“Male State” (MG) was created by Vladislav Pozdnyakov in October 2016 within the framework of a closed community on the social network “VKontakte”. The movement’s activities are mainly carried out in the Internet environment: community members are engaged in bullying, threats and persecution of women, black people, people in interracial relationships, and LGBT people. In 2020, the “Male State” community was blocked by the “VKontakte| administration for “incitement to violent action”. By the time of blocking, the group consisted of over 150 thousand people. After the blocking of the “Male State” and two more of his communities on “VKontakte”, Pozdnyakov began to actively maintain his channel in Telegram, with more than 80 thousand subscribers.
According to former member of MG [Dmitriy Popov](https://moloko.plus/takeafapalready), Pozdnyakov’s main idea were hype and earning money: “We immediately planned to make money from advertising, so the calculation was to raise high-profile topics that would provoke controversy – first and foremost, relationships. The most violent reactions were always the posts with the girls’ revelations. We were approached by subscribers, asked to check the fidelity of their girlfriends, and, frankly, there was rarely a girl who did not fall for some tricks. Then it was published or not according to the guy’s wishes, and there was always a flurry of comments under such stories”.
However, the MG administration did not intend to limit itself to the topic of relations and actively developed a political agenda. The leitmotif of their discourse was criticism of the current government: forced conscription, the oligarchic system, corruption, and restrictions on freedom of speech. Gradually, discussions of gender relations and socio-political news crystallized what the MG members later called their ideology: national patriarchy.
MG’s first public appereance was on March 26, 2017 during anti-corruption rally organized by Alexei Navalny. At the unsanctioned march, the members of the public interest group, including the group’s administrator Dmitry Popov, showed up with flags (a white eagle with the letters MG on a black background) and tried to hand out their leaflets to other protesters, but their agitation activities were quickly interrupted by the riot police.
By 2017 MG had not only its own documented ideology and symbols, but also branches throughout Russia – in St. Petersburg, Chelyabinsk, Ryazan, the Krasnodar Territory – and even outside of Russia, for example in Ukraine, where the name of the public group was localized. Participants began to go offline and hold gatherings in their cities, sometimes combining meetings with hand-to-hand or knife-fighting training. The curators intended this to bring members together and allow them to get to know each other better. An FSB operative was infiltrated into one of these cells in Khabarovsk, and four members of the community were detained in December 2017 and sentenced to real terms in March 2019. All four of them pleaded guilty. In July 2019, the verdict was overturned on appeal and sent back for reconsideration; in January 2020, they were convicted again, and the sentences were reduced.
During FIFA World Cup 2018 in Russia Pozdnyakov created Buceta Rosa community where he gathered fighters for the moral image of Russian women. They collected photos and videos of girls flirting with foreign fans. In late September 2018, Pozdnyakov was detained, and his apartment was searched. While he was serving five days of arrest under an administrative article, investigators gathered evidence in the criminal case – they found publications inciting hatred of women in the MG group VKontakte, which was closed at the time. For the next two months, the fitness trainer could only share his ideas with fellow inmates. At the end of 2018, the Soviet Court sentenced the MG ideologue to two years of probation. In March 2019, the sentence was overturned due to the partial decriminalization of Article 282 of the Criminal Code.
After release Pozdnyakov created Nationalism and Patriarchy community on “VKontakte”. In May 2019 there were reports that Pozdnyakov left Russia for political reasons. Now his “[VKontakte](https://vk.com/doktorvladi)” page shows a new location: Mainz, Germany. Currently all “Male State” accounts on VK were banned and Pozdnyakov moved his activity on telegram-channels https://t.me/doktorvladi and https://t.me/butylka1488
