TV Commercials for the MMM Pyramid Scheme

Sergei Mavrodi’s (1955-2018) 1994 Ponzi scheme, MMM, became one of the most successful financial pyramids in history, defrauding between 5 and 10 million investors of their savings. Launched in February 1994, MMM promised investors up to a 3000% annual return on investment. Through the first months of the year, the scheme worked, drawing in millions of investors (or “partners,” as MMM insisted on calling them) and paying out the promised dividends.

Fueling the scheme’s early success was an extensive ad campaign that Mavrodi and his company launched on Russia’s major television channels, including ORT (the future Pervyi Kanal, Putin’s main propaganda network) and NTV. The campaign featured a post-Soviet everyman, Lyonya Golubkov, a construction worker who simply wanted to make a little extra money for himself and his family. The first spot shows him taking a chance on MMM and quickly earning enough returns to buy his wife some boots. In subsequent ads, he uses the proceeds of his MMM investments to buy her a fur coat and even a car. He is also shown plotting his financial plan for his family on an exponential curve marked with various purchases representing what sociologist Boris Dubin, writing in 1995, called the “new Russian dream” (novaia russkaia mechta), an unquestioning adaptation of the “American dream” distilled to its most materialistic essence.

In facilitating the growth of post-Soviet Russia’s most prominent pyramid scheme, Mavrodi’s MMM ads also advanced a peculiar fantasy of capitalist promise. By structuring each mini-narrative around “a simple model of ‘action-reward,’” Dubin writes, these ads project a “utopia of social order” where certain actions (like investing in MMM) are reliably rewarded and it is possible to exercise control over one’s life through the application of methods that are “elementary and generally understood.” In a setting where the actual workings of the new capitalist economy—from price liberalization to privatization—proved destabilizing, devastating, and mysterious, the “utopia of social order” Mavrodi’s Ponzi capitalism promised was both more comprehensible and attractive than its counterpart in reality.

By the peak of MMM’s activities in late spring 1994, the company was taking in fifty million dollars daily and had become a force in public life that could not be ignored. In late July, the Ministry of Finance opened a tax evasion investigation into the company. Sales of shares were suspended. Protests erupted. And on 4 August 1994, when Mavrodi was arrested for tax evasion, the police raid on his apartment was broadcast on live TV—and he immediately announced his intention to run for the State Duma. He won his seat in October of that year, only to be stripped of his office in 1995 as a criminal investigation into MMM was underway.