Brother Nation

Ildar and Anton Batrakov grew up in an orphanage in Chuvashia. One of the brothers was sentenced to 24 years in a penal colony, fought in the “Wagner” PMC, was seriously wounded but decided to go back to the front. Another was adopted by Americans. In Russia, he became a star of [the reality show] “Dom-2” but then returned to the United States. Liudi Baikala tells the story of two brothers who call themselves Russian patriots – although one of them did not manage to live in his homeland and the other could not adapt to peaceful life.

The last time the Batrakovs saw each other in person was in a penal colony in the Nizhny Novgorod region. The adopted one had returned to Russia from the United States a few months before – and wanted to see his brother, who was serving time.

The meeting lasted about an hour, but neither Anton nor Ildar can really remember it. “It was just small talk,” recalls the brother who never left Russia. “The guy in front of me was not a Russian kid but a typical American youngster from some TV series. I thought: Is this really my brother?”

“We got fed, we got clothed, had it warm, didn’t get walloped.”

The Batrakovs were brought to the Yolochka (“Little Christmas Tree”) orphanage in 2000. Ildar was eight years old, and Anton was four. Before that, they had lived with their grandmother in the Chuvash village of Novoye Buyanovo. The brothers’ mother, Svetlana, did not participate in the upbringing of the children. As for their fathers, Anton and Ildar never knew them.

The Batrakovs were taken from their home because the guardianship office was not satisfied with the way their grandmother looked after them: she was rather too fond of alcohol. “What the fuck was their problem? This was a village, everyone drank,” Ildar exclaims indignantly. “We got fed, we got clothed, had it warm, didn’t get walloped. What more could anyone ask for?”

Anton Batrakov, now 28, remembers nothing of the life before Yolochka. Ildar, 32, calls landing in the orphanage a tragedy.

The brothers ended up in “Yolochka” on different days. Ildar recalls that he was brought to the orphanage by a care worker, whom he saw for the first time in his life. It was cold and snowing outside; for a long while, they waited at the bus stop. Ildar was crying. He tried to run away, but the woman held his hand tightly. To calm the boy down, she bought him an ice-cream.

“I pushed the ice cream away”, says Ildar. “She didn’t shout at me for that. I guess she knew how I was feeling.”

The Yolochka orphanage is located on the outskirts of the Chuvash town of Shumerlya. Contrary to its name, there are no Christmas trees around it, but great big pine trees. In a conversation with LB [Liudi Baikala], one man who’d lived in the orphanage recalls that the pine trees “always overwhelmed him with their grandeur”.

Shumerlya, surrounded by swamps and forests, has about 25,000 inhabitants. According to one version, the town’s name means “mire” in Chuvash. The town’s main enterprise, a defence plant, makes mobile hospitals and military vehicles for the Russian Ministry of Defence.

Regional officials describe the Shumerlyans as “a very energetic and hospitable people”.

“Grandma would see and beat me with a stick.”

The boys had relatives, but no one took them from the orphanage. Their mother’s brother, Igor Batrakov, tells LB that he once “had thoughts” of adoption. But then he changed his mind: “In the nineties, the whole country was in such a state... I decided the state would take better care of them.”

The grandmother, Zoya Kraeva, would visit her grandchildren in the orphanage. Once, the Yolochka administration allowed her to take the Batrakovs home for the summer. Lyubov Shinkarenko, the 66-year-old former director of the orphanage, tells LB that Kraeva failed to bring back the children on the appointed day, so the institution’s staff went to the village of Novoye Buyanovo.

When Shinkarenko saw where the boys lived, her “hair stood on end”. According to Lyubov, the brothers lived in a “dilapidated banya” (bathhouse) and slept on an “iron bed without a mattress”.

Six-year-old Anton came out to meet the staff – “half-naked, without any pants on”. Shinkarenko recalls: “He was very hungry. We said to him: look, there are cucumbers in the vegetable patch, why don’t you have some? And he said: “I can’t. Grandma would see and beat me with a stick. I still remember his words.”

Shinkarenko adds that later, the grandmother “ran up to them, also half-dressed, in a terribly unsightly state”. She was drunk, too. “We informed her that we were taking the child away, and we did”, the ex-director says. She does not mention Ildar.

Batrakov Sr. remembers that day quite differently. Ildar says that when the Yolochka staff came to take his brother back, he “hid in the bushes” – he really didn’t want to return to the orphanage.

“I remember very clearly how the staff started threatening grandma, pressuring her for hiding the children”, Ildar recalls. “When I saw her getting hysterical, I came out of the bushes, and we went to the orphanage.”

Zoya Kraeva repeatedly tried to take the Batrakovs out of Yolochka. But the guardianship office wouldn’t let her as she continued to drink.

“Hurtled all over Russia”

All of LB’s interlocutors say that the Batrakov brothers were very different from each other. “Anton was all, you know, round eyes, button nose, a smile from ear to ear, like Buratino [the Russian version of Pinocchio, cheerful and charming]. Ildar had that heavy gaze, darkish skin, a broad face – non-Russian blood, clearly. His Dad must have been Armenian or Georgian, one of these dark peoples,” recalls Lyubov Shinkarenko, Yolochka’s former director.

The brothers’ mother, Svetlana Batrakova, lived in quite a few different Russian cities. When she was young, she kept running away from home”, her brother, Igor Batrakov, tells LB. “And as soon as she finished school, she just took off, hurtled all over Russia. Every now and then, she’d turn up for a month or two, and then she’d buzz off again. She was, like... that kind of woman.”

At the beginning of the 1990s, Svetlana left for Azerbaijan and returned with a son, Ildar. Ildar only knows what his mother had told him about his father – namely, that he was a citizen of Azerbaijan who graduated from the Volgograd Police School and worked for the Ministry of Internal Affairs. “There is no reason to trust this information”, Ildar comments dryly. He refers to his mother as “a complete stranger”.

Anton’s father is Sergei Vinogradov, a resident of Samara. Svetlana Batrakova lived with him for several years. He’s had another family for a long time now, though. In 2014, Sergei came to the TV show “Muzhskoye i zhenskoye” (“Male and Female”) to meet Anton, but his son did not want to talk to him.

Svetlana Batrakova came to visit her sons at Yolochka once. According to Ildar’s memories, she did not bring any gifts or treats. “I made sure she got some lunch with the preschool group”, Ildar says. He hoped that his mother would explain why she had abandoned him and Anton, but this did not happen.

In 2010, Svetlana Batrakova was sent to a colony for murder. She was released in 2017 but soon detained again for intentional infliction of serious harm to health. In 2022, Svetlana was released, but again, only for a few months. At the end of 2023, she was sentenced to 15 years in a labour colony – Batrakova killed a drinking buddy; another one was lucky to survive.

“Deprived of football and taken to a madhouse” 

Lyubov Shinkarenko, the former director of Yolochka, remembers Ildar Batrakov as a “tough, harsh boy”. She says that Batrakov Sr. “resented and blamed everyone, including the orphanage staff”.

Ildar repeatedly escaped from Yolochka. “I never really saw myself living at the orphanage. I didn’t understand what I was doing there,” he explains.

Shinkarenko tells LB that during his stay in Yolochka, Ildar was sent to a mental hospital several times. She explains this by Batrakov being “too aggressive”.

Ildar himself believes that the purpose of this “hospital” was to break him: “They beat me with sticks, tied me up, gave me injections, all to drill into my brain that I should obey the director and not contradict her.”

According to Ildar, he was taken away from Yolochka on purpose during major football tournaments. Batrakov not only liked to play himself but also drew up tables for championships, making predictions about which team would win against which. In 2006, he was looking forward to the Mundial. The director of Yolochka sent the 14-year-old away for treatment exactly for the duration of the championship. At the mental hospital, there was no football. Batrakov believes that Shinkarenko did it on purpose.

“Imagine that psychological blow”, Ildar tells the LB journalist. “You are a child; football is all you live for – and then you are deprived of football and taken to a madhouse.”

Yuri Spiridonov, another former Yolochka child, now director at the Chuvashfilm studio, tells a similar story. “They would break a disobedient kid on purpose”, Spiridonov says. “There logic was: if he doesn’t obey, it means he’s crazy.”

Lyubov Shinkarenko does not agree that anyone tried to “break” Batrakov: “Ildar always claimed that it was the orphanage that put him in a mental hospital. Some people like to believe that people who work at orphanages are evil and would send a child into psychiatry just to get rid of him. But things don’t work like that, it’s not true! A child can only be sent there by doctors for medical reasons.”

“Uncomplicated, soft, good-natured” 

“Anton had that smile, that charisma, everyone liked him”, says another Yolochka alumnus, Yuri Spiridonov. He knew both brothers but says he’d only been friends with Anton. “Well, everyone was friends with him!” he laughs.

The younger Batrakov brother tells LB that he liked the carers at Yolochka; still, he always wanted a foster family and was jealous of children who had a real home. “We could only hope for charity people to come to [the orphanage] and give us some new clothes or a treat”, he says. He does not hide that, just like Ildar, he resented his mother, calling her a “morally weak person”.

Lyubov Shinkarenko, the orphanage’s ex-director, remembers Anton as “uncomplicated, soft, good-natured”. She also adds, though, that “he always wanted to be seen, wanted everyone to admire him. He wore those wide jeans. Loved getting a compliment, loved attention.”

She believes that there were no brotherly feelings between the Batrakovs. The Batrakovs themselves think otherwise. Anton assures the LB journalist that he was friends with his older brother and that Ildar “always protected him”.

“I tried smoking when I was seven, and my brother told me to not even think about such bad habits until I was 14”, Anton says. “I remember, once we went to a camp together, and I snatched some food from dinner for him. My brother did not approve of this act and scolded me – Ildar wanted me to be honest.”

When the younger Batrakov turned 14, the head of the local social insurance fund congratulated him on his birthday. She gave the teenager a new football uniform and a pair of trainers. There are still some photos of Anton standing next to the official and smiling directly into the camera.

“If they had only managed to 'find the key'”

Ildar Batrakov still has a photograph from his Yolochka times, too. In the group photo, he is squatting in the very centre. He is the only one wearing headgear, a knit cap. The 13-year-old Batrakov is staring into the lens, unsmiling.

Orphanage alumnus Iosif Sorokin tells LB that Ildar Batrakov was “just like everyone else”. Iosif calls himself Ildar’s friend. “What did we do together?” he muses. “Well, we’d ran off to collect some change at the gas station, we looked for scrap metal, especially aluminium. Ildar was always up for such stuff. We all drank beer. Ildar would go a little further – for instance, he sniffed glue.”

Sorokin claims that Ildar was “not broken even by the hazing” in the orphanage. “The older [pupils] made us do push-ups and 'catch butterflies' (jump up from a sitting position – LB)”, Iosif recalls. “We’d have to squat for an hour, holding up a chair. It brought tears to my eyes, it was worse than the army. Ildar went through it, too. But when he grew up, he did not do anything like that to others.”

Another graduate of the orphanage (she asks not to be named – LB) says that the older Batrakov “instilled fear in many children”. She recalls how one day Ildar decided to find out who at Yolochka was spreading rumours about a friend of his: “He interrogated me and my friend, and he said that if it was us, we were, pardon the expression, fucked.”

The LB interviewee describes that she was “scared out of her wits” because Ildar Batrakov was “capable of bad actions”: “I spent the rest of the day hiding from him in the toilet room.”

Yuri Spiridonov, another orphanage alumnus, calls Ildar “a cocky kid with a heavy gaze”. “He was tougher, stronger than Anton, he could give a dusting to anyone who deserved it. If they [the orphanage management] had only managed to 'find the key' to him, things could have been different”, Spiridonov says.

In 2007, 15-year-old Ildar left the orphanage. First, he tried to become an auto mechanic at a vocational school in Shumerlya. Then he moved to Mariinsky Posad, one of the oldest settlements in Chuvashia, famous for the fact or legend that Yemelyan Pugachev’s Cossacks destroyed a church and a drinking house there and hanged a dozen locals. For almost three hundred years, the town’s trademark was a distillery that produced top-quality vodka. It was closed a few years ago.

In Mariinsky Posad, Ildar tried another apprenticeship, this time as a pastry chef, but he did not finish that one, either. He believes that things did not work out for him because of the “stigma of being an orphanage boy”. The locals, he says, would beat up orphanage guys and take away their apprentice’s dues.

“Then I came there – an independent guy, very bright for my age”, Ildar recalls. “And I quickly changed things. I gathered some guys, and we showed resistance.”

Ildar does not want to talk about the details of this “resistance”. From the court verdicts, we can learn that he was convicted of attempted and actual robbery when he was not yet 18 years old. After that, he spent over a year in the Novotroitsk educational colony.

“Deep Slavic soul”

“It could have been me who ended up in America”, Ildar Batrakov tells LB journalists. “Now that would have been a different life!”

In the 2000s, many Yolochka kids were adopted by Americans. At that time, the Children’s Ombudsman of Chuvashia, Alexander Andreev, reported that 51 % of adopters in the region were foreigners, the most frequent adopters of Chuvash orphans being citizens of the USA, Italy, and Spain. For instance, in 2010, 80 children were adopted in the republic, 42 of whom went abroad.

In order to adopt a Russian child, US citizens had to fulfil several conditions. First, they had to gather the necessary papers and get approval from American immigration services. Second, the needed to pay for an agency’s services in two countries – coordinators translated the documents and accompanied the adoptive parents to the Ministry of Education, the court, the embassy, and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Third, they had to travel to Russia at least three times. For an American, the cost of adopting a Russian child ranged from $35,000 to $60,000. However, adoptive parents received tax breaks and social benefits in the United States, and the children were entitled to free medical care and college education.

Chuvash foster children kept moving to America until 2012, when Russia adopted the Dima Yakovlev Law. In 2013, the overall number of adoptions in the republic fell almost by half, down to 44 cases. The adoptive parents were foreigners only in three cases.

The staff of the orphanage do not say how many children left Yolochka for the USA. Both Lyubov Shinkarenko and current director Tatyana Tsapina reply that they “don’t remember the exact numbers”. “This is a completely irrelevant topic in our difficult times” is Tsapina’s perplexed reaction to LB’s questions.

Lyubov Shinkarenko is sure that the lives of most adoptees in America have turned out “splendidly”. “They got an education and are doing just fine”, she says. “Sure, all sorts of things have happened in the United States. But things happen in Russia too!” Tatyana Tsapina, head of the Shumerlya Centre for Orphans and Children Left Without Parental Care (as Yolochka is now called), adds that she communicates with some of the “American” children, “but only with those who want to keep in touch”.

According to the Yolochka alumnus Yuri Spiridonov, Chuvash orphans in the United States had a “hard time” and “only few found their way in life”. “The girls are mostly married to Latinos, and they have a different faith, they beat their wives, you know. They give birth to five, six children. As for the boys – some of them are in jail, some have already been killed.”

Spiridonov himself left Yolochka at the age of eight – in 1977, he was adopted by a Soviet family. In 2003, 34-year-old Spiridonov was on a business trip to Shumerlya and stopped by the orphanage. In Yuri’s words, this “stirred up childhood memories”, and soon, he began to provide charitable assistance to Yolochka. Spiridonov brought the children bicycles, books, and sweets, organised football tournaments, got the gym repaired. “For the orphans, I became an authority”, he says. “I bought them with my gifts, bought them with my kindness.”

Spiridonov is sure that Russian children should have been left in Russia. “People just don’t realise that you can be happy in our country. Happy simply because you are Russian. The thing is, we have a deep Slavic soul”, the film director argues. “Not to beat about the bush, Mexicans are fuckheads. They are completely different from us, they can turn up at a school and kill some kids, even without any drugs. But if a Russian person gets drunk, he’ll fall face down in a puddle – and cry because cranes are chirping so beautifully in the sky.”

“In America, you can find your future, your stability”

“I am a citizen of Russia; I like my homeland despite its problems. I could never imagine myself living in another country”, says Ildar Batrakov when asked if he, too, wanted to go to the United States. “That’s why I treated Americans negatively and coldly. They were like mannequins when they came to our orphanage: a strained smile, a cold look, some kind of calculation. They didn’t have any love for us.”

The elder Batrakov did not like the fact that when potential adopters from the United States appeared in Yolochka, the orphans were “dressed up in white shirts and dragged to the big hall for introductions”. According to him, headmistress Lyubov Shinkarenko told the children that in Russia, they’d “see nothing and have nothing”.

“In America, you can find your future, your stability”, Batrakov mockingly quotes her. “You’ll find a family that will love you and that will give you everything!”

Ildar claims that out of the entire Yolochka, he was the only one who didn’t want to go to the US.

“I said I would run away or hang myself, but I would not live in America,” he recalls. “The other kids just loved Americans, and I kept telling them not to go. That was one of the things the director didn’t like.”

“But your brother did eventually move to the States…”

“At that time, I realised that my life was already broken,” says the older Batrakov. “It was clear to me that if I couldn’t find myself, Anton would never be able to, either. There was the question of his future. So I agreed to let my brother leave.”

In 2010, 14-year-old Anton Batrakov flew to America. He was adopted by Peter and Catherine Shockey, residents of the state of Missouri. Peter was a doctor, Katherine a housewife. Before the adoption, the couple and their three biological children had flown to Shumerlya to meet Anton; later, he had visited them. The former orphanage director Lyubov Shinkarenko says that “they liked each other” and that she found the family “kind and nice”.

At the same time, 19-year-old Ildar was sentenced to 18 years in a special regime colony.

“Such people are dangerous for society because they are independent and resentful.”

Ildar was convicted of two murders and rape. He had managed to commit them in just a few months after he was released from the penal colony in September 2009.

Six months after his release, Ildar killed a female acquaintance in Chelyabinsk (LB has the verdict at hand) – they quarrelled in the lift of a residential building, Batrakov dragged the girl to the stairwell, beat her unconscious, then laid newspaper sheets on her face and body and set her on fire with a lighter. The next day, the victim died in the burns department of the local hospital without regaining consciousness.

A few days later, Batrakov killed a 72-year-old pensioner in Mari El, a republic close to Chuvashia. According to the investigation, Ildar saw the woman at a Yoshkar-Ola drinking establishment, followed her to the village of Zagury, where she lived, entered her house, beat her with his fists, then with a log, then stabbed her in the neck with a screwdriver and a knife. Then he raped the woman, who was still alive but bleeding to death.

From her home, Batrakov took some gold jewellery and seven hundred roubles. The next day, he returned to the house, which had already been sealed by investigators, and took an old icon and some Soviet coins. He was detained while trying to leave for Cheboksary. In 2012, Ildar was tried again, and several more years for robbery were added to his sentence. In total, he was sentenced to 20.5 years in prison.

Ildar Batrakov himself says he “vaguely remembers those times” and calls them “hard”. “We all did weird things when we were young. Some got lucky, God kept them out of jail”, he says.

Ildar suggests that he fell into the world of crime because “society didn’t accept him”. “People believed that if you were an orphanage boy, they could easily trick you. Not just could but should. Well, and alcohol played its part, too.”

According to the older Batrakov, many of his acquaintances “did not and do not believe” that he “could have done such a thing”. “Judges and lawyers saw me and couldn’t understand how this [crime] could have happened. It was like I was two different people”, says Ildar.

Lyubov Shinkarenko, ex-director of the Yolochka orphanage, comments that she was “not surprised at all” when she learnt about Ildar’s crimes. “Everyone said that he’d end up in a colony, this is where he was headed on his own accord”, Lyubov reasons. “He was looking for adventure, you know?”

Film director Yuri Spiridonov says that since childhood, Ildar “had a worm inside him – [a temptation to] take, steal, beat someone up”. Spiridonov recalls how, after leaving the penal colony, Batrakov asked to spend the night at his place in Cheboksary. Yuri let him sleep in the gym he ran, but in the evening the cleaner called and complained about Ildar – he had tried to rape her.

“She’s an orphan herself, a defenceless girl”, Yuri said. “So he tried to take advantage, made a move. ‘What the fuck are you doing?’ I told him. I had to kick him out.”

“Did Ildar realise why you kicked him out?”

“People like that seem to understand everything – but then they forget all about it. One minute it’s raining, and half an hour later, the sun is shining. Such people are dangerous for society because they are independent and resentful.”

“Unable to adapt”

“The first time I was on a plane was just wow, the first time I saw skyscrapers – another wow!” This is how Anton Batrakov recalls his first trip to America.

He does not deny that he has always dreamed of living in the USA. “I told Ildar: this is fucking America, after all! Look, I’ll grow up and I’ll help you, maybe I’ll become a film director”, he remembers telling his brother.

Batrakov the younger is reluctant to talk about the first four years in the United States. He just says that “the relations with his adoptive parents did not work out”. In the talk show “Muzhskoye i zhenskoye”, Anton stated that the Shockeys were babying him too much, almost trying “to spoon-feed him and sleep in the same bed”. According to Batrakov, he did not attend a regular school; instead, he was constantly taken to church and to adaptation camps.

In 2012, two years after moving to America, Anton wrote a letter to Yury Spiridonov. In it, Batrakov complained that the Shockeys were locking him in the basement, feeding him poorly, and slapping him in the face. After Spiridonov shared that letter, the Chuvash prosecutor’s office stated that Batrakov’s adoption was and remained legal.

“We found that Anton was unable to adapt to the foster family; there were also certain problems in his behaviour”, the prosecutor’s office said.

The foster parents sent Batrakov to the Marygrove Catholic Charity Centre in St. Louis, a treatment facility for children and adolescents under 21. The centre’s website says that young people often end up there after a failed adoption. Most of the wards are diagnosed with behavioural and mental disorders. Anton Batrakov told Russian journalists that the Shockeys had “carted him off to a looney bin, claiming he was inadequate”.

Russian media wrote that Peter and Catherine Shockey accused Anton of molesting their own children, after which he spent 10 months in a juvenile colony. Batrakov himself denies the accusations. The Shockeys did not respond to LB’s messages on social networks. According to our sources, they left the state of Missouri several years ago for Tennessee.

After leaving Marygrove, Batrakov the younger changed several more foster homes. He continued to write appeals and asked to be returned to Russia. The letters were addressed to Russian President Vladimir Putin, children’s ombudsman Pavel Astakhov, and the Russian consul in the United States. Journalists got interested in Anton’s story. It turned out that Batrakov would be able to leave America when he became of age. In 2014, 18-year-old Anton flew to Moscow. Russian diplomats had paid for his ticket.

Many publications reported on the return of the teenager whose life in America had not worked out. On federal talk shows to which Anton was invited, he often spoke about his love for his homeland. For “Muzhskoye i zhenskoye” on Channel One, Batrakov wore a metal ring with the inscription “Russia”. The jewel was shown in close-up. The TV crew also filmed the dormitory where Batrakov was living at the time, complete with the Russian tricolour at the entrance to his room.

“I have always considered myself a Russian citizen”, Anton says to LB. He received Russian citizenship but did not give up his American one. “It could still come in handy.” He also kept his adoptive parents’ surname, Shockey.

“Before even holding a pair of scissors, he imagined himself the best stylist in Moscow.” 

For the next few years in Russia, Anton tried, as he put it, to “find himself”. He came to Cheboksary, spending several months in the family of the film director Yuri Spiridonov, to whom he had written from America. By then, Yuri was married and had three children.

“Anton wasn’t disciplined enough”, says Spiridonov. “He partied till five in the morning. I kept offering him jobs, he said: ‘I don’t want this one, not that one, either.’ My wife had to wash his underwear, he wouldn’t even put it in the washing machine, just threw it on the floor. I told him: don’t be a bastard, Batrakov. You’re a big boy; you have to earn your own money.”

Spiridonov calls Anton Shockey “a very cunning man who’d stop at nothing”. “There is a duplicity in him, some kind of deceitfulness. It’s as if there was another person inside him. In this, he was unlike Ildar. And this makes Anton even more dangerous for society”, Spiridonov believes.

Shockey says that Russian officials did not give him the necessary documents (such as a Russian passport), which is why he could neither learn nor work. Children’s Ombudsman Pavel Astakhov commented that Anton had a “preference for scrounging” and “missed 15 meetings organised for him by the Chuvashia leadership”. In an interview, Astakhov called Shockey “an unfortunate person” who “failed to become a member of society”.

At the end, Anton was placed in a hostel in Cheboksary and apprenticed to be a welder. Yuri Spiridonov cast him in minor roles in his crime films The Battle for Novoyuzhka and Yegor Shilov. During the filming of Battle, Shockey was introduced to Spiridonov’s friend Alexei Yakovlev, a municipal deputy from the Moscow suburbs.

“In the evening, I invited Yura to a restaurant to get some steaks”, Yakovlev tells LB. “And then I saw Anton standing next to us with that hungry look. Well, I asked him to come with us. He turned out to be such an active guy, good to talk to.”

Soon Yakovlev took Shockey to Moscow. “What are you going to do here, in this slightly remote republic?” Aleksey recalls asking Shockey. In Moscow, the MP paid for a hairdressing course – Anton wanted to become a barber. Yakovlev calls Shockey “very hard-working”. “Well, sure, he was a bit full of himself, what with being so young. Before even holding a pair of scissors, he imagined himself the best stylist in Moscow”, he recalls.

In 2015, Anton visited his older brother Ildar in the colony. This was the last time they saw each other in person.

“He’s become a typical American youngster” 

At that time, Ildar Batrakov was in a colony in Nizhny Novgorod region. He had been transferred there from Cheboksary IK-6 after attempted murder: at night, Ildar tried to stab a fellow inmate in the neck with a shiv but missed. Then Batrakov grabbed a chair to hit the other man on the head. But the chair hit the metal bed frame and collapsed. After that, the colony staff ran into the cell and grabbed the attacker.

Ildar explains to the LB journalist that the victim had been “spying on everyone and talking to the bosses”. “I don’t like that kind of thing”, he comments.

Another four years were added to his sentence. He was to be released in 2034. In the colony, Ildar got some prison tattoos, such as the letters “LHVS” on the knuckles of his right hand. The most common deciphering of this abbreviation is “Let thieves be free and cops suck dick” (legavym – khui, voram – svoboda).

This is how his brother Anton saw him that day – with a prison haircut and tattoos. The Batrakovs met in the room for short visits, and their conversation lasted about an hour.

Anton tells LB that he “only vaguely remembers this meeting” and that he “still imagines Ildar as the child from the orphanage, not as an adult”. Ildar says that he was struck by how much his younger brother had changed.

“America left its marks on him”, Ildar describes. “He’s become a typical American youngster. In fancy clothes, with some kind of ring on his hand.”

The elder brother says Anton did most of the talking, “telling things about his life”. Ildar recalls: Anton said he’d never come to a Russian colony again – he was too terrified by the barbed wire.

“Just a tiny pawn in this structure”

After seeing his brother, Anton Shockey met Andrei Razin, producer of the “Laskovy May” band. Razin was touched by the fate of a former orphanage boy and announced that he wanted to make Shockey the band’s new lead singer. This didn’t work out – Anton himself tells LB that while he writes rap, he doesn’t have a voice for songs and “isn’t really a singer”. Still, Andrei Razin did not forget about Anton. Instead of a music career, he made him the coordinator of the programme Vozvrashchenie – “Return”.

Shockey was supposed to find adopted Russian orphans who wanted to return to Russia from other countries. The programme was actively supported by the United Russia party. Razin was an assistant to the United Russia Duma deputy Andrei Isayev; in his turn, Isayev headed the board of trustees of the Solnechny Krug creative centre presided by Razin.

Shockey was given a separate office in the State Duma (“two floors above Isayev’s”); Razin registered him in Moscow and helped him obtain a Russian passport. Photos from that time show Anton wearing stylish suits and ties. In one picture, Shockey, Razin, and Isayev are smiling into the camera, arms around each other’s shoulders, Anton in the centre.

However, Shockey’s career in the State Duma ended after just a few months. Razin accused Anton of constant tardiness; Shockey himself tells LB that he was unable to establish a relationship with Children’s Ombudsman Pavel Astakhov – “he was always busy, at some event or other, or at the theatre or something. He had no time for me.” Shockey says that he “needed help, some kind of state support”, being “just a tiny pawn in this structure, who had to coordinate everything with Isayev and Razin”.

Andrei Razin (who now lives in America) agreed to answer LB’s questions about his work with Anton Shockey in writing, but at the time of publication the editorial board had still not received a reply. Andrei Isayev (still a Duma deputy) refused to talk due to “lack of time”.

Alexei Yakovlev, a Moscow Region ex-deputy, said in a conversation with LB that Razin kept Batrakov “on a tight leash”. “Anton flourished at first, he liked the whole media thing”, Yakovlev says. “But he told me – bro, I’m like a tiger in a golden cage. I’m registered in Tverskaya Street, but I can’t leave the house without permission.”

Shockey’s final quarrel with Andrei Razin occurred in 2016. The producer said that he’d gifted Anton two flats, in Moscow and in Sochi. But Shockey never managed to move in, as he wrote on social networks. Razin published his angry dialogue with Anton on YouTube. The producer suggested that Shockey had been asked to “write beastly things” about him because of the upcoming elections.

“I could be friends with Shockey, but I couldn’t imagine a serious relationship with him.”

A few years after seeing his brother, Ildar Batrakov was transferred to colony No. 29 in Togliatti, a special regime colony for dangerous criminals.

Nikolai, a friend of Ildar’s from Colony 29, describes him as a “bright, intelligent, honest guy”. He also says Ildar “had great potential as a rapper. He could compose on the fly. I’d say something like ‘look, bro, courtyard, window, gate’. And he’d give me a track [with those words] right away. A real artist, not like that faggot Morgenshtern!”

Nikolai himself was imprisoned for drug distribution. He says that the colony administration used both physical force and psychological pressure on the convicts.

“We got back at them the way we could, by cutting ourselves (opening their veins – LB). Ildar cut himself a lot of times”, says Nikolai.

At that time, Anton Shockey was cast for the reality show “Dom-2”. He appeared on the set in 2017. Fans found he looked like “a young Celentano”. On the very first show, Anton talked about the orphanage and the failed adoption.

Viewers remembered not only his difficult fate but also the many fights into which he got.

“He didn’t leave the best impression. What can I say – poor guy!” says one of the “Dom-2” participants, Dmitri Pshenichny, to LB. Pshenichny had got into fisticuffs with Shockey over a girl.

Another contestant, Bulgarian-born Ivana Dilova, tells LB journalists that she found Shockey “weird” when she first met him. “Anton seemed positive, all smiles, and at the same time aggressive and mentally unstable”, Ivana describes. “I could be friends with Shockey, but I couldn’t imagine a serious relationship with him.”

Dilova adds that periodically she and Anton would talk about his childhood. “He used to say that fate didn’t love him”, Ivana says. “I was always friendly to him: after all, such people did not choose their fate, right? Life just happened that way.”

“Sometimes I think, I should have swum better in that shit, made some more money.” 

In “Dom-2”, Anton started a relationship with Viktoria Komissarova from Krasnodar. A few months later, due to financial disagreements with the producers, he and Komissarova both left the programme. Shockey himself says that he’d behaved like a “little boy” in failing to settle the matter with the organisers. Shortly after leaving, Shockey and Komissarova separated.

“Sometimes I think, I should have swum better in that shit, made some more money”, says Shockey. “That’s just how media works – you need some drama, squabbles, fights.” Anton believes that he could have got into show business, worked as presenter for a music channel, if he had stayed in “Dom-2” – and that’s just what he wanted.

In 2018, Anton was again invited to “Dom-2”. At the same time, tabloids began writing that Ildar Batrakov had hanged himself in the colony. The source of the news was Shockey himself, who suggested that Ildar “had mental problems” because of the long time spent in the colony.

Later it turned out that a fellow convict had written to Anton about Ildar’s suicide after hearing a rumour. Actually, Ildar was alive. The Batrakovs would never discuss the suicide story. Ildar tells LB that he was shocked at how easily Anton publicly announced his death.

During his second appearance in “Dom-2”, Anton for a few weeks dated Margarita Ovsyannikova, who was born in the Ukrainian town of Makeyevka (since 2014, under the control of pro-Russian separatists). But Shockey soon left the show again: “Things were no longer the same, the ratings and the producers were different.”

Both Viktoria Komissarova and Margarita Ovsyannikova refused to answer LB’s questions. Komissarova now has a Wildberries shop for children’s clothes. Ovsyannikova records music videos and is known as Philip Kirkorov’s new “maid of honour”: she often appears with the singer at social events. It was with her that Kirkorov travelled to Donbass in February 2024 after that “naked party”. The media reported that the guests visited the “Palace of Creativity” in Makeyevka, where Margarita had danced as a child. Kirkorov presented the children with stationery and action figures depicting himself.

“The guys used to call me stone-cold.”

“The first time I killed an enemy with a bayonet”, Ildar Batrakov recalls, “there was no pity. I just stuck the knife in his eye, that was all. I knew he was the enemy. And the enemy is subject to total destruction.”

Batrakov was sent to the war in Ukraine in autumn 2022 as a member of PMC “Wagner”. Ildar says he signed the contract in the colony “without a second thought”. “If you consider yourself a true man, if you have balls, you must unquestioningly defend Russia”, Batrakov explains his desire to go to war.

He was appointed commander of the assault team. Ildar believes this was due to his fearlessness. “The guys used to call me stone-cold”, Batrakov recalls. “During shelling, I could lie peacefully under a tree, smoking. Nothing could drive me into a trench.”

At the end of January 2023, Ildar was wounded. He says that on that day “the sky was as clear as God” – in the colony, he had become religious. Ildar’s group was shelled by a mortar strike. Some shrapnel went through his left leg, severing his femoral artery. “The entrance wound was the size of a tangerine”, Batrakov describes. “And the exit wound – well, it could easily fit my hand. The doctors couldn’t understand how I survived.”

On the way to the hospital, Ildar says, he was not afraid that he might die: “It was just a shame that I’d been knocked out. I mean, I had so many good tactical plans to destroy the Nazis! I felt kind of ashamed before Russia. It was a bad time for me to get this wound.”

Batrakov said he’d “begged doctors” in the hospital in Luhansk to put him back on his feet within a month, so badly did he want to return to the front. “But then they made it clear that my war service was done. And that destroyed me”, Ildar says. “I was proud to be a Russian soldier. I realised that the whole world was judging the spirit and the weapons of the Russian soldier. And yet I couldn’t fight any longer.”

“I’m kind of a Russian patriot, but unfortunately, I chose America.”

In 2018, after leaving “Dom-2” for good, Anton Shockey returned to Missouri. There, he changed several jobs, from a hotel administrator to a cableman. Shockey says that, at first, one of his former caregivers let him move in.

Lately, Anton has been working as a forklift driver at a factory and doing construction work. “I’ve made $13,000 in two weeks!” Anton boasts to LB journalists in the first half an hour of getting acquainted.

“Beats being a welder in Cheboksary, does it?”

“It’s hard to break your own will when you realise you’re going to earn ten times as much in America!” laughs Shockey.

Lyubov Shinkarenko, the former director of the Yolochka orphanage, believes that Shockey did not stay in Russia because “he was not ready to follow the rules of behaviour that apply to Russian citizens”. Shinkarenko emphasises that Anton “has always been looking for an easy and cool life – and in America, there is more freedom and more money.”

In 2020, Anton married Alexandra Kondratyeva, a Moscow native who’d moved to the US with her parents as a schoolgirl. The couple has a daughter and a son. They took out a mortgage and bought a house in the suburbs of St Louis. Anton’s page in social networks over the past few years has been filled with photos and videos of the children – Shockey singing to them, taking them for a walk, putting them to bed…

In the summer of 2023, Alexandra filed for divorce. Kondratieva stated that Anton had repeatedly subjected her to physical and moral violence in the presence of their children. For instance, in 2021 – their first child was five months old at the time – Alexandra had to call the police. She reported that Shockey had pinned her against the wall and was choking her with both hands. The conflict stemmed from an argument over baby formula. Anton was arrested but later released on bail. While Shockey was in jail, he was fired from his job. Then the couple reconciled and had a second child together. But last year, the final breakup came.

Alexandra refuses to talk to LB as she “does not want to draw attention to herself”. Anton himself denies all accusations of domestic violence and says that Alexandra and he broke up “because of some everyday nonsense”.

Shockey goes on to say that he is now “lost and mentally devastated”.

“I left home. I left everything to my wife and children. I started thinking about suicide. Then I had the idea of going to Russia and volunteering for the war [with Ukraine].”

“Volunteering for the war?”

“Yeah. I didn’t want to die just like that. I’m a Russian Orthodox, and I can’t just [kill myself]”, says Anton. “I wanted to do some good for my country and die honourably. I’m kind of a Russian patriot, but unfortunately, I chose America. Although most Americans are against the Ukrainian war. All our taxes go there. It’s such a waste. If the US wasn’t allocating money to this war, it would have ended long ago.”

Shockey says he even went to the local Orthodox church to discuss his desire with the priest. The priest said: “If your main wish is just to die, that’s one thing, and if it’s to defend your homeland, that’s another”, Anton recalls.

“So which one were you leaning towards?”

“Well, probably the first”, Shockey sighs.

He never went to Russia. He says that his passport was taken away during the divorce proceedings, so now he cannot leave the USA.

“Absolute coldness in his eyes.”

In the last year, Ildar Batrakov has undergone eight operations. He says that all of them failed. He now moves around on crutches. After the hospital, Batrakov went to stay with his relatives in Serov, Sverdlovsk region. There, Ildar tried to get a cash payment for his injury. But Batrakov was refused by the city’s social policy department (the written reply is at the disposal of the LB editorial office), as he was not officially registered at any military unit.

“The social security officer said ‘how can we know, maybe you just fell and hurt your leg!’” Ildar exclaims indignantly.

After he was wounded, Ildar says, the woman with whom he had a long-distance relationship for twelve years while serving his sentence left him. “She came to see me at the colony; difficulties did not scare her”, he says. “But she didn’t approve when I left for the special military operation. And when I was wounded, she just disappeared.”

Batrakov says that he doesn’t trust women anymore, that he despises them. “Judah’s seed”, Ildar expresses himself metaphorically. “They lead an absolutely degraded, that is, depraved life. But God sees and feels everything. I know He felt my sincere remorse for my past deeds. I washed away my guilt with blood.”

In Russia, Ildar was unable to get any job. Batrakov was not hired as a security guard because he could not “walk three hundred metres without crutches”. Others refused him because he had fought in the war. “They’re afraid I’ll freak out”, Batrakov suggests.

Recently, Ildar entered a trolleybus in his military uniform and on crutches. “I stood for half an hour, and no one gave up their seat.” Batrakov does not try to hide his disappointment. “Today, I deeply regret having volunteered to fight for this country.”

This is what Ildar told an LB journalist in March 2024; however, in April, he said that he’d decided to go to the front again. His health problems do not scare him. “There are guys who only have one arm left and still perform combat missions”, Ildar writes to LB, sending a video in which a soldier with an amputated arm is firing a machine gun.

Batrakov suggests he might be taken on as a drone operator. “But really, it’s all the same”, he says monotonously. “I won’t achieve anything here, in peaceful life, and I’m tired of just surviving. It’s better to leave with dignity.”

Batrakov says that lately, he’d had neither money nor accommodation. Sometimes, he has to spend the night “in house entrances and on benches”. Ildar claims that neither his relatives nor his fellow soldiers help him financially.

“Nothing surprising about that – I’m an orphan, and that’s what I’ll always be”, says Ildar. “Yes, I have a brother, but when he learnt that I was on the street, he was not particularly touched by it. He’s got his own life.”

Ildar Batrakov did not tell Anton Shockey that he was going to the front.

P.S. Lyubov Shinkarenko, the ex-director of Yolochka, blames the fate of the Batrakov brothers not only on their relatives but also on their older friend and orphanage alumnus, the film director Yuri Spiridonov. She is sure that all the charity toward Yolochka on the part of Spiridonov is only a way of showing off.

“He pretended to be that good, kind uncle, but that meant surrounding the children with pseudo-love”, Lyubov says. “And this is not the way to do it. Orphans need to be loved for real, never mind what they are like.”

Yuri Spiridonov tells LB that the Yolochka staff “were constantly stealing from the children”. He recalls how the food he brought in was nicked right in front of his eyes. “Sure, it’s not easy to work in an orphanage. But if you’ve taken on that job, you have a big responsibility, don’t you? You came to this job for a reason, didn’t you?” he addresses some imaginary interlocutor. Yuri says that he has a hard time tolerating injustice because his foster parents gave him “what matters most – honesty and integrity”.

The film director Yuri Spiridonov was convicted of fraud in 2017. He promised relatives of prisoners to help with parole, taking up to 700,000 roubles per person for this service. He was given a two-year suspended sentence.

The ex-director of the Yolochka orphanage Lyubov Shinkarenko was convicted of embezzlement and forgery in 2015: she’d sent her granddaughter to Crimea together with orphanage children at the expense of Chuvash budgetary funds. She was fined 50,000 roubles. Shinkarenko was also banned from holding positions in state institutions for three years. Now she is a pensioner, frequents an “Active in Old Age” club, enjoys dancing, and is fond of theatre.