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Moscow

Protesters for hire: Details have emerged about how people were paid to show up at campaign rallies for Vladimir Putin before his recent election as president. Employees of the website Massovki​.ru, where Russians can sign up to get cash for rallying, have been giving interviews to Russian and international reporters in recent weeks about the business of engineering such crowds. “There’s never been such a surge in political orders,” one employee told Time. He said demonstrators generally get about $10, and that most orders come from Putin’s party and another pro-Kremlin party. In the wake of those reports, a state-run TV station controlled by the Kremlin ran a segment last week accusing the opposition—whose supporters have been thronging the streets in anti-Putin rallies by the tens of thousands—of being paid by the U.S. Embassy. Some quoted in that TV piece claimed they’d been misquoted, however, and it was widely mocked on Twitter.

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