В первом выпуске подкаста «Капли датского Короля» расследователь Алексей Трофимов препарирует саму природу власти через призму реального уголовного дела о жестоком захвате крупного бизнеса долларовым миллионером.

Кто виноват в насилии сильнее - заказчик, щедро оплачивающий ломание чужих жизней, или низовой исполнитель, готовый покалечить незнакомца за скромный гонорар? Почему интеллектуальный средний класс оказался бессилен перед лицом агрессора?

На примере леденящих душу ритуалов Господина Би - от жестокого избиения курьера, превращенного затем в «благодарного раба», до садистского доминирования над десятками женщин, облачившегося в военную форму - мы исследуем феномен «нулевой точки». Это состояние лимба, в которое носитель власти помещает свою жертву, полностью разрушая ее систему координат и переписывая ее реальность.

Во второй части выпуска мы переходим от криминального профилирования к академическому анализу. Опираясь на исследования понятия слова “власть”, подкаст разбирает уникальный русский «хронотоп власти». Вы узнаете, почему в русском языке понятия «власть» и «владеть» семантически неразделимы, в отличие от западной традиции (Power / Authority), и как носители власти в XXI веке неосознанно возвращаются к сакральным ритуалам правителей Бронзового века и фараонов Древнего Египта.

Выпуск содержит описание сцен физического и психологического насилия и предназначен строго для аудитории старше 18 лет (Explicit).

A couple of years ago I found myself investigating the operations of a complex and well-organized structure. Its purpose was to seize a trading and manufacturing group of companies with an extensive retail network. The organization was created and run by a millionaire, an oligarch of sorts, who had decided to take someone else’s business by force.

My task at that moment was to protect people. To preserve their lives, health, and property from attack.

The machine operated on several levels. At the first level, dozens of professional lawyers working across several international jurisdictions, from Europe to Asia. Several expensive law firms. Corrupt prosecutors at various levels and customs officers. At the ground level were enforcers and several ethnically organized criminal groups. Intimidation campaigns, beatings, property destruction, shootings at people’s homes, smear campaigns in the press, surveillance and provocations. Everything, up to attempts on the life of the company’s founder and owner.

In essence, it was a small war projected onto a large city. Or a large war inside a small life. A besieged fortress. An exhausted rear. Assault squads under the command of a ruthless ruler.

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At that time I was tormented by many philosophical questions. One of them was this: who bore the greater guilt? The man who ordered the violence, who reliably paid his enforcers for every act of violence and generously compensated his lawyers for cover. Or the ground-level enforcer, who for a very modest reward was prepared to maim or kill a stranger.

I caught myself thinking that I was the guilty one. As a representative of the educated middle class. We consider ourselves the guardians of coordinates: law, morality, common sense. We are the glue that is supposed to hold the world in balance. But at that moment I understood: this was naivety. And nonsense. Because in the world I was investigating, there is no balance. There is no horizon we are trying to defend. There is only someone’s palm, on which we all lie. And when the bearer of power tilts that palm, all our coordinates go to hell.

We don’t walk. We roll.

In this case I negotiated with all representatives of the aggressor. With lawyers, legal teams, and men in black who invariably demanded ten million dollars from me at every meeting. And of course with the enforcers. Yes, sometimes you can and must speak with them. They ask for nothing.

So it was, after nearly twenty years of contact with the world of violence and crime, that I saw clearly through it all the nature of power. This realization came to me not through repentance and not through the tears of a two-meter enforcer whose face was scarred no less than Bulgakov’s Mark Ratslayer. It came through watching the man who ordered the violence. The man who stood at the center of the entire system.

The man I will call Mister B.

The study of his personality, his daily routine, the events and actions surrounding him. Everything that made up the nature of his being. For whom hiring an army of enforcers and seizing a company was simply the natural consequence of a gaze falling on a desired object.

As in any decent detective story, studying and profiling the personality of a criminal allows you to predict the vector of his behavior with a certain degree of confidence.

In my case, the suspect’s actions were so public that you could observe them with the naked eye. Sometimes even by smell.

Mister B adored violence. Beating distracted drivers on the road, publicly humiliating flight attendants in first class, toxic firings of subordinates. All of this formed a daily ritual. Repeated day after day with absolute impunity.

But surely someone among those he had wronged tried to seek justice?

No. No one. Because by using violence, Mister B had learned to control the behavior of his victim. To some degree, the victim’s world.

One of the most telling cases was the story of a courier who had delivered him a pizza. Because of a crookedly applied label, Mister B beat him severely right on the threshold of his own home. The poor man had already accepted death. He lay bleeding on the floor. At that moment, Mister B leaned down to him and asked about his dreams. The courier spoke: he wanted to buy a car, to fix his housing situation. Mister B listened. And then overturned his life with a single gesture. He gave him money for everything the man had never dared to dream of.

- “Don’t you want to thank me?” he asked, helping the beaten man to his feet.

- “Very much. This is an enormous joy for me and my entire family.”

- “Don’t you want to be my personal courier?”

- “With pleasure.”

The probability that the hero of this story would file a police complaint was zero.

Do you feel the edge? Let’s go further.

Mister B did not limit himself to couriers. After some time, my observations opened before me the doors of a luxurious hall where our subject carried out violence against dozens of women. Binding them to columns, handcuffing them, beating them. At the core of the ritual was always the same scenario: immobilize the victim, dress in clothing symbolizing domination, usually a military uniform, beat her, enjoy the sight of blood. Sexual intercourse did not interest him.

When I found these women, there were dozens of them, perhaps hundreds, they refused to give testimony. One after another. Mister B worked with them the same way he worked with the courier. He paid them off. Money, silence, gratitude. He moved those he had just held in a state of balance into the plus column.

With one exception.

The one they thought was dead. She was dragged outside, paralyzed and naked, after she lost consciousness from the beatings. The agents from the modeling agency that collaborated with Mister B, who found and supplied him with women for these beatings, panicked and abandoned her. He hadn’t managed to pay her. And here the system broke down before the money reached the victim.

When they realized she was alive, they began to threaten her. They told her that Mister B held a high ministerial position. That the courts were useless.

But this woman gave testimony. She became the tear in the packaging. Through which you could see what was inside.

And inside was a man who spoke to his enforcers with the same ease: you can kill. You can maim. The factory owner, the courier, the girl from the modeling agency. For him they were the same object. A living being treated as his property. To destroy or to reward — a technical question. Not a moral one.

He was not a monster in the conventional sense, some random error of nature. He was a flawless mechanism. His passion for violence, his rituals with blood, this was not simply deviance. It was an interface. He used violence as an instrument that allowed him to place the victim at the boundary of life. To build his own reality, he first needed to destroy someone else’s. His sadism was the fuel for this mechanism. He turned a person into an object so that on this empty space, at this zero point, he could draw a new world. Where he was a god. And the beaten courier, for example, was a happy slave.

For twenty years, I looked at this. And at a certain moment I saw the same thing, over and over again. The same pattern. The moment when the bearer of power places a person in a state of balance. Strips him of his own coordinates. And that person begins to roll. Not of his own will, but depending on the tilt. And the tilt is controlled by the one who holds the palm. Or creates the scenery.

In the context of this course, I want to offer a definition of the concept of power. To do this, I would bring together two meanings from two languages. The Slavic Vald, to own, to possess. And the English Power, energy.

And what we get is this: Power is the energy of possessing the living.

Not territory. Not an office. But the living. With all its characteristics: health, freedoms, time, rights, aspirations.

Zero is the position of the bearer of power. He is the reference point. He holds the surface and regulates the tilt. The victim never reaches zero on their own. They balance relative to him. And when the tilt is chosen, they roll. To be destroyed. Or to be made rich. Mister B knew this in his body. He reached the level of a god.

Why does this work?

There is a researcher, Oleg Shevchenko, who took up a question that seemed purely academic: how exactly does the word “power” live in language. Not in laws, not in political speeches, but in the language itself, at the level of roots and dictionaries. And what he discovered has a direct bearing on what we are talking about.

The Russian word “vlast” comes from two semantic streams simultaneously. The first: force, dominion, Vald. The second: volost, land, territory. To own and to rule in the Russian language are almost the same thing. Dal’s dictionary states it directly: to own is “to have in one’s possession, to call something one’s own by right.” To own land and to hold in one’s power are inseparable concepts.

This matters. Because in the Romance and Germanic languages, power is structured differently. In English: Power, an abstract force, a potency; Authority, a formal power or mandate. In French, Pouvoir and Autorité. In German, Macht and Gewalt. Everywhere two words, two meanings, two levels.

In Russian, one. Power does not divide into force and mandate. It either exists, wholly, entirely, indivisible, or it does not.

Shevchenko calls this the chronotope of power, its simultaneous existence in time and space. In the Russian perception, power is not a process and not a capacity. It is a state. It does not work and does not function. It simply is. Like weather. Like the sun. Like the earth beneath your feet.

And this state has three modes. The time before power. The time of power. The time after power. They do not flow into one another smoothly. They break off from one another. A person is either in power or already not. The Russian language assumes no gradual weakening or strengthening.

What follows from this in practice?

If power is a state of possession, indivisible and physically tangible, then its bearer perceives himself as an owner, not as a functionary. He does not exercise authority. He possesses. And this is precisely why the boundary between power and property, between office and personal interest, is blurred. This is not merely linguistics. It explains how people inside the system think, how they act.

It explains why it is enough for a girl to be told “he is a minister” for her to believe that the courts are useless. Why the courier left with gratitude.

Moreover, all of them lived inside a language in which power is alive. You do not put it on trial. You plead with it. This is called the anthropomorphism of power. We see a god. But inside is a mechanism. And you do not argue with god. You do not check god against his job description.

And this is not a modern invention.

Before the Axial Age, power was literally a force of nature. In the ancient Sumerian myths, the gods decide to wipe humanity from the face of the earth simply because people “made too much noise” and disturbed their sleep. Do you understand? Not for sins. Simply because the bearer of power wished it so.

In this world there is no category called justice. There is only the intensity of will.

The Pharaoh ruled as the embodiment of the god Horus. His wrath was not a “crime.” It was like drought or locusts. You do not take a drought to court. You bring it offerings. He stood at the zero point between harvest and famine. Between the life and death of a people.

Then came the Axial Age. Philosophy, law, ethics. The ruler became a human being. But the sacralization went nowhere. It simply changed its skin. In the modern world, a uniform instead of priestly robes. An official identification card instead of a scepter. “He is a minister” is not a legal argument. It is a sacred formula. Who else, if not him?

Mister B in military uniform during the beatings — not a fetish. A vestment. A ritual confirmation of his right to be that same elemental force that punishes for making too much noise. Or for a crookedly applied label.

Mister B, the police officer before he killed the journalist, and the immigration officer with a gun facing an unarmed person — all of them, in that moment, return there. To the Bronze Age. To the point where they are gods, deciding who lives and who disappears.

The zero point is not only about Mister B. It is about the structure of power as such. About that place, empty, stripped of coordinates, into which the bearer of power places the object of his power before making a decision. It is limbo. Mister B did this physically.

But there are ways to place a person in limbo so that he himself does not notice the moment of crossing. He will be convinced that he is moving of his own accord. That he is making decisions. That it is his own fault.

This too is power. A different instrument. The same zero point. But we will speak of that in another part of the course.

Power is not a way of reaching agreement. It is energy that turns what is alive in you into someone else’s property. And at the moment you find yourself at its zero point, it no longer matters whether you will be struck or made wealthy. The only thing that matters is that the tilt of the surface no longer belongs to you.

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In the next episodes: six classical forms of power. We will see which of them Mister B fits into. And which one he does not.

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This was the first episode of The Danish King’s Drops, from the series The Provocation of Crime as the Seventh Form of Power. A project about power and crime.

You have been reading to Alexei Trofimov, the author and host of this project.

Sincerely yours, Alexei Trofimov.

Art direction and archival photo processing by

The full written version is available here:

I’m holding a small bottle. The most ordinary kind, the kind you find in every pharmacy and almost every home. A yellowed label. A smell you couldn’t mistake for anything else. And on that label, it says:

The Danish King’s Drops.

I hold it and think about how this name has lived several lives.

The first, in Shakespeare’s time, when the Danish king was not a remedy, but death itself. That’s exactly how Hamlet begins, drops dripped into the ear of a sleeping king. Quietly. No witnesses. No traces. Through trust and sleep, in the most unguarded moment of existence. That murder sets the entire mechanism of the play in motion. Everything that follows: revenge, madness, the collapse of a state.

The Danish King’s Drops, in that sense, are provocation in its absolute form. An act that cannot be proven. But whose consequences cannot be stopped.

The second life this name lived was in pharmacies. Bitter, sharp, effective, a remedy no one takes with pleasure, but one that works toward recovery. A symbol of unpleasant but honest therapy.

Now the Danish King’s Drops is also a blog, and a podcast.

My drops are not what I want to poison my reader with. They are what this conversation is going to be. Uncomfortable. Sometimes bitter. And, I hope, useful.

About power. About provocation. About crime.

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To speak of such things, you have to stare into the abyss for a long time.

I'm Alexei Trofimov, the author of this project. An investigator and human rights defender. For more than twenty years I’ve investigated crimes, from brutal kidnappings to highly organized corruption schemes at the upper levels of state and corporate power. I have acted as a defender in court and conducted investigations into high-profile cases in the media.

Let’s begin.

You are reading the introductory episode of the course: The Provocation of Crime as the Seventh Form of Power.

Before we move on, I want you to hear one phrase in the original Russian. Not for the name. For the tone.

For the English listener, it means this:

“...I shouldn’t have broken the law back then. Although at the time it seemed to me that, through those crimes I allowed myself to commit, I was unofficially supplementing the law.”

Remember that phrase. We’ll come back to it.

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On June 29, 2004, journalist Maxim Maximov, of the St. Petersburg Agency for Investigative Journalism, went to a work meeting at a recently opened bureau of a Moscow newspaper called Intellect and Creativity.

The paper’s editor-in-chief, Andrei Isaev, had been persistently trying to persuade the talented and well-known journalist, a graduate of the Leningrad Theatre Institute, to write about art. In their phone conversations, Isaev kept insisting: leave the criminal investigations behind. Write about culture instead.

The moment the doors of Intellect and Creativity closed behind Maximov, a deafening blow struck him on the head. It was delivered by the man who had invited him to write about art.

They began to beat him. Several people. Methodically. Beyond recognition.

At that moment, a police officer entered the room. An officer from the anti-corruption division. Mikhail Smirnov.

And joined the beating.

Moments later, he was strangling the disfigured journalist with his bare hands. It didn’t work. So he threw a rope over a set of gymnastic wall bars, and finished it by hanging him. The body was wrapped in plastic sheeting, which the officer had brought with him, loaded into a police vehicle, and driven out of the city.

The bureau of Intellect and Creativity was an expertly constructed cover operation. A space with a single exit. Isaev was an agent of the anti-corruption division, a decoy, and an accomplice to murder.

But why?

Maximov’s mother did not live to see it. Not the trial, the discovery of the body. Twenty-one years is not the length of an investigation. It’s the length of time it takes for those who wait to die. And now that the body has been found, there is no one left for whom this could mean anything resembling an end.

The body of the vanished journalist was found only twenty-one years later. And twenty-two years after the murder, the retired, so-called “honored fighter against corruption”, Colonel Smirnov, publicly confessed.

Smirnov later said in an interview:

“...he really did, from ‘99 to 2004, kind of become my personal journalist, he’d periodically write about my operations. He wrote... negatively. He had his own view of the investigation, the undercover work on the bribery case...”

According to many of the murdered journalist’s colleagues, the crime was connected to a story Maximov was about to publish, about a police officer who had stolen a car seized from a detained customs chief. The car never made it into the evidence log. Smirnov took it and sold it using forged documents produced inside the Ministry of Internal Affairs for operational cover.

According to the version Smirnov himself constructed in 2025, framed by some media outlets as the story of a man of honor, this was, in his telling, a murder committed in the name of honor. A settling of scores with a journalist he portrayed as dishonest, whose conversation with him while preparing the material about the stolen Mercedes he interpreted as extortion.

“Yes. And I made that decision. And I did kill him.”

Smirnov’s version, the one he built and wrapped in a heroic frame in 2025, is contradicted by Maximov’s own actions before his death. Before going to meet his killers, he had already sent the story about the stolen Mercedes to multiple newsrooms. He had effectively filed it for publication.

As for the version held by the victim’s family, that greed was the motive, I’m not inclined to agree with that either. And here’s why.

Over the course of several years, I conducted an independent investigation into the motives behind this murder. I gathered testimony from journalists, victims, witnesses, investigators, prosecutors, and criminal associates of Smirnov himself. I received a number of statements pointing directly to a different motive, deeper, and born of power.

Through that work, I uncovered a monstrous world of “parallel justice”.

Maximov, I am firmly convinced, was killed for one reason only: he had stumbled onto something bigger than police officers enriching themselves with trophies. He had encountered a barely perceptible presence. Almost invisible at first glance.

Its name: the provocation of crime.

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This course is not true crime. It’s not a collection of horrifying stories, though horrifying stories will be here, and they will be real.

All this time, working with criminal police groups and with sophisticated criminal organizations, alongside the case of the disappeared journalist, I was researching and immersing myself in the world of power and provocation. Not the mechanical, routine provocation of crimes widely used today to falsify performance metrics across various agencies. But a genuine, fully developed form of it. The kind that wraps itself around everything like an invisible net, separating the real world from the reality modeled by criminal power.

This is a conversation about power. But not the kind we usually mean when we say that word, presidents and ministers, laws and courts. This is about a form and function of power that leaves no traces and has no official name. One that cannot be produced as evidence and is almost impossible to disprove, because it alters the foundations of reality itself.

The form of power that over twenty years of investigations I learned to recognize by a single sign: the victim always believes they are acting of their own free will.

That is something of a discovery. One I want to share with you.

Before we get to provocation, we’ll need to move through several things that seem obvious but aren’t. What power is, and why it has no single definition. Why people grant power almost religious properties. Six classical forms of power. The concept of crime and the mechanics of how crimes are solved. Without that foundation, the word “provocation” will remain a metaphor. A beautiful word. Not a tool for analysis.

After that, we’ll look at it as a technology, a means of constructing artifacts to legitimize power. Then we’ll return to the murder of the journalist. Not as a story. But as a demonstration of how criminal power protects itself.

There will also be bonus episodes. More personal ones.

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Who this course is for

This course is for people who have moral bearings, and who are beginning to doubt whether those bearings still point true.

Not because they are weak or confused. But because they look around, at the news, at colleagues, at how decisions are made in administrative offices and courtrooms, at the reality newspapers and television place before us, and they feel it: something doesn’t add up.

The picture we’re asked to accept as reality, and what we see with our own eyes, these are two different worlds.

And many people don’t yet know what to call that.

In the next episode, we’ll start with a question that seems simple, until the moment you try to answer it.

What exactly is power?

Not in the dictionary sense. But in the sense of how it works from the inside. What it’s made of. Why some people feel it even where it doesn’t exist, and others don’t notice it even where it’s obvious. Why it has no single definition, and why that isn’t an accident but a property.

Without that conversation, everything else is just stories.

And I don’t tell stories.

This was the introductory episode of the Danish King’s Drops.

You have been reading Alexei Trofimov, its author and host.

Sincerely yours
A. T.

Postscript, March 2026. Police officer Mikhail Smirnov was killed several days before this text was written. Smirnov, the killer, will never stand trial.

But we are here…

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The visual materials for this issue incorporate graphic stylizations based on archival press photographs, and the audio elements include short archival excerpts from the "Honest Detective" video interview (all materials used under the Fair Use doctrine).

Until that moment I had never allowed myself to think about suicide - not in the literal sense that might present itself to the reader, like a cold draft from a window thrown open, scattering everything from the table and picking a fight with the curtains in an empty house - no, I am speaking of something else, of social suicide, of that step across a threshold after which you cease to exist for some and have not yet begun to exist for others, of a choice that erases your name from the contact list of someone who was once close and at the same time strips away your ability to act on the fabric of the society you lived in and the one you want to live in. And it is precisely this choice, and those who made it before us, that I want to talk about today.

The Bridge

Several years ago my wife and I crossed a border - not flew, not drove, but crossed, on foot, at night, over a bridge, past barbed wire, in the light of a single lamp, beside a border guard who had just switched off the camera on which he had recorded my wife - a woman with three children - refusing to return home - and at that moment, consumed by self-censorship and dreams of an ideal state, it seemed to me that this was liberation, that here it was - the multicultural, empathetic light, that here we were - young, in love, holding hands and walking forward, failing to notice what mattered: the social annihilation had already begun.

Because where we arrived, we were also outside the law - not literally, but almost - in a space of everyday nationalism and legislative humiliation, in which we in those years existed as people without solid ground beneath our feet, and I thought: you cannot go back, here you are a stranger, and on both sides of this bridge there is emptiness, and where did we actually step to?

Then I understood that many people had asked themselves this question before us, long before, in different circumstances and in different languages - and that some of them had answered it not in words but with their entire lives.

The Archetype

There is one figure standing at the beginning of this entire conversation - a man who knew where he was going, who could have chosen not to go, for whom the Last Supper was not a trap he was lured into but a choice he made consciously, in full understanding of its cost - and Christ in this text is not a religious symbol but a human matrix, an archetype of the threshold in its purest form: you see what lies ahead, you understand that this is the end in the ordinary sense, and you still sit down at the table, still walk into the garden, still do not run.

The Fatalist

Anna Politkovskaya did not die in a lift - this is important to understand, because the lift was an incidental detail, and the date was also an incidental detail, however telling - Politkovskaya died much earlier than that October day in 2006, at the moment she decided to go all the way, when she chose Chechnya as the territory of her presence and filtration camps as the subject of her attention - and did this every day, at maximum altitude, without a safety line, with that particular fatalism that arises when you are so convinced of the necessity of what you are doing that the question of personal safety ceases to be a question.

The Saint

Natalia Estemirova, human rights defender in a war zone - a different case, cleaner and more terrifying, because she worked in Chechnya at a time when almost no one was left there, when human rights workers were leaving and journalists were leaving and international organizations were withdrawing their presence, and she stayed and documented kidnappings and torture and extrajudicial killings and collected names and facts that no one else was collecting - because no one else was going anymore. She was abducted and killed in July 2009 - her body was found the same day.

The Naive One

Alexey Navalny boarded a plane from Berlin to Moscow in January 2021 - after they had nearly killed him, after he had personally exposed his would-be assassins - and I think he did not fully grasp the level of mortal danger, or he grasped it but somewhere inside believed that history would repeat with him the trick it played with Mandela. He did not emerge. He died in an Arctic penal colony in February 2024. But the gesture remains a gesture regardless of the calculation.

Where We Stepped

I thought about these people a great deal - especially in the first years here, in a place arranged for those who do not ask questions, where you can sink into this silence so slowly and so imperceptibly that one day you discover you have become someone who has stopped being yourself.

Then I began again - and understood something important: the same instinct, the same inability to stay silent, that pushed us to this threshold, they can revive you here too - in absolutely paradoxical conditions - in art, in literature, in the freedom of thought and word, in love, in work you do not because you must but because you cannot do otherwise.

And even though my wife and I lost everything that can be counted, and were forbidden to send letters home - voices and thoughts cannot be taken.
They ring.

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The people I write about - they could not be killed. Because they did not commit the one act that truly kills - the act that turns the intention of the physical murderer and those who ordered it into reality. They did not go silent. And so - they did not die.

This is where we stepped! Not into safety and not into emptiness, but into the possibility of creating without fear and without censorship and without looking over your shoulder, and this is not as little as it seemed on that bridge at night, in the light of a single lamp, when the first messages were already arriving and names were already disappearing from contact lists and ahead was only the cold air of a foreign country and my wife’s hand in mine.

I dedicate this to her - with gratitude for her support and steadiness - and to our children, who will more than once face obstacles on the moral path ahead of them.

I am beginning work on new material - investigations into power and crime, into the difficulties of moral choice, into what makes us human and keeps us that way. I will fill it with philosophy and love of life.

These texts - and everything that will be published on this channel - are for all those who doubt. And for those whose voice, like mine, still rings.

Alexey Trofimov · 2026

Audio version of this essay