Pozdnyakov Vladislav Viktorovich

Russian blogger, Z-propagandist.

Born in the Kazakh SSR in Aktyubinsk (now Aktobe) on February 22, 1991, then he and his parents moved to the village of Balakovo, Saratov region. According to him, he entered the Balakovo Medical College, worked as a paramedic, but before graduation, due to a conflict with the college administration, he quit his studies.

Around 2016, he created the closed VKontakte community “Male State,” where various girls were condemned for dissolute behavior and details of their intimate lives were posted, including photographs and videos. Often the material was posted from the 2000s or even the 1990s, while at the time of the creation of the “Male State” community, many of them were already married and had children.

“Male State” quickly recruited participants and already in 2017 Pozdnyakov announced its transformation into an organization with regional branches. The ideology was called patriarchy and Russian Nationalism. Propaganda information against LGBT people, promiscuous women, and interethnic marriages was published on the movement’s resources.

Pozdnyakov’s information campaigns include attacks on the Khachaturian sisters, accused of murdering their father, gay blogger Andrei Petrov, and a single mother from Krasnodar who adopted a black child. The Tanuki sushi bar chain filed a lawsuit against Pozdnyakov for 158 thousand rubles for his information campaign against the restaurant. The Man State was outraged by advertisements featuring black men and white girls. According to the plaintiff, because of Pozdnyakov, Tanuki customers began to refuse orders en masse. The Nizhny Novgorod Court satisfied this claim.

Pozdnyakov personally used rather harsh and radical statements like: “If there is a lone nationalist in Russia who will kill them, I will not feel sorry for them.” However, due to the large number of supporters of the movement and the lack of control by the leadership, more serious acts were committed on behalf of the “Male State,” namely direct threats of murder and violence. Supporters of the “Male State” even carried out false mining of the “Tanuki” network.

At the same time, the “Male State” positioned itself as an opposition movement, regularly criticized the current regime in Russia, its activists took part in the anti-corruption actions of Alexei Navalny, and conducted training in knife fighting and shooting.

Since 2017, a consistent persecution of Pozdnyakov and the “Male State” began; activists of the local branch of the organization were detained in Khabarovsk on charges of participation in an extremist community. Four students received sentences of about two years in prison. The sentence was later overturned. In many ways, this case is similar to the “New Greatness” case, when an “extremist” cell was essentially created by FSB provocateurs.

In December 2018, Pozdnyakov himself was convicted under Article 282 of the Criminal Code for “Inciting hatred or enmity.” The head of the “Male State” received a two-year suspended sentence, but the sentence was soon overturned due to the decriminalization of the act.

In 2020, the resources of the “Male State” began to be blocked. Thus, the “Male State” group on the social network “Vkontakte” was closed for “calls for violent action.” At the time of blocking, the group consisted of over 150 thousand people. In 2021, Telegram blocked the “Male State” resource at the request of Apple and Google. In total, Pozdnyakov’s blocked resources include the channels “Male State”, “NAP”, “Pozdnyakov”, “Pozdnyakov 2.0”, each of them had tens of thousands of subscribers.

In 2021, even Kremlin propagandist Vladimir Solovyov drew attention to Pozdnyakov’s activities. The “Male State” has made enemies among feminists, LGBT activists, national minorities, Kremlin propagandists, and entrepreneurs. As a result, in October 2021, the movement was declared extremist by a decision of the Nizhny Novgorod court.

Pozdnyakov himself stated that he had left Russia and was allegedly in Poland. In this regard, LGBT movements submitted requests to the Polish authorities in order to extradite Pozdnyakov to Russia, but the requests were not satisfied. According to politician Vladimir Milov, Pozdnyakov never crossed the border with Poland and is not on EU territory.
He repeatedly published false reports about his arrests and murders in order to attract attention to himself. He is actively criticized not only by ideological opponents, but also by Z-patriots as “an accomplice of Ukrainian information and psychological special operations,” as well as by nationalists as “a mestizo and a latent homosexual.”

At the moment, he runs the telegram channel “Pozdnyakov 3.0.”, which has 430 thousand subscribers, as well as several private channels.

- Support for Putin’s aggression against Ukraine. Even before the invasion of Ukraine, Pozdnyakov named the possible start date of the aggression as February 15, 2022. Probably due to his large number of subscribers, he may have received some insider information.
After the invasion began, he actively supported the aggression, calling for the occupation of Ukraine up to Lvov, inflicting more serious attacks on the infrastructure, and mobilizing a larger number of the population. His telegram channel daily publishes a large number of posts that incite hatred and call for the killing of Ukrainians. All this is allegedly justified by the interests of the russian nation.

Pozdnyakov received a large audience for the channel due to the fairly prompt publication of news from other open sources, as well as for exclusive content that was received in an unclear way. Thus, among these publications there are videos and photographs of the killings of Ukrainian Armed Forces soldiers by Russian troops and vice versa. At the same time, Pozdnyakov accompanies only the latest materials with angry comments and calls for revenge. Pozdnyakov does not condemn the killings of Ukrainian Armed Forces soldiers. Quite a large amount of content consists of combat footage. The materials are accompanied by praise for the actions of soldiers of the RF Armed Forces, for example:

“Bakhmut area. The wounded Russian soldier, in order not to surrender to the Ukrainian, shot himself in the mouth.... The Russian is not afraid of death! Eternal memory to the hero,” reads the commentary on one of the videos.

To attract attention to his channel, Pozdnyakov often uses fake information and false forecasts. For example, he reported on the planning of a nuclear strike on Kherson, a serious offensive by the Russian Armed Forces in August 2023.

Pozdnyakov also spreads fake information about himself personally. So in October 2023, he stated that he may have been poisoned by the Ukrainian special services. Earlier, in June, he announced a public gathering for protection for himself, due to possible threats to life and health.

At the same time, despite the radical support of the government’s foreign policy, Pozdnyakov continued to criticize President Putin’s domestic policies, especially in the field of interethnic relations, and also fully supported Prigozhin’s putsch in June 2023. Thus, we can conclude that Pozdnyakov is a Z-patriot who is quite sincere in his beliefs.