From Blinovskaya to Portnyagin: How Russia Cracked Down on the Influencer Business

Over three and a half years, Russian authorities moved from tax cases against Lerchek, Alexandra Mitroshina and Elena Blinovskaya to prison sentences for Blinovskaya, Ayaz Shabutdinov and Dmitry Portnyagin, an in-absentia conviction of Gusein Gasanov, and a separate registration system for major bloggers. Publicly available evidence does not prove that the criminal cases were launched in order to control their audiences. But the outcome is clear: in Russia, a large online following is no longer an autonomous business asset operating largely outside the state.

On September 30, 2026, Dmitry Portnyagin was taken into custody in the courtroom. The creator of the Transformator brand, co-founder of Club 500 and one of Russia’s most recognizable evangelists of entrepreneurial success was sentenced to five years in a general-regime penal colony and fined 900,000 rubles in a money-laundering case.

The ending is particularly revealing when viewed against what happened two and a half years earlier. In April 2024, Portnyagin was detained in Rostov-on-Don while returning from the war zone in Ukraine, where, according to his lawyer, he had delivered 46 million rubles’ worth of humanitarian aid. By then, Portnyagin and his wife had paid more than 188 million rubles in tax arrears and additional assessments. The tax-evasion case was later dropped, and an arbitration court ruled that part of the additional tax assessment had been unlawful. But the money-laundering charge remained. After further investigation, the amount prosecutors said had been laundered fell from roughly 64 million rubles to 15.3 million. The court still imposed a prison sentence. RBC reported the defense position: Portnyagin’s lawyers argue that the transactions were wrongly classified as money laundering and say they will appeal.

Portnyagin’s case effectively closed a cycle that began in the spring of 2023. That was when the state first moved systematically against people who had spent the previous decade building an economy around Instagram, YouTube, Telegram and online courses. They sold fitness programs, business training, psychology, social-media promotion and promises of personal success. Some had audiences in the millions and revenues in the hundreds of millions of rubles, while the sector itself remained far less formalized than traditional large business.

March 2023: first came the tax cases

The first major case involved Valeria Chekalina, known online as Lerchek. On March 7, 2023, Russia’s Investigative Committee opened a tax-evasion case. Investigators alleged that revenue from her fitness programs exceeded the threshold for Russia’s simplified tax regime, while the business continued operating through several individual entrepreneurs and relatives’ accounts. The initial tax claim was 311 million rubles. RBC noted at the time that Chekalina had around 10 million Instagram followers.

Two weeks later, on March 21, authorities searched the home of Alexandra Mitroshina. Investigators said she had also exceeded the simplified-tax-system limit but distributed revenue through affiliated individual entrepreneurs. The initial alleged tax shortfall was more than 120 million rubles. In May, Mitroshina said she had transferred 127 million rubles to the Federal Tax Service. The tax case was later closed.

On April 27, Elena Blinovskaya was detained. She was stopped in the Smolensk region while attempting to cross the border into Belarus; she was carrying airline tickets from Moscow to Tashkent. Prosecutors alleged that the creator of the “Marathon of Desires” had split her business among 18 companies and three individual entrepreneurs using the simplified tax system. The initial amount of unpaid tax exceeded 918 million rubles. A money-laundering charge involving part of the proceeds followed at the same time. The Moscow Prosecutor’s Office described the alleged structure in detail on the day of her detention.

Within seven weeks, three of the biggest names in the same new economy were facing criminal cases. That was when Russian media began speaking of a distinct wave of “blogger cases.”

The official explanation: they grew too fast

Russia’s Federal Tax Service made no secret of the fact that major bloggers had become a separate area of scrutiny. Tax chief Daniil Yegorov explained the wave of audits not as politics but as the result of a rapidly growing industry: businesses were becoming large before their owners had built the accounting and legal systems normally found in companies of comparable size. Kommersant reported his position in the autumn of 2023.

That explanation has an obvious factual basis. Artificially splitting a business is not an offense invented for bloggers. Russian tax authorities have challenged similar structures across many industries for years. The Lerchek, Mitroshina and Blinovskaya cases involved specific accounts, individual entrepreneurs, tax filings and large sums. The Chekalins paid roughly 500 million rubles in arrears, penalties and fines in their first case. Mitroshina also paid the tax claims against her.

But it soon became clear that paying the taxes did not always end the story.

Paying was not always enough

The Chekalins’ first tax-evasion case was dropped after the debt was paid. A separate initial case over the alleged laundering of 130 million rubles was also closed, and Lerchek was formally recognized as having a right to rehabilitation in that episode.

In the autumn of 2024, however, a new case followed — this time over foreign-currency transactions. Investigators alleged that more than 251.5 million rubles from the sale of a fitness program had been transferred to a company in the United Arab Emirates using documents containing false information about the purpose of the payments.

In April 2026, Artem Chekalin was sentenced to seven years in prison and fined 194.5 million rubles. His appeal was still pending as of October 2. Valeria Chekalina was given a five-year suspended sentence on July 31 and fined more than 760 million rubles; both the defense and prosecutors appealed. RBC noted that proceedings against her had resumed after a lengthy interruption caused by a serious cancer diagnosis.

Mitroshina followed a similar path. After she paid her tax debt, the first case was closed, but in 2025 she was detained on a new money-laundering charge tied by investigators to proceeds from the earlier tax scheme. In June 2026, a court gave her a three-year suspended sentence and fined her 900,000 rubles. Prosecutors, who had sought a real prison term, appealed the verdict as too lenient; the defense also appealed. RBC reported that prosecutors linked the alleged laundering in part to real-estate purchases.

Portnyagin underwent the same basic transformation. The tax case ended, but the derivative money-laundering charge survived it and ultimately led to a five-year prison sentence.

A new reality had emerged: a tax claim could be the beginning of a more serious criminal case rather than the end of one.

Blinovskaya: the symbol of the first wave

Elena Blinovskaya became the most recognizable symbol of the crackdown. She was initially placed under house arrest. In January 2024, the court moved her to pretrial detention after finding that she had violated the terms of her restrictions. In March 2025, Moscow’s Savyolovsky District Court convicted her of tax evasion, money laundering and unlawful circulation of payment instruments and sentenced her to five years in prison.

The Moscow City Court later reduced the sentence to four and a half years and cut the fine to 950,000 rubles. On July 29, 2026, a cassation court left that verdict in place. According to RBC, the final version of the case was based on 906 million rubles in unpaid taxes and 706 million rubles in allegedly laundered funds. The defense said it planned to appeal to the Supreme Court.

At the same time, a separate case developed around her husband, Alexei Blinovsky. In the spring of 2024, he signed a contract with the Defense Ministry and went to the combat zone. He was placed on a wanted list in June, but by late October his lawyer said the search had been terminated and the criminal case suspended because of his military service. RBC reported that Blinovsky remained in the war zone.

Military service as a new legal exit

Blinovsky’s case was not a one-off privilege created for a particular blogger. In March 2024, Russia amended its criminal law to allow investigations against certain suspects and defendants who signed military contracts during mobilization to be suspended and, under conditions set by law, terminated altogether. In October 2024, the mechanism was extended to some cases that had already reached court.

That added a new option to the older choices of paying, litigating or leaving the country: signing a military contract. In the Blinovsky case, the mechanism operated literally.

But publicly demonstrating support for the war did not itself provide immunity. Portnyagin did not sign such a contract. In 2024 he traveled to the war zone with humanitarian aid. His representatives emphasized both that support and the full payment of the tax debt. Two years later, he still received a prison sentence.

Shabutdinov: the state moved beyond accounting

Ayaz Shabutdinov’s case was fundamentally different from the tax cases of the first wave. He was detained in November 2023 not over the simplified tax regime or alleged business splitting, but on fraud charges tied to the sale of educational programs.

By the end of the investigation, prosecutors had counted 113 episodes. According to the prosecution, resources controlled by Shabutdinov published knowingly false claims about programs that promised customers a financial result. Buyers paid between 60,000 and 12 million rubles, and the total documented loss exceeded 57 million rubles. On October 31, 2025, the court sentenced Shabutdinov to seven years in a general-regime penal colony and fined him 5 million rubles. The Moscow Prosecutor’s Office published the prosecution’s account of the judgment.

Shabutdinov pleaded guilty and said he had compensated victims. The verdict remains under appeal: the Moscow City Court is due to continue hearing the case on October 6, 2026. RAPSI reported that an earlier hearing was postponed so the court could examine documents showing payments to victims.

The case changed the nature of the dispute. The state was no longer arguing only about how the influencer business paid taxes, but about what it sold and whether the promises used to sell it matched the actual product.

Gasanov: the option of leaving

Gusein Gasanov chose a third path. He left Russia in the spring of 2025, shortly before a criminal case was opened. Investigators accused him of evading more than 170 million rubles in taxes and later laundering part of the proceeds through financial transactions and real estate.

Gasanov was placed on an international wanted list. On August 4, 2026, Moscow’s Presnensky District Court sentenced him in absentia to four years in prison, fined him 1 million rubles and barred him from administering websites for two years. The court also ordered property transferred to the state. The defense appealed. RBC reported that Gasanov remains outside Russia.

The size of his audience matters to the broader story: more than 30 million people followed him on Instagram. Among the products he sold was a course called “Millionaire Mindset.”

At the same time, the state rewrote the rules for the entire blogosphere

If one looks only at the criminal cases, it is easy to see a collection of separate stories: taxes in some cases, fraud in another, foreign-currency transactions in others. But at the same time, the legal infrastructure of the Russian internet was changing.

As early as December 2023, the State Duma held a dedicated roundtable on regulating bloggers and the influencer business. Participants discussed a separate economic-activity code, professional standards and possible licensing of educational products. Kommersant reported that the idea of a separate legal status for bloggers had also been discussed by industry representatives in meetings with officials from the presidential administration.

Since November 1, 2024, owners of pages and channels with audiences above 10,000 have been required to submit identifying information to Roskomnadzor for inclusion in a special registry. Unregistered pages are barred from carrying advertising or collecting donations, while other users face restrictions on reposting their material. By July 2025, Roskomnadzor had processed more than 264,000 applications and added 149,000 pages to the registry. Roskomnadzor published those figures in official guidance.

Another restriction took effect on September 1, 2025: advertising can no longer be placed on internet resources blocked in Russia or on platforms linked to organizations designated as undesirable or banned. In explaining the law, State Duma leaders explicitly connected it to cutting off financial flows to blocked platforms. The State Duma described the measure as protecting Russia’s information security and economic interests.

By the middle of the decade, the state was therefore regulating not only how a blogger paid taxes, but also who the blogger was, whether they could sell advertising and part of the infrastructure through which their audience could be monetized.

So was this about taxes or control?

The simplest answer is taxes. And much of that answer is true.

The public record does not support the claim that Blinovskaya, Chekalina, Mitroshina or Portnyagin were prosecuted solely because the Kremlin feared their followers. Their cases contain specific commercial transactions, tax calculations and court rulings. Shabutdinov was convicted over complaints from buyers of his products, not over political speech.

Nor is there a sound basis for collapsing all of the defendants into a single legal theory. Some cases involved alleged business splitting, others money laundering, others foreign-currency transactions, and another fraud. Defense lawyers in several cases dispute the legal characterization of the conduct, and as of October 2, 2026, some of the judgments have not yet exhausted all levels of appeal.

But if the focus shifts from the presumed motive of an individual investigator to the outcome of the past three years, the picture changes.

Before 2023, a major Russian blogger could possess three assets that depended only weakly on the state: a huge direct audience, an independent revenue stream and a sales infrastructure built on global platforms. These people were not necessarily political. Most of the figures in this story sold fitness, entrepreneurship, psychology and personal success. But their influence existed outside traditional state and corporate institutions.

By 2026, that autonomy had narrowed sharply. A large account must be identified in a state registry. The ability to make money from advertising depends on regulatory compliance and on which platform the blogger uses. The tax service treats the industry as a distinct large sector. The sale of educational products has become the subject of criminal cases and dedicated legislative debate.

That is not proof of a secret decision to “eliminate independent opinion leaders.” But it is a visible political effect.

The problem was not that they opposed the government

Almost none of the best-known defendants belonged to the political opposition. Some went out of their way to demonstrate loyalty to the state. Alexei Blinovsky signed a military contract and went to the war. Portnyagin delivered tens of millions of rubles’ worth of aid to the combat zone. That did not prevent Portnyagin himself from being prosecuted.

What happened is therefore better understood not as a campaign against opposition figures, but as the incorporation of an autonomous sector into a vertical system of rules and accountability.

For a centralized political system, a large independent resource matters in its own right. Millions of people listen every day to a specific individual. That individual can sell a product, raise money, move an audience to another platform or change the subject of the conversation within hours. None of that requires a television channel, a political party, a state corporation or permission from an official.

There is no public evidence that this was the reason the criminal cases were opened. But the new regulatory framework shows that the state considers the identifiability of those audiences — and the ability to influence how they are monetized — important.

From the “Marathon of Desires” to the Roskomnadzor registry

In 2023, the message to the market was straightforward: once revenue reaches the hundreds of millions, tax structures designed for small business no longer work.

By 2024, the message had become tougher: paying the arrears did not guarantee that all criminal exposure would disappear. At the same time, military service became a lawful mechanism for suspending prosecution for some defendants.

In 2025, a different precedent was added to the tax cases: Shabutdinov received seven years over the way an online product had been marketed and sold. By then, the state was already maintaining a registry of major pages and restricting their advertising model.

In 2026, the cases produced a series of endpoints: four and a half years for Blinovskaya, seven years for Artem Chekalin, a suspended sentence for Mitroshina, a suspended sentence and massive fine for Lerchek, four years in absentia for Gasanov, and five years for Portnyagin.

Russia’s influencer business did not disappear. What disappeared was its old freedom of movement.

The market had grown by promising people independence — from bosses, salaries and conventional careers. It ended up far more dependent on the state itself. A major blogger must now be visible to the tax authorities, Roskomnadzor and advertising regulators. And the stories of those who built their audiences before those rules existed have become a practical demonstration of what happens when a new digital economy collides with Russia’s older vertical system of power.