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Plinofficial Instagram
This week, a court in Pennsylvania took up the case against a 29-year-old Russian rapper, known as Plinofficial, accused of cybercrimes. He once dreamt of becoming the biggest rap artist on the planet. Where did it go wrong?
“Married to cash, high as a kite” – this is how Maksim Boiko, a rapper originally from Siberia, formulated his credo in 2015. His track The Money is Flying came out in a collection called Killa Verse.
Plinofficial was never a household name. MTV Russia fans voted him 74th best Russian rapper and he rarely performed in public.
But the redhead from northern Russia wanted to stand out among his fellow rappers. Although he couldn’t have come from a more different world, Boiko identified with black hip-hop culture in the US and tried to emulate it in his own lifestyle, writing on social media that he lived and rapped like an African-American man.
Boiko learnt about the lives of American rappers during a trip to the US. He adopted their habit of photographing himself with a stack of cash next to his ear – the famous “money phone” meme to resemble the “brick” mobile of the 1980s.
Boiko published a photo of the fat bricks of cash, held together tightly with elastic bands on Instagram. Awash with red bills portraying Chairman Mao, he made them into pyramids. Greenbacks with US presidents looked good against a backdrop of luxury handbags. Red and brown notes were only any use for “phone calls” inside Russia.
Boiko drove a white Mercedes, sported an expensive Hublot wristwatch and drank Moët champagne. He rapped, “I’ve been seen playing crazy games with cash/you’ll blow off the roof with such a stash”, and “We youngsters are making huge loads/we’re making our ‘Louis’ bags explode.” “Clearly I’m sick and addicted to the money/ since 16 I’m independent from my papa and mommy.”
“I live in Russia, I’m having a great time, I’m confident, calm, I sleep well and don’t worry,” the rapper said in an interview on TheMostRussia Youtube channel in 2017. “It doesn’t matter how much you earn; the important thing is to sleep well at night.”
Two and a half years later, still calm and confident, Boiko and his pregnant wife flew to the US. He expected to become a father and release an album there. In February 2020 the couple’s baby girl was born.
A few weeks later, on 28 March, just days before his album launch, Boiko fell into the hands of the FBI who had been studying his work and Instagram photos.
At the source of Russian trap
Born in an oil-drilling town of Muravlenko, in the Yamal-Nenets district in the very north of Siberia, close to the Arctic circle, Boiko has not always been able to afford his extravagant lifestyle.
In an interview for a Russian music website, Boiko talked about his parents as ordinary working-class people. The BBC has learnt that Boiko’s father went from being an electrician to a production manager at a Gazprom subsidiary in the north of Russia.
Before he left school, Boiko set up an independent hip-hop label and with his breakdancing friends started performing at festivals in Muravlenko and the neighbouring town of Noyabrsk. The tickets cost around 30 roubles ($0.40) and sometimes the gigs were cancelled because of bad weather. The average winter temperature in this part of Russia is -13F (-25C) below zero.
“The beer keg would get cold while you carried it to the apartment block entrance, where you’d be hanging out in the hallway with the lads,” Boiko told TheMostRussia.
Aged 17, Boiko moved to Chelyabinsk, a much larger city in Western Siberia, to study journalism. During his second year at university he wrote on VKontakte: “Studying is light and not studying – loads of free time,