Russia's Ministry of Internal Affairs opened a formal review on September 10, 2026, into the Telegram channels and VKontakte community known as "Ne Sushchiy Svet" (roughly, "The Light That Isn't"), following weeks of public backlash over its misogynistic content, paid seduction courses and alleged links to real-world assaults.
The network, running since 2019, includes two Telegram channels and a VKontakte group with a combined 154,000 followers on VKontakte and 261,000 across the two Telegram channels. It runs contests in which participants must submit photo or video proof of sex with a specific woman, and it sells a paid course called "Conqueror of Natashkas" that claims to teach men how to talk women into sex within minutes using a fixed "script." Seven cohorts of the course have already run.
Contests and prize money
Two contests, "Hunt for the Mammoth" and "Hunt for Kuraga," offered 100,000 rubles each to whoever had sex with the heaviest or the oldest woman, while a contest called "Alpha Male" offered 50,000 rubles to whoever "closed" the most women by the end of the course. Organizers required participants to post proof in a group chat, including photographs of women on scales and images or video showing sex acts, and the network reportedly circulated a guide on how to drug women.
Maria Rusakova, a former singer with the group Band'Eros, was among the first to draw wide attention to the community, posting about it on Instagram, a platform owned by Meta, which is banned in Russia as an extremist organization. She said the group's closed chats contained hundreds or thousands of sexual encounters filmed and posted without the women's consent.
A course that sells for up to 350,000 rubles
The "Conqueror of Natashkas" course, the network's main product, costs between 200,000 and 350,000 rubles ($2,000-$3,500), with a free introductory version used to draw in paying customers. The group also sells supplements marketed as potency boosters.
Advertising for the course reportedly runs daily across 20 large Telegram channels, with individual posts costing up to hundreds of thousands of rubles. The Telegram channel Baza estimated a full three-month promotional campaign costs between 7 million and 14.6 million rubles. Blogger Alexander Koven, who describes himself as a feminist, estimated that each course cohort brings the network at least 30 million rubles.
Preaching toward believing teenage girls
Alongside crude insults toward women in general, the group's writings single out one group for approval: religious, virgin girls as young as 16. A co-founder using the pseudonym Speedy Gonzales, described by the group as its second-in-command, wrote that a 30-year-old man and a 16-year-old wife made the most harmonious union, and said he personally would only pursue a relationship with a believing virgin.
Followers echoed the group's rhetoric in the comments under a post reacting to the killing of a 12-year-old boy, who authorities say was lured into an abandoned building and killed by two older girls. Commenters blamed feminism for the killing and made hostile remarks about women in general.
Ties to real assaults
According to the outlet Baza, a 30-year-old man named Huseyn, recently employed at a massage salon, raped a 21-year-old client. Baza reported that Huseyn followed "Ne Sushchiy Svet" and had reposted its material on humiliating women. He has since been detained and placed in custody, Baza reported.
A separate subscriber remains free. His wife told the broadcaster REN-TV that after he encountered the community, he began beating and biting her hard enough to leave scars, and that he attacked her friends so violently that one of them fell from a window.
Women fight back with public exposure
As the community's posts drew wider attention, women online began identifying and publicly shaming subscribers who had not hidden their names or contact details. Psychologist and blogger Alexandra, who posts as ne.psihuy, tagged the construction company Good Wood after finding that one of its architects, identified as Ivan, followed the channel. A Good Wood representative said the company reviewed the situation internally and mutually agreed to end its relationship with the employee.
Alexandra also flagged an oncologist and mammologist from Ufa who had left an approving comment under one of the group's posts, asking how a woman undergoing a cancer screening would feel knowing her doctor followed a channel that calls women stupid and worse. His employer, the clinic TochnoClinic, said social media posts alone do not establish wrongdoing but promised to investigate if Alexandra filed a formal complaint.
In a separate case, a Moscow woman identified a man who left her an offensive comment as an employee of a premium car dealership; after she complained to his employer, he was fired.
Who is behind the network
The network's most visible administrator, besides Speedy Gonzales, is Pavel Inakov, who runs the main Telegram channel and sells the courses under his name; he has also written two books titled "Bearded Bastard" and "The Male." Blogger Alexander Koven said he identified several other people behind the project, including a 26-year-old marketer and social-media specialist originally from Volgograd who now lives in Saint Petersburg and, according to Koven, regularly donates to extremist organizations.
Koven said Speedy Gonzales is 23 years old and holds the trademark for "Ne Sushchiy Svet" through his own sole proprietorship. Koven also said Pavel Inakov is in fact Pavel Slobodenyuk, a 33-year-old born in Ukraine's Odesa region and a Ukrainian citizen whose current place of residence he could not determine. Journalists at the outlet Regnum reached a similar conclusion but said the man, whose name they rendered as Pavlo, is 36 and lives in Kyiv. The outlet Net, Eto Normalno described Inakov as a simplified version of an incel guru whose followers do not credit him with any original ideas but who gives them someone to share their resentment of women with.
Koven said he passed all the information he gathered to law enforcement. Russia's Interior Ministry announced its review of "Ne Sushchiy Svet" for possible unlawful activity on September 10, 2026.
