“INTERNET operators needed! Work in a chic office in OLGINO!!!!” read the ad posted in August 2013. “The task: posting comments on relevant internet-sites, writing thematic posts, blogs, social networks.” The job, an undercover reporter who applied for it discovered, was with the then new, now notorious Internet Research Agency (IRA).

Yevgeny Prigozhin, the catering baron in charge of the IRA, started off as a hot-dog seller in St Petersburg. One of the restaurants he went on to own, New Island, became a favourite of Vladimir Putin’s. That led to opportunities beyond the kitchen, from troll armies at home to private military contractors deployed in Syria. Mr Prigozhin operates far enough outside official structures to allow ministries to claim ignorance of his doings, but his Concord companies, which Robert Mueller’s indictment (see article) says stood behind the IRA, still made a fortune from working with the Russian state. One of his firms made $8.15bn from the Russian government for catering services in 2011-17, according to an analysis by Reuters.

Rather more modest—but still, at 45,000 roubles ($800) per month, healthy—remuneration attracted his employees. In 2014 Vitaly Bespalov spent time in the IRA’s “2nd Ukraine Department” replacing words like “separatist” and “terrorist” in news stories about Russian proxies in the Ukraine with “rebel”. In the social-media department he created fake profiles on Russian social networks. “We had to create the appearance of a real person,” he says. Women were considered more trustworthy; he pulled their pictures from Google image searches. “It was idiotic work,” he says. “Control–c, control–v.”

A more secretive department focused on English-language content. Their English was often awkward and their content asinine. “So do you brush your teeth before kissing Obama’s ass?” read one typical post from an IRA-linked Twitter account called @I_Am_Ass in mid-2014. “It is dirty fucked!” One former troll from the American department, Alan Baskaev, told TV Rain, an independent Russian broadcaster, how his colleagues hired a prostitute bearing a resemblance to Hillary Clinton to have sex with a black man on camera. He spent his time impersonating Americans on political forums and in the comment sections of news sites. “The six months that I was there it all resembled a farce and clowning around—it was true postmodernism,” he said. “Postmodernism, Dadaism, and surrealism.”