The AllatRa movement, originating in Ukraine, is spreading globally and spreading disinformation under the guise of climate change awareness. In Ukraine, AllatRa was attacked by the security services and banned as a pro-Russian sect, but its supporters recently secured an audience with Pope Francis and hired a registered lobbyist to work on their behalf in the United States. In Bulgaria, the sect has recently appeared in the form of two associations registered by Varna lawyers. Despite the activity in Bulgarian on social networks, so far the followers are counted on the fingers.
A Creative Society Will Heal the World
The AllatRa movement was established in 2014 in Ukraine as a center for personal development, and a publishing house of the same name. Initially, his main activity was to promote a series of books by Anastasia Novykh, which promised readers “unique scientific evidence of the existence of the soul” and “exceptional information about self-knowledge and secrets hidden from society.”
It is not clear whether Novykh actually exists. Partners from the Firehose of Falsehood project found no evidence of her earthly existence, but the copyright for several of her books is owned by Halina Yablochkina, founder of the AllatRa publishing house.
AllatRa has also created an online television station of the same name, as well as companies or non-governmental organizations in several countries, including Russia, Cyprus, Belarus, the Czech Republic, Moldova, Bulgaria, Slovakia and the United States. The website states that the headquarters is in Atlanta.
The Creative Society is a related project born in 2019 at the AllatRa online conference entitled “The Last Chance”. At a conference of adepts in Prague, the president of Creative Society USA, Olga Schmidt, described it as a volunteer-founded, international, independent, non-political and non-religious project that draws attention to the climate crisis, explores the causes and finds solutions.
Alain Egon Ciolakian, who introduces himself as a scientist from CERN, but the press service of the prestigious scientific institution says that it has never heard of him, also spoke at the conference. Cholakyan states that the mission of the Creative Society is twofold – protecting democracy and “extracting information about volcanoes and so on and climate change.”
The leadership of AllatRa claims in an official lobby registration in the United States that the movement is “a member association that deals with geophysical analysis of the impact of climate change on the earth.”
In fact, it is engaged in actively promoting and spreading climate disinformation around the world.
Undesirable in both Russia and Ukraine
Last year, the Prosecutor General’s Office of Russia described the activities of AllatRa and its Creative Society as “undesirable.” AllatRa is branded as a “pseudo-religious” movement engaged in alleged missionary activities without the status of a religious organization, while the Creative Society is a front for its political activities.
Three months after Russia’s listing as an undesirable organization, the Ukrainian Security Service (SBU) and the National Police shut down AllatRa in Ukraine, describing it as a “religious sect.” Unlike the Russian authorities, the SBU found that the AllatRa missionaries justified Russia’s armed aggression against Ukraine and promoted the idea of a “union of Slavic peoples” under the leadership of Moscow.
During a search of the Ukrainian offices of AllatRa, the SBU seized weapons, passports and books of “Anastasia Novykh”. “The content of these books and other materials distributed by the organization is consistent with Russian geopolitical interests, idealizing the Soviet Union and downplaying the crimes of the communist regime,” the Ukrainian National Police found.
The SBU also found books from the series “Project Russia” by Yuri Shaliganov in the offices. According to a 2018 scholarly article published by Johns Hopkins University Magazine, the books contained ideas against democracies and glorified Soviet Russia by claiming that Vladimir Putin’s regime was its successor.
Prophet Igor Danilov
Court documents show that Ukrainian police are investigating six individuals, including Igor Danilov, on suspicion of committing treason, participating in a criminal organization and undermining national security.
Authorities believe that the group distributed more than 1.7 million books from “Anastasia Novykh”, which they suspect is Yablochkina’s pseudonym.
According to court records, Danilov began undermining Ukraine’s statehood and promoting Russian propaganda as early as 2002.
Ukrainian authorities issued a warrant for Danilov’s arrest in December 2023 and later put him on the international wanted list.
Konstantin Moskalyuk, an associate professor at the Kiev Theological Academy, has been studying the teachings and activities of AllatRa since 2016. He discovered that the movement had the characteristics of a cult and had a guru – Igor Danilov, who “is supposedly an extraordinary spiritual being and prophet.”
Moskalyuk also found that AllatRa spreads its ideology in public schools and hospitals under the guise of social projects.
Comparing some features of Danilov’s language and his word order, he found an indirect indication that he was the author or co-author of the books “Novykh”.
Nomo and Putin
“This is a conspiracy theory of a spiritual nature of unclear origin that has spawned a cult,” Luigi Corvaglia, co-chair of criminology and forensic science at the University of Salento in Lecce and a member of the European Federation of Research Centers and Information on the Board of Sectarianism (Fecris), told Slovak media partner Oštro.
He finds it cult due to the presence of a leader; the use of foundational texts; and a theory of the end of the world, including an apocalypse with volcanic explosions and doom, in which only one world, united by a Creative Society, will save humanity.
Corvalia said several of Novykh’s books include Nomo, a character seemingly modeled after the image of Russian President Putin. Nomo is presented as the savior of pan-Slavic civilization in its battle with Western materialism: “pro-Putin rhetoric is obvious.”
Eva Hronova, a former AllatRa coordinator and video translator from the Czech Republic, told a researcher at Charles University in Prague that the movement had openly discussed the similarities between Nomo and Putin since the publication of Novykh’s book.
“It was an open secret,” she said. Today, she sees the movement as anti-systemic in the sense of opposing “the elite and the one percent that controls us.”
Existential hysteria and “We will all die”
Creative Society spreads its propaganda through volunteers and is very active on social media. Several of his online claims and those of his volunteers were found to be false by fact-checking organizations that adhere to the International Fact-Checking Network’s code of ethics.
In total, Firehose of Falsehoods partners identified 275 TikTok accounts in 41 countries that distribute Creative Society content. Together, they have posted over 83,000 videos that have been viewed almost 2 billion times.
The Romanian partner Context.ro developed an AI-based tool to detect disinformation in videos posted by 227 linked accounts in Russian, English, Slovak, Hungarian and other languages. The tool analyzed more than 54,000 video posts from AllatRa, Creative Society, and related accounts. Almost a third of them contain disinformation.
Czech sociologist Vojtěch Peka, who focuses on climate disinformation, told the Czech Center for Investigative Journalism that the way Creative Society talks about climate is specific.
In general, climate skeptics tend to downplay the risk of a climate crisis, while Creative Society is alarming in its narrative. His strategy inspires legitimate anxiety about climate change, but this fear is pushed into “immediate existential hysteria while diverting attention to completely imaginary solutions.”
The project promises its members millions of dollars in the future, but there doesn’t seem to be viable financial support at the moment, despite at least 21 related companies currently pushing its agenda around the world.
Despite its denial of human-centered climate change and curious financial promises reminiscent of a pyramid scheme, AllatRa arranged a papal audience this year. It also paid a lobbyist to convince the U.S. Congress that it was not a cult after Russian and Ukrainian authorities branded the movement a “religious cult” in 2023.
Lobbyist Alan Egon Ciolakyan is presented in the materials of the Creative Society as a “CERN scientist”, but the CERN press service told Oštro that they had never heard of him.
His LinkedIn profile also refers to him as a “former White House lobbyist,” but the official record shows that he was never registered as a lobbyist in the U.S. before this year.
And in Bulgaria
The site has allatra.bg existed since the inception of the sect in 2014 and was registered by the Bulgarian artist Viktor Mazhlekov. The domain registration was renewed in 2021 and paid until August 2025.
Mazhlekov presents himself as an astral painter – “an artistic style whose gravitational field is the study of the deep feelings arising within a person”. But he himself does not seem to be engaged in organizational work and is not among the founders of the official structures of AllatRa in Bulgaria.
The non-profit association AllatRa Bulgaria was registered in May this year in Plovdiv and is chaired by Elihana Jamalova Sirakova, born in 1995, and members of the Management Board are also Daniela Chukova and Kaloyan Mirchev. Of the three, only Mirchev does business with the company Inova Crew, registered at the same address as the association.
The Creative Society Association was registered before AllatRa Bulgaria, on November 11, 2023 in Varna. It is represented by Nadezhda Gorcheva, and the Varna lawyer Vladimir Ivanov and Stefan Dimov are also on the Management Board.
At first glance, there is no connection between the two associations, but it turns out that their documents in the Register of Non-Profit Associations were submitted by the same lawyer – Kremena Vladimirova, who works together with adv. Vladimir Ivanov.
Our attempts to get a comment from the lawyers were unsuccessful. Contacted by phone lawyer. Ivanov refused to answer questions and said that he would return a call when he decides. This did not happen until the editorial end of the material.
A review of the content in Bulgarian, which AllatRa actively distributes on its Bulgarian social media accounts, shows that it is a product of automatic translation. So far, hundreds of videos with panicked misinformation that volcanoes are drastically changing the climate and in 2036 we will all die have only a few likes.
The article was created within the framework of the Firehose of Falsehood* project, a consortium of 13 editorial teams from Central and Eastern Europe, researching disinformation. The project is led by Josef Schlerka, Investigace.cz. With the participation of journalists Anastasia Morozova, Julia Dauksza, Anna Gielewska, FRONTSTORY.PL, Poland, Karin Kovari Solimos, ICJK, Slovakia, Boglárka Redl, Márton Sarkadi Nagy, Átlátszó, Hungary, Kaili Malts, Delfi Estonia, Inese Liepina, Re:Baltica, Latvia, Šarūnas Černiauskas, Siena.lt, Viktoras Dauksas, DebunkEU.org, Lithuania, Palina Milling, Petra Blum, Westdeutscher Rundfunk (WDR), Germany, Katarina Bulatovic, Ostro, Slovenia, Anja Vladisavljević, Ostro, Croatia, Iulia Stanoiu, Context.ro, Romania, Atanas Chobanov, BIRD.BG, Bulgaria, Marija Vučić, KRIK, Serbia
Lead photo: Security Service of Ukraine
Материалът A global pro-Russian sect spreading disinformation has set foot in Bulgaria е публикуван за пръв път на BIRD.
