Tabak Vladimir

General Director of ANO "Dialog"

Born in 1986 in Moscow.
Graduated from Moscow State University named after M. V. Lomonosov. In 2010, he was the author of the idea of a calendar with photographs of former and current students of the Faculty of Journalism of Moscow State University in underwear, who that way “congratulated” the then Prime Minister of the Russian Federation Vladimir Putin on his birthday. According to information in the media, Tabak, who was then a student himself, managed to “sell” the idea of the calendar to Vladislav Surkov, who was then deputy head of the Presidential Administration of the Russian Federation and with whom he was introduced by the notorious Kremlin propagandist Kristina Potupchik.
From 2015 to 2016, Vladimir Tabak worked as creative director of Mirror LLC. In 2019, he took the positions of Deputy General Director of the Internet Development Institute and Deputy Head of the Situation Center under the Public Projects Directorate of the Presidential Administration of the Russian Federation.
Since 2020 - First Deputy General Director of ANO Dialog, since December 2021 - General Director of ANO “Dialog” and ANO “Dialog Regions” (infamous near-Kremlin structures with the help of which the AP is trying to control social networks). ANO “Dialog” participated, in particular, in developing a campaign to vote for odious “amendments” to the Constitution, and then the organization was entrusted with informing about the situation with the COVID-19 epidemic, including the fight against so called fakes. At the same time, although the voting on the amendments took place in the midst of a pandemic, Dialog urged people “not to be afraid of COVID and go to the polling stations.”
According to information in the media, ANO “Dialog” has created regional management centers - these organizations are essentially responsible for PR for the authorities of various Russian regions. We are talking about the creation and maintenance of public pages on social networks not only by administrations, but also by organizations reporting to them, including schools. According to the “Dialog” training manual, the school information resources/accounts should publish news about the decisions of the president and government of the Russian Federation, about the work of the local governor, about Russia’s successes in science and sports, and – with the outbreak of the war in Ukraine – also about this war and one of the “Dialogue” projects is about “embedding teachers into patriotic themes” and turning them into “public opinion leaders” for promotion on social networks pro-government narratives. The first test of such regional centers, in collaboration with the Ministry of Telecom and Mass Communications of the Russian Federation and ANO Digital Economy, were launched in six regions in April 2020. In the summer of 2020, a subsidiary structure “Dialog Regions” was established to work with the regions (it is responsible for the creation of such centers). As of 2022, this organization employed more than 2.5 thousand people, and 6.5 billion rubles were transferred from the budget of the Ministry of Digital Development of the Russian Federation for its activities (for comparison: ANO Dialog itself received only 1.8 in 2022 billion). In total, as of the end of 2022, Dialog had centers in 93 regions and federal districts of Russia.
Representatives of “Dialog” visited the occupied territories several times – for example, Donetsk and the occupied part of the Zaporizhzhya region. The government decree on the rules for providing subsidies to “Dialog” states that the regional centers should work in the “Donetsk People’s Republic, Luhansk People’s Republic, Zaporizhzhya region and Kherson region.” “Dialog” itself has already reported that it teaches Mariupol civil servants how to managen “pro-state inline communities” And their “media workshop” was attended by residents of the occupied territories - the winners of the “Leaders of Revival” competition, invented by the Presidential Administration to find reliable collaborators capable of occupying leadership positions in the “new regions”.
According to Dialog’s own reports, the organization distributed on social networks fakes about the war in Ukraine - for example, that servicemen of the Armed Forces of Ukraine allegedly began selling their awards on the eBay platform, that the mobilization of women has begun in Ukraine, or that in Poland Ukrainian refugees are offered “humiliating” vacancies. This area of work appeared in Dialog a few months after the start of the war, and at least 60 people were involved in it, and, according to the media, the topic of fakes was personally approved by Vladimir Tabak.
The media claim that Dialog cooperates with the pro-Kremlin publication Readovka and with the network of telegram channels of Kristina Potupchik - it is known that in 2022, Dialog Regions transferred more than 50 million rubles to the Rokk Media company (owned by Elena Berdova, the mother of the former Potupchik ’s husband Anton Berdov; earlier Baza found Berdov and Potupchik’s house in Spain worth about 500 thousand euros). Among the “partners” of the ANO “Dialog”, one of the largest tabloid telegram channels Mash is also mentioned, as well as the channels “Z-military correspondents” Colonelcassad Boris Rozhin and “Unofficial Bezsonov” Daniil Bezsonov, as well as the telegram channels of propagandist Vladimir Soloviev (the main channel “Soloviev" with 1.3 million subscribers and the unofficial channel "Soloviev Live " with 10 thousand subscribers).
Also, after the start of the war in Ukraine, “Dialog” took over the information support of the Russian Ministry of Defense (this is handled by Tabak’s deputy Tikhon Makarov), while also distributing posts criticizing the head of the Wagner PMC, Yevgeny Prigozhin, who was in conflict with the Russian Ministry of Defense. “Dialog”, represented by the same Tikhon Makarov, also oversees the propaganda telegram channel “War on Fake News”.
In addition, already at the beginning of the war, “Dialog” had the “Tribunal” project - the website and telegram channel “Tribunal” (70 thousand subscribers), a kind of attempt to make “a pro-Kremlin analogue of the Ukrainian ‘Peacemaker/Myrotvorets’.”
According to media reports, Dialog is also involved in the supervision of telegram channels that mimic Ukrainian ones, but act from a pro-Russian position. The Ukrainian media outlet Texty counted 120 such telegram channels of the same type created since March 2022, of which 68 were created in the first two weeks of the war. The publication noted that based on the regions that these channels “represented,” one can evaluate Russia’s military ambitions: Zaporizhzhya, Sumy, Mykolaiv, Zhitomir and Dnipropetrovsk regions, as well as Odessa, Luhansk, Donetsk, Kyiv and Kharkiv. Pseudo-Ukrainian channels are actively reposting “War on Fake News ”.
It is known about the attempts of the ANO “Dialog” to censor content on Russian online information platforms, for example, on “Yandex.Dzen”: for example, employees of the organization asked to remove (allegedly “due to fakes”) three videos from the blog of opposition politician Ilya Yashin, recorded in the first month of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, and as a result, Ilya Yashin’s blog was nevertheless blocked - at the request of Roskomnadzor.
According to Meduza publications, one of the important areas of Dialog’s work is “Internet sociology,” and the results of the organization’s surveys also reach Vladimir Putin (although their reliability is doubtful even among officials of the Presidential Administration of the Russian Federation). This is done by the “sociological agency” “Weber” subordinate to the “Dialog”; in fact, this is the “Dialog” department for sociology, which was separated into a separate company. “Weber’s” work is supervised by Elena Udalova, a former employee of VTsIOM, head of the ANO Dialog department .

Ensuring the functioning of the system of state power under the dictatorship of Vladimir Putin and organizing the dissemination of propaganda for the aggressive war of the Russian Federation against Ukraine.
As described above, Vladimir Tabak, being the head of ANO Dialog, manages the important area for the Kremlin (and in particular for Sergei Kiriyenko) in the dissemination of propaganda (including a pro-war one) on social networks and executing control over them. Representatives of ANO “Dialog” visit the occupied territories, help develop government structures there, and are actively engaged in propaganda and disinformation on the topic of Russia’s war against Ukraine.
Thus, as one of the important functionaries of the regime, Vladimir Tabak bears full responsibility for the actions that are carried out by his state machine - especially for crimes related to the full-scale aggressive war unleashed by the Kremlin in February 2022.
In July 2023, the European Union added ANO Dialog to the sanctions list as a company responsible for conducting a campaign aimed at “distorting information and disseminating propaganda” about the Russian Federation’s aggressive war against Ukraine. Also included in the sanctions list was the head of the department of strategic directions of the ANO Dialog, Timofey Vasiliev (also known as Timofey V) .
According to the Ukrainian information portal “War and Sanctions”, Vladimir Tabak organized several campaigns in support of Vladimir Putin, ensuring his retention in power, and was also involved in the censorship of information by the largest Russian news aggregator Yandex News (Yandex News) .