In the footsteps of Sergei Mavrodi

2024 Author: Seth Attwood | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-16 15:55

27 years ago in Russia they began to buy the first shares of MMM, not yet knowing what financial pyramids are and who Sergey Mavrodi is. In this article we will walk in the footsteps of the "great schemer" of the 1990s, whom, as it turns out, began to be forgotten, and we will study his last years of life.

December, cloudy. Troekurovskoye cemetery in the west of Moscow.

- Can you tell me how to find the grave of Mavrodi Sergei Panteleevich? - I ask the guard at the entrance.

- Who is this? he asks lazily.

- Well, the one that was MMM in the 1990s, remember? - I clarify.

- I do not remember. What is the site?

I check my notebook and give the lot number. A huge map of the cemetery hangs on the wall in the lobby of the administrative building. The guard points his finger at the place, and I go to meet with the last great ideological champion of banknotes.

It seems strange that today someone may not remember a person who for a decade and a half remained the leader in terms of mentions in the media (“Mavrodi was elected to the State Duma,” “Mavrodi was arrested,” “Mavrodi is threatening the government,” “Mavrodi is on the run”). Many of those who knew Sergei Panteleevich personally do not want to talk about him in an interview or remember something “off the record”.

On February 1, 1994, the shares of JSC "MMM" went on sale. The joint-stock company was part of the cooperative of the same name, which was created five years earlier. The name is the first letters of the names of the three founders: Sergei Mavrodi, his brother Vyacheslav Mavrodi and his brother's wife Olga Melnikova.

“I announce my signatures as works of art and start selling them - selling and buying - according to the following scheme: today I sell, for example, for 10 rubles, and buy at 9, 90. Tomorrow I sell at 10, 10, buy at 10.

The day after tomorrow: I sell at 10, 20, buy at 10, 10. In such a way that the prices for the month would rise by about two times. In short, I trade according to the principle: today is always more expensive than yesterday,”Mavrodi writes in his autobiographical story Pyramid, which is fictional in essence, but very close to real events that took place for six months while MMM was active.

Trading in shares, and then MMM tickets, similar to Soviet banknotes, was successful. For six months, their prices have increased 127 times, and the number of depositors, according to Mavrodi, has reached 15 million throughout Russia. He also said that the joint-stock company owned almost a third of the country's budget. The country's leadership clearly did not like this state of affairs. The conflict between the entrepreneur and the government has matured quite quickly.

Mavrodi was first planted in August 1994, six months after the launch of MMM. He was accused of tax evasion. But he did not stay in the cell for long. In October of the same year, he registered as a candidate for deputy to the State Duma, and he was released from custody. Few doubted that the founder of the largest financial pyramid (at the beginning of 1994, however, no one knew such a concept yet) would collect the required number of signatures in his support.

Moreover, immediately after Mavrodi tried to cut off the oxygen, thousands of depositors took to the streets of the cities who demanded to release him. People even picketed the White House in the hope that it will help to return the money invested and the accrued interest. A little earlier, Sergei Panteleevich himself threatened to organize an all-Russian referendum in a week and dismiss the government.

On this wave, he moved from the cell directly to the State Duma, having received parliamentary immunity. True, for less than a year he did not appear at the meetings even once. Sitting in his apartment, he continued to prepare for the financial apocalypse.

In 1997, MMM was declared bankrupt, and Mavrodi was put on the wanted list. Until 2003, he was hiding in a rented apartment on the Frunzenskaya embankment in Moscow. He was immersed in the Stock Generation, a virtual stock exchange that he registered with a dummy in one of the Caribbean countries.

With his own security service, Sergei Panteleevich felt comfortable. They brought him everything he needed - food and clothing. Mavrodi led an ascetic lifestyle. As he later said, he did not want to leave the house.

Even before the creation of the pyramid, Mavrodi traded pirate audio tapes, and then office equipment, collected butterflies and raised aquarium fish. But after he was convicted of fraud in 2007 and served four and a half years in Matrosskaya Tishina, butterflies and aquariums ceased to fascinate him.

- I remember his birthday in August 2011. The only thing he asked his assistants was to take him on a fishing trip,”recalls lawyer Andrei Molokhov, who defended Mavrodi at the time.

Then an entrepreneur or a swindler (everyone calls him differently) organized a new pyramid of MMM-2011. The security forces at that time closely monitored his activities. More than ten thousand statements from defrauded depositors were in court. But Sergei Panteleevich calmly sat in the apartment and told the turned on webcam about the injustice of the financial system. In the background he could see a large gymnastic ball and an empty shelf.

Lawyer Andrei Molokhov is sorting through a pile of old documents - his collection associated with Mavrodi. He invented the 2011 pyramid while still in prison. Then, according to Molokhov, he even enlisted the support of thieves in law. Starting to promote his new brainchild, Mavrodi thought globally and dreamed of causing the collapse of the financial system not only in Russia, but also in the world. Molokhov extracts from the folder the papers with the signature of the ward.

At the top of the page it says: "Dear Mr. Assange!" In a letter to Julian Assange, dated April 24, 2011, Sergei Mavrodi talks about his project and that he is “a kind of Russian [Bernard] Madoff”: “I offer you cooperation and I believe that we could join forces (…). We are allies in the fight against the hypocritical global financial clique, with the gang of international bureaucracy."

Sergey Mavrodi continued to broadcast these ideas on the Internet, in his videos on YouTube. At the same time, the number of participants in MMM-2011 grew, and when the counter of new depositors on the site approached 10,000 people, all the lists were removed - "so as not to provoke the authorities," Mavrodi explained.

The small basement of the office center on the Third Ring Road is filled with old tape recorders. To the measured rustling of the film, we talk with Andrei Makhovikov, who was once so carried away by the ideas of Sergei Mavrodi that he invested in MMM both times. He was “one hundred thousand” in 2011.

At Makhovikov's house, he also has a couple of boxes with MMM tickets of the 1994 model, which he keeps as a memory. In 2011, Mavrodi promised depositors to pay off all old debts. But Andrei assures that he entered the pyramid again not for the sake of money, but for the sake of defeating financial injustice. Andrey talks about Mavrodi in the present tense. He fidgets in his office chair and folds his arms behind his head.

His intonation, smile, gestures - everything is very similar to the behavior of Mavrodi himself during various interviews. The 500 thousand rubles taken on credit, which Andrey invested in the project in 2011, he managed to withdraw from the pyramid on time and give it to the bank. He didn’t manage to earn anything: “What has come is gone”. From the whole story with three Ms, he was left with disappointment and a TV, which he bought "to please his wife."

Sergey Mavrodi answers any questions from depositors in his interviews as if he were reading out prepared cards. Here is a card about seventeen KamAZ trucks of money that allegedly disappeared during a search in the MMM office on Varshavskoye Shosse. Here is a card about phenomenal childhood memory. Here are twelve concussions, after which the memory disappeared. And so - he did not steal anything, but simply wanted to help people and the country.

Andrey Kim was called Mavrodi's right hand. He was in the structure of MMM in 1994 and joined in 2011 in the campaign, attracted investors. Under the flag of the MMM, he went to the coordination council of the opposition, ran for mayor of Moscow, was the chairman of the MMM party.

In 2013, during one of the rallies in support of MMM at the Shchelkovskaya metro station, Kim had a fight with one of the disgruntled depositors. The scuffle ended in death for him. An autopsy showed that Andrei died due to a detached blood clot. The fight was filmed by Kim's wife: she was crying over a corpse, ambulance workers came running, depositors were spinning around. On other recordings that YouTube slips because of a similar topic, Sergei Mavrodi expresses his condolences, adding: "War is like war."

Andrei Kim's wife does not want to remember MMM and Mavrodi. Another ally of Kim, unfortunately, agrees to be interviewed, but asks for 100 thousand rubles. The rest, who remember Andrey, generally refuse to continue the conversation, having heard the "password": Sergey Mavrodi. “Don't you know that no one wanted to take his body after death? - says one of Mavrodi's former subordinates on the phone, explaining that his brother and his wife - the other two M in the abbreviation - did not come to the funeral of Sergei Panteleevich. - Probably, it says something.

He played talentedly on one human feeling - pathological greed. And then the interlocutor emphasizes that the very scheme invented by Mavrodi was ingenious. Allegedly, they even went to him to consult from the Central Bank and the Ministry of Finance. They asked how best to implement the idea with government short-term bonds. But they could not realize it, and now they remember it as a possible state pyramid.

In the 2010s, Mavrodi was often invited to talk shows with Pavel Medvedev, an economic expert, former State Duma deputy and financial ombudsman. Sometimes Mavrodi leaned over to his ear and reminded in a whisper how Medvedev had set the prosecutor's office against him.

He studied MMM for a long time and tried to explain that the second coming of Mavrodi in 2011 would not be good. But Mavrodi won: “There were examples of enrichment: if Ivanov succeeded, why not try it for me too, the investors thought,” Medvedev explains. - There were also many who continued to invest because they hoped to get off in time. But Mavrodi still taught his fellow citizens something."

“He was like an autist - insensitive to loved ones, alien to any emotions and empathy,” recalls his client's lawyer Alexander Molokhov. "I thought that man was by nature a pitiful helpless creature." The lawyer says that Mavrodi was very suspicious: he suspected his brother and his wife that they had given the security officials the address of the apartment where he was hiding. According to Molokhov, he “changed his lawyers like gloves”. Even Molokhov fell under suspicion.

Almost everyone who knew Mavrodi personally noted his unhealthy asceticism and misanthropy. Many associate this with a prison sentence and long seclusion. And they are advised to read the books that Mavrodi began to write in prison and continued at large. These books are full of reflection, mysticism and self-talk.

In The Son of Lucifer, for example, Mavrodi describes all human passions and analyzes the concept of sin. According to his scripts, two rather strange films were shot - "The Pyramid" and "The River". In the latter, the main character finds in the river the corpse of his friend's girl, whom he always liked. The first tells the story of MMM. But suddenly the image of a child who was not in the script is added - at the end of his life he tried to improve relations with his daughter.

The grave of Sergei Mavrodi is easy to find. The landmark is an ordinary wooden cross, such a rarity at the Troekurovsky cemetery. Judging by the artificial flowers covered with snow, few people come here."Rest with the saints …" - it is written on the cross in golden font. In a simple frame - a recognizable photograph. "MMM in the 1990s, remember?" - as if the person on it asks.