elected to the Duma of the second calling, as more lucky happened to be a candidate of the party “Our House Russia”, an important regional official. In 1996 Feigin becomes a co-founder of the OJSC “Newspaper “Chisla” (“Numbers”) and chief editor of the homonymous regional newspaper. Co-owners of the publication were local businessmen allegedly connected to the regional organized crime.

After Georgy Limansky, a friend of Feigin, was elected mayor of Samara (1997), the ex-deputy was appointed deputy mayor. “For the period of ten years I became vice-mayor, although I, primarily, carried out legal duties”, recalled Mark Feigin. Mark received from Limansky “for nourishment” the chair of a representative of Samara in Moscow, and that is why he almost constantly lived in Moscow.

His work didn’t get much time, that is why the young ladder climber, having forgotten about revolutionary dreams, started to be engaged with “his own development” – to be more precise, he started to get ready for a new career jump. For that purpose, in 1999, he defended a dissertation, in 2000 received a diploma of the Academy of National Economy affiliated with the government, and in 2 years a diploma of Russia’s Diplomatic Academy. At the same time, he received a status of advocate, but he was not yet engaged in legal practice.

Yet Viktor Tarkhov, the new mayor of Samara, was not impressed by the academic degree and several diplomas of higher education. “Samara’s representational office in Moscow is in a kind of wretched condition”, said the new mayor. First, Feigin was transferred to the position of an “assistant of Samara’s mayor working in Moscow”, and at the end of 2007, he irrevocably lost this official position.

The fatal Feigin’s mistake and the reason of his dismissal was that he, being a high ranking regional officer, had flagrantly violated the ethics of a public officer and openly supported the ex-premier Mikhail Kasyanov.

And then the ex-officer Feigin pulled out of his trunk “the spiked military helmet of his grandfather”, and it was time to make a living with the help of revolution.

In August 2006, Feigin became head of the Samara affiliate of the oppositional People’s Democratic Union, which had been created by Kasyanov and financed by Boris Berezovsky (In those years, the disgraced oligarch, with all his force, was trying to dismiss the president Vladimir Putin). After that, Feigin lost all chances to get the coveted position of a leader of some federal branch of power and started to say publically that Putin nothing less than “has deprived me of destiny”.

And already in the summer 2007, Feigin returned to active oppositional work – he was a member of the committee “March of Discordants”, and, “as an ardent revolutionary”, he addressed a motley audience of this exotic crowd. He returned to what he had begun: meetings, flags, posters, cries from tribune, down with the Federal Security Service (FSB), “we are power here”.

HOW MUCH WOOL SHEARED THE LAWYER FEIGIN FROM BLACK SHEEP OF THE GROUP “PUSSY RIOT”

In 2009 Feigin entered the collegium of advocates “Moscow Legal Center”, and from then on, he has started to defend in courts so-called non-system opposition activists, among them Geidag Jemal and neo-Nazi Ilya Goryachev, Kazakh oligarch and fraud Mukhtar Ablyasov and Ukrainian gun layer Nadezhda Savchenko, freak Andrey Babchenko and riot-girls from the group “Pussy Riot”.

“I just asked myself – that kind of normal lawyer would I be, a lawyer as all others”, wrote Feigin once on his Tweeter page. “I would bring bribes, toad to charges, rat out clients. As it is, I am a famous scum”.

It seems that, with his 40^th anniversary approaching, Mark Feigin, by contrast with his grandfather, learned to make money from revolutions and from revolutionary urges of his clients. One would think, how much wool one can shear from the black sheep of the group “Pussy Riot”? But Feigin quickly grasped that the scandalous fame, blown up by the world mass media, could bring hundreds of thousands U.S. dollars.

So, the punk-group of six girls under the name “Pussy Riot” became popular after its scandalous action called “Holy Mother, banish Putin” carried out in February 2012 in the Cathedral of Christ the Savior in downtown Moscow. The antic of these “feminists” drew severe criticism from the part of authorities and clergy, and after that three members of this group – Nadezhda Tolokonnikova*, Maria Alyokhina and Ekaterina Samutsevich – were arrested by court order; they could have been sentenced to up to 7 years of imprisonment under Article “Hooliganism”. This arrest drew an extraordinary wide resonance: the world mass media blew to the whole world about the unfortunate prisoners of conscience, Western foundations rewarded them with awards, Hollywood stars supported them, documentary film makers made hours-long films about up until now completely unknown girls with doubtful reputation.

Mark Feigin and “the porno actress from the Museum of Zoology” Nadezhda Tolokonnikova.

Three lawyers, Feigin included, were engaged in protecting rights of the arrested members of the group “Pussy Riot”. Already in the autumn of 2012 a new scandal flared up another within this world scandal – not that big, but with more acid odor. It dawned on the jailbirds that the OJSC “Film Company “Web-Bio” of Natalia Kharitonova, wife of Mark Feigin, was trying to register the trade-mark “Pussy Riot”. This firm was preparing to make profit from selling pens, toys, clothes, videos with the name of the scandalous group. And not only that.

“Web-Bio” concluded a contract with the European film company “Roast Beef Production Limited” for making a film about participants of this nasty action in the Cathedral of Christ the Savior in Moscow. It was implied that the girls from the group “Pussy Riot” and their lawyers would participate in this film. The firm belonging to Kharitonova already received at that moment 30 thousand pounds. After the completion of filming, the Feigin family planned to receive 170 thousand pounds, or 40% of net profit from the selling of the film.

The member of the group Ekaterina Samutsevich got out of jail and demanded that Mark Feigin should relinquish his claims to the brand. In response, Feigin showed the agreement signed by the three members of the group “Pussy Riot”, yet Samutsevich said she had never signed this document.

“In August, after all court sessions, he came and said that we should somehow “defend our work”, recalled she. “We said, yes, of course”. At the same time, we had with Mark a separate talk, and I said to him that we were an non-commercial group and it was important for us that there was no obscure commercial use. We, as authors, want to control this. Mark said he knew how to do it, and I, naturally, trusted him. Well, I am sitting in a pre-trial detention center, and I don’t know how it should be done. Then, with amazement, I receive information from an interview that the registration request was made as early as in April. That was a surprise for me”.

Apart from that, Samutsevich said she had signed, under Feifin’s request, blank sheets of paper. “They gave us these sheets during the last three seconds of the meeting”, said she. “We were told like this: we have to run, but sign also this, please, otherwise they wouldn’t give you in court certain documents. Naturally, I signed”.

Moreover, she said she had first heard about the necessity to register a trade mark in August, although Feifin himself was saying he had agreed with the group in April. According to her, the lawyer came to her seldom and for a short time, in general they discussed not the case itself, but news – as well as reports that the group “Pussy Riot” would receive soon a Nobel prize. Besides, Samutsevich accused Feigin of unlawfully holding her passport and keys from her apartment, and also declared of her intention to lodge a complaint with the Lawyers Collegium of the Moscow Region.

The scandal was with the taste of a rotten deal: that was a cynical cheating of a client, and unconscientious carrying out of professional duties as well as illegal acquiring of the trade mark “Pussy Riot”. Its minimal value, according to experts, was 1 million U.S. dollars, and in skilled hands its value could grow by ten folds!). Yet Feigin at that time was not only not brought to justice for fraud but was not even deprived of his lawyer’s status.

LOVE TRIANGLE WITH A LESBIAN

Yet the punk group “Pussy Riot” played a fatal role in the personal life of Mark Feigin. He was involved in a situation which communists called “a moral degeneration”. The lawyer dived into a romantic relationship with the LGBT activist Alisa Obraztsova who regularly participated in actions in support of the arrested girls from the group “Pussy Riot”. Their romantic relationship had lasted couple of years, and then it was possible for this activist to get a lawyer status… This specifically intimate detail of his biography was made public after his wife Natalia Kharitonova file a petition for divorce with Feigin. The lawyer’s wife had found the intimate correspondence of her husband with Obraztsova and their common photos.

Alice Obraztsova and Mark Feigin

“The reason of the divorce were systematic cheatings. My confidante found numerous textings on intimate themes, as well as mutual photos of my husband with other woman. Natalia filed for divorce and went with her sun to Samara to her relatives”, commented to the journal “Life” a Kharitonova’s lawyer.

Oddly enough, Feigin’s fancy woman earlier had declared herself representative of untraditional sexual orientation, and some compromising photos had posted herself in her Live Journal; later she had deleted them, but they had been kept in caches of some web search engines.

The piquancy of this story attach the circumstance that Feigin had sent Obraztsova as his representative at the divorce suite. “Mr. Feigin <…> managed to get (for Obraztsova) a place in the Collegium of lawyers and provided her with all-round material support. Yet, after having received her advocate certificate, Alice accidentally sent to Feigin’s wife her intimate correspondence with her husband, and while Mark Zakharovich Feigin was being grappling with his furious wife, she flew away to the Gudkov’s head-quarters”, so describes the telegram channel “Rakova will call” further career highlights of Obraztsova.

Having used the moment, Obraztsova jumped “in the political Uber” belonging to Gudkov-Kaz – and made it through to became a municipal deputy. “Gudkov Junior, obviously, also saw the true value of the business acumen, rich live experience and other charms of Alice. As the result, the assiduous girl received new sheepskin – this time of a municipal deputy. As well as a complete financing of her election campaign, material support and priceless experience. <…> Learn, dames. Watch out, doors are closing, next stop Moscow City Duma”, they mocked in social media.

Meanwhile, the Khamovnichesky District Court recovered child support from Feigin to the amount of 35 thousand rubles with “further readjustment in case of growing subsistence rate”. And then the court forbade him to leave the country” – “because of non-transfer of a piano in accordance with the decision of the court”. The divorce suite had lasted for almost a year and was ended in December 2016. All claims of the wife about the partition of property were settled, the counter-claim of the lawyer to his wife the court dismissed.

Screenshot of a page from the website of the Khamovnichesky District Court.

Having hardly squared accounts with his former wife, Feigin at once left on a long business journey, to Washington. In March 2017, he met with representatives of the U.S. Congress, and about this meeting he posted a rather detailed photo-report on his website page “Feigin Live”. Apart from panoramic views of the American capital and interiors of the Capitol, Feigin organized several mutual photos with some friends-congressmen.

A particular sympathy should evoke “a very wide smile” of the senator Roger Wicker. One would not think at once that this cheerful Pinocchio of pension age is a finished Russophobe who even two months before the beginning of the special military operation he had proposed to launch a preventive nuclear strike against Russia. At the same moment, this senator called for sending NATO’s soldiers to Ukraine.

Mark Feigin and congressmen Albio Sires, Peter Roskam and John McCain (Washington, March 2017). Feigin wrote on the photos: 1. Met with the congressman Albio Sires (New Jersey) from the Committee on Foreign Affairs. Each time I visit him when I come to Washington; 2. Congressman Peter J. Roskam; 3. “I met with the old man McCain in April 2015, and now. Once again he asked to be cautions. Or else they kill you. These people can…”

It’s moving to see how pointedly and paternally the late “old man McCain” takes care of Feigin, the same McCain in homage to whom a street is even called in Kiev. Shortly before his death caused by brain neoplasm, this head of a Senate Committee on Armed Services almost as his last will proposed to carry out a massive cyber-attack against Russia.

And the closest among the bosom friends from Feigin’s curators from the Capitol, Albio Sires, a congressman from New Jersey, member of the Democratic Party, is also an old unfriend of Russia. For instance, as early as in 2019, Sires proposed to the U.S. House of Representatives a draft resolution against returning to the format of “Big Eight” with Russia’s participation.

According to the inscription on the photo with Sires, Feigin nowhere nearly for the first time visited the Washington “obkom” (regional party committee) but only in the spring of 2017 he started to promote himself in the company of American congressmen. It seems that the scandal-plagued lawyer understood that his legal practice in Russia was nearing to its final and that it was necessary to enter on “international level” and for that real business connections with the U.S. Congress was a guarantee of commercial success of a new project.

In May 2017, the forethoughtful Feigin acquired a certificate of a member of the Association of Russian Lawyers. And as early as in April 2018, the Council of Advocate Chamber of Moscow decided to deprive Feigin of a lawyer status. In the decision of the Council some Feigin’s tweets are cited in which he offends his “processual opponent” and blogger Anatoly Shariy.

The decision of the Council of Moscow’s Advocate’s Chamber on Feigin from 24.04.2018

Feigin, using obscene vocabulary, wrote on his page in Tweeter, for instance: “Meatheads! Remember and pass it to your dickhead friend! F. never, you hear, never has lost to such crap. I will gobble you and shit you out, shit-asses,,,”. . “The outcome of this village style PR-attack of the Kremlin freebee will be the same , as it was with his claim against me in Ukraine for the phrase “Ukrainophobe animal”.

During a session of the Council of Advocates Feigin acknowledged the authenticity of his notes and justified himself saying he had used this vocabulary as “it is his sole weapon” and he himself “was under powerful influence from the part of the authorities because of the specific character of the cases he is handling”. That’s why he thinks that such behavior “is permissible in certain cases”.

“FEIGIN LIVE” OF DUAL PURPOSE

After that, Feigin moved to Ukraine. At the end of 2018, he prepared the “Putin list” – a demo-version of the future “Base” consisting of 350 names, an analogue of the Ukrainian “Peacekeeper” (Миротворец) where are mentioned high-ranking officials, pro-Kremlin politicians, senior officials in the military-security establishments and law enforcement officials, as well as top-managers. And this list Feigin presented at the session of the Atlantic Council* in Washington.

In Ukraine the advocate’s practice went neither good nor bad., but then suddenly went up the YouTube channel “Feigin Live”, created as early as in 2009. If until the beginning of the 2020s the channel had about 200 thousand subscribers, then, together with the special military operation in Ukraine, the number of subscribers was considerably widening, until it reached 2 million. Particularly in demand were videos of Feigin together with the speaking head of the Kiev’s junta Alexey Arestovich. The other day, Arestovich on his page in Facebook boasted about his achievements “on the information-psychological field” and, having counted the number of his followers, fantastic statistics became apparent (The grammar of the original is preserved):

Screenshot of the message of Alexey Arestovich.

“Taken all together, only on my YouTube channel, during the period from 24.02.22 up to 16.01.23 – there were 551 videos, which is approximately a quarter of all visits. From them, military programs with Mark Feigin – 239 videos. Number of visitors: 287 102 198, six times more than the population of whole Ukraine, and 1.8 times more than the population of Russia. The length of looking (in hours): 61 488 978. The real cover, including television of different countries, I even can’t imagine. Interview in text format are even beyond telling. Finally, I have tried a little bit on the information field”.

As we see, on the videos with participation of Arestovich have been seen by more than 267 million viewers, that is, “six time more than the whole population of Ukraine”. Half of them belong to mutual “military programs” with Mark Feigin” (Only for the first months of the carrying out of the Special military operation the number of subscribers of the YouTube channel “Feigin Live” has increased ten times and exceeded two million. In fact, I don’t know who of the two was the first to put forward the idea to monetize their media political popularity, but Feigin was the first to muster this idea.

In the first days of January 2022, in one go, two internet-magazines were opened under the “brand” “Feigin Live” – for customers from Europe, Russia, Asia and the Middle East, as well as for the North and South Americas. The global scope of this trade super project is in contrast with the poverty of the design: on all T-shirts, jerseys, baseball caps and other pieced of consumer industry imprinted are only two faces – that of the owner of the store himself and of his business partner. In the catalogue of the stores you will not find the main propaganda images of the Kiev’s junta: there is neither Bandera or Shukhevich, no trident, no motto “Muscovites on tree branch”. All items are formed exclusively for the purpose of self-promotion.

Screenshot of the headpiece of the store “Feigin Live” for customers from Europe, Russia, Asia.

The design of the website for European store “Feigin Live” differs from the American twin-store only in one thing – here as an ad banner is placed the screenshot of the video about the progress of the special military operation – “Day one hundred thirty-three”. In other words, for feeding of “Feigin’s life” the friends are unceremoniously trading on the blood of internecine feud.

Screenshot of the headpiece of the store “Feigin Live” for customers from America

“Responsible for managing this on-line store”, as it is written on the mentioned websites, is a certain Rostislav Feigin. In the Russia electronic card-index “Kontur. Fokus” there is only one “Rostislav Feigin”, and his patronymic name is “Zakharovich”, as of the owner of the store. Perhaps, his is the blood brother of Mark Zakharovich Feigin.

Registration card of the individual entrepreneur “Feigin Rostislav Zakharovich”.

In August 2014, Rostislav Feigin was registered in the town Novomichurinsk of the Ryazan Region as individual entrepreneur. There are types of his activities in the card-index, for instance: “Retail sales via post”, “Retail trade carried out directly with the help of the information-communication network Internet”, “Retail trade through Internet auctions”. In June 2022, Rostislav ceased his activities in Russia and moved to the French resort town Biarritz. At least, on the website of the store “Feigin Live” the town Biarritz is mentioned as the place of residence of the person “responsible for the keeping of this Internet store”.

Here is that “Wikipedia” writes about this town: “It is a luxurious seaside climate and spa resort of France. During “Belle Epoche” a place of recreation and medical therapy of aristocracy and members of royal families, now – for presidents and other high-ranking persons. Thanks to powerful waves of the Atlantic ocean, Biarritz is a well-known surfing center”.

It seems that Biarritz had become the place of constant family residence of Mark Feigin where he records his streams about horrors of the war in Ukraine.

Apart from that, Biarritz is famous for its magnificent chestnuts. You would ask: what has this to do with chestnuts? Actually, Bolshevik grandfathers kindled flames with sparks, but one of their descendants will be best remembered for the fact that he pulled chestnuts from the fire of war”.
The author: Alexey Chelnokov

Russian version at: «Знаменитая мразь». Фейгин. Live на продажу»

*Feigin Mark Zakharovich, born 03.06.1971, on 08.04.2022 included in the registry of foreign agents with No 356
** Atlantic Council of the United States (Atlantic Council), United States – on 25.07.2019 was included with No 18 by the Ministry of Justice of the Russian Federation in Registry of foreign and non-governmental organizations activity of which is recognized as undesirable on the territory of the Russian Federation (Ruling No 945 from 29.07.2019)
* Tolokonnikova Nadezhda Andreyevna, born 07.11.1989, on 30.12.2021 was included in the registry of foreign agents with No 326