With help from his readers, Ekho Moskvy journalist Alexander Plushev has unmasked what he calls a “grief factory,” claiming that activists from the pro-Kremlin movement “Anti-Maidan” secretly staged a demonstration in Moscow earlier this week, in memorial of the victims killed in Monday’s subway bombing. On April 3, after the terrorist attack in St. Petersburg, a group of young people appeared in downtown Moscow, laying flowers at the Leningrad “hero city” monument along the Kremlin Wall. Russia’s new media promptly covered the story, hailing it as a spontaneous outpouring of civil spirit.

Many of the flowers, Plushev noticed, were identical. Calling the demonstration “blood publicity,” he asked his readers to identify the demonstrators, who described themselves to TV reporters as students at Bauman Moscow State Technical University (MGTU). Within a couple of hours, Plushev got an email from Alexander Kukin, an MGTU alumnus, saying the university never organized any visit to the Kremlin on April 3. As it turns out, the young people who laid flowers at the Leningrad memorial weren’t students — they were pro-Kremlin activists.