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Starting on 12 November 2016, the day after Donald Trump’s shock victory in the US Presidential Election, a Russian politician and internet activist called Konstantin Rykov posted two bizarre and outlandish Facebook Posts in which he claimed that he and his team had been working for “four years and two days” on ensuring “the victory of Donald in the election of the US President”.
The Facebook posts were like something from The Matrix.
Rykov claimed that, during a US Presidential Election debate between Barack Obama and his challenger Mitt Romney in 2012, he and his colleagues had the “insane idea” that they would “digitize all possible types of modern man” and “change their perception of reality” to elect the New York property tycoon to the presidency.
To do this, Rykov went on to say that Donald Trump himself solicited a “special scientific department of Cambridge University”.
Who is Konstantin Rykov? Who are his colleagues? What is the special scientific department in Cambridge? And what has this got to do with Russian interference in British politics?
The Super Secret Weapon
Rykov is a maverick online entrepreneur, politician and disrupter. An early adopter of internet memes, conspiracy theories and social media disinformation, he founded the anarchic idiot.ru website and a lucrative dark net prostitution service called Dosug before being recruited by Russian state TV to run its internet department and other news websites.
So strong was Rykov’s association with the early years of political trolling, sock puppets, automated avatars and other kinds of information operations that, as early as 2007, his bot armies were described as “Rykovians” or “Rykovites”.
The success of Rykov’s digital warfare soon drew the attention of another playful but powerful ideologue: Vladimir Putin’s former deputy chief of staff Vladislav Surkov, a master of ‘non-linear’ warfare.
Surkov was infamous for deploying all the tricks of theatre and reality TV to create fake opposition parties and sow counter-narratives and conspiracy theories so that Putin’s opponents were constantly lost in a hyper-real fog of doubt and despair. He appears to have adopted Rykov as his protégée. By 2008 – at the age of only 28 – Rykov was elected as a deputy in the Russian Parliament for the ruling United Russia party and became known as Putin’s internet guru.
So, as a provable Kremlin propagandist, Rykov certainly has the credentials to make his extraordinary claim about the 2016 US Presidential Election. Moreover, there is independent corroboration that he was supporting Trump in October 2012.
Rykov’s friend, the young oligarch Artem Klyushin, was in the room with Trump in 2013 during the Moscow Miss Universe event where his candidacy was discussed with Russian oligarch Aras Alagarov.
By 2015, Rykov had created his own site based on Trump’s famous ‘Make America Great Again’ slogan – only in Russian.
Rykov was also part of a wider strategic project to undermine the European Union after the war in Ukraine. He was advocating for Scottish and Catalonian independence in 2014, renaming himself McRykov and insisting that “Scotland will be free”. During the Maidan uprising in Kyiv against Putin’s ally Viktor Yanukovych, he was pushing conspiracy theories that the EU shot 100 or so demonstrators.
By this point, according to British intelligence, the Kremlin had “a secret black budget of tens of millions of dollars” earmarked for populist-nationalist politicians who were opposed to the EU. Text messages show Rykov, using his familiar first name ‘Kostya’, discussing with one of Putin’s top advisors how to get Marine le Pen’s National Front to recognise the recently annexed Crimea in return for