Is it true that Dmitry Nagiyev is the author of the anti-war text “Our Victory!”?

At the beginning of April 2022, a short essay circulated on social networks, in which the militaristic pathos of our days is projected onto the events of the 1930s and 1940s. The author of the essay is the famous showman Dmitry Nagiyev. We checked whether he actually published such text.

The text begins with a story about the difficult fate (dekulakization, camps, penal battalion, disability) of the potential reader’s grandfather, and ends with the following fragment:

“77 years have passed. You stuck “We can repeat” on your credit German foreign car. You put the letter Z on your avatar on the networks. You rejoice at the new war, you write denunciations against national traitors. A month later you were going to celebrate something there. You love the parade - you really like the tanks. In the stands, you might spot the veteran who once took aim at your grandfather's back. Or maybe the one who once hit your grandmother right in the temple with a rifle butt. Or maybe it won’t be them - in any case, you don’t think about it. In the morning, you will dress your children in military uniforms and give them toy machine guns. They will read a poem on camera about the heroic exploits of that war. You are happy, invigorated, in high spirits, and you even found the only photograph of your grandfather so that you can proudly march with it around Moscow, putting a cap with a red star on your head. “Our victory,” you will think with pride. In the evening you will get drunk with friends. Going down into the courtyard, you will roar “hurray” to the exploding fireworks, and then in slurred language tell your drinking buddies that your grandfather fought, that then they crushed the fascist reptile, and now even more so, then we reached Berlin, and now we will reach Kyiv. You will shout that “fascism will not pass!”, without realizing that fascism, in fact, has never passed here.

In the morning you’ll be hungover and for some reason you’ll move on with your life.”

The text signed by Nagiyev was actively distributed on social networks in early April 2022. So, straightaway some publications, made on April 6 by ordinary Facebook users, each received around 2,100–3,600 reposts in just a matter of days. More one, posted on April 4, generated more than 2,000 shares. The text is also very popular in public pages in “VKontakte"

It’s easy to monitor Dmitry Nagiyev’s activity on social networks. The actor has only one confirmed and regularly updated account - in Instagram. From February 24 until the beginning of April, only two posts appeared in it. IN first, dated March 12, the showman said goodbye to his subscribers on the eve of Instagram blocking in Russia. "Goodbye. We will definitely meet again. I love you, despite the tart taste of lost hopes. As my grandfather said before communion: “What have I done, old man?”, read Nagiyev’s address. As background music, Dmitry chose a fragment of the song “Train on Fire” by the Aquarium group, which began with the words “According to new intelligence data, we were at war with ourselves.” Nevertheless, four days later Nagiyev got in touch again, informing to subscribers who are in Russia and are not going anywhere: “Dima is at home.”

Dmitry Nagiyev did not comment on the situation in public anymore, which did not interfere with the resource Politeka On March 1, under a fresh heading, post an old report on showman Nagiyev’s visit to post-Maidan Ukraine, which in fact turned out to be fasting on VKontakte for 2014 from a completely different, unknown citizen named Dmitry Nagiyev. However, we are not interested in this report, but in the above essay.

At the very end of the essay, before the name and surname of the TV presenter, you can see the signature “Bell XXI”. This is not the title of a work, as one might think, but the name of a relatively popular Telegram channel, operating since January 9, 2022 and positioning itself as an uncensored online newspaper. Among his publications for March 30, one can indeed find an essay familiar to us "Our victory". But there is no signature under it - the text is anonymous. Nagiyev’s name along with his photograph will appear under the essay in the coming days - for example, on April 2 in “LiveJournal"

It would seem that the issue has been resolved. However, a more thorough study of Internet resources leads us to the conclusion that the text “Our Victory” was born much earlier than the spring of 2022. He could be found on social networks and 2020, and in 2018 - only without the sentence about the letter Z on the avatar, without mentioning Kyiv and with other dates in the story. It is easy to establish that the text comes first posted Russian journalist Alexander Tverskoy on his Facebook on May 6, 2017, three days before the celebration of Victory Day. Today, neither the post nor even the account exists anymore, but history has preserved the name of the author. Moreover, on the same days, Tverskoy published another post with similar content, reprinted next to resources. But TV presenter Dmitry Nagiyev has nothing to do with these texts.

Incorrect quote attribution

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