Shall we play a game?: Meet the eSports fanatic who cornered Russia’s surveillance industry

Anton Cherepennikov has had quite the career and he's not yet 40. A decade ago, he partnered with Alexey Kolesnikov, one of the best eSports players in Russia, to form a premiere team that grew into a briefly profitable business, training players and drawing major sponsorships before it attracted a massive investment from the oligarch Alisher Usmanov. Cherepennikov's greatest impact as a businessman, however, hasn't been in competitive computer gaming but in the cybersecurity industry, where he founded a holding company called "Citadel" that now controls most of the manufacturing for Russia's key surveillance technology: "SORM." In a report for the news outlet Baza, sources told journalist Andrey Kaganskikh that Cherepennikov is not, in fact, an independent figure in the SORM market, calling him "an avatar for Alisher Usmanov's business interests." Cherepennikov insists that he is a "self-made" entrepreneur, and he's spent the past several years trying hard to distance himself from the oligarch. Meduza summarizes Baza's profile of Cherepennikov. Original Article: https://meduza.io/en/feature/2021/11/05/shall-we-play-a-game