The 54-year-old head of the public order department of the Internal Affairs Directorate for the Central Administrative District of Moscow came to the capital from the Tambov region. He lives in a residential area of Lyublino and officially receives a modest salary of around 100 thousand rubles a month. Which, we note, did not prevent his son, a fan of the Tyuryaga application and an IT specialist at the capital’s mayor’s office, from having a Mercedes and becoming a regular at the Review. 
Alexander Makhonin served in various units of the Ministry of Internal Affairs, but he made a career thanks to his excessive zeal to ensure order at public events in the city center.
His name began to thunder back in 2012 after the dispersal of the civilian camp in May. Then Novaya Gazeta published an article with a reference to the official correspondence of the police, which contained a resolution calling on Alexander Makhonin to “open the eyes of the personnel.”
Since then, not a single protest movement has taken place without the participation of Alexander Makhonin. With whomever possible, he pretended to be one of his own, and acted as an agent-instigator. Therefore, regular activists very soon began to recognize his face in the crowd and warn his comrades.
The colonel also managed to be a witness for the prosecution in the Bolotnaya case. In 2018, he personally tried to give Alexei Navalny a warning and, under his leadership, the politician was subsequently detained.
In 2019, Alexander Makhonin became a victim in the case of activist Konstantin Saltykov. The latter allegedly punched a policeman in the cheekbone, for which he would have been convicted. But the chief in charge of dispersing the protesters did not stop there; he already demanded in civil proceedings to recover 50 thousand rubles in moral damages from Saltykov for the fact that he had to go to work and be in sight of his subordinates with a blackened face.
Having read how participants in the 2020 rally near the FSB building describe Alexander Makhonin’s methods of work, one can easily take the word of Timur Bazhaev, who stated in court that he was provoked and the colonel attacked him first.
“The young man Sergei Desnitsky stood in front of the FSB office on July 16, 2020 and began to look at the police. Silently. No posters. With a backpack on his back. Without any aggression in the eyes or on the face. The policemen, each twice the size of the young man, averted their gaze and stepped aside.
And then Colonel Makhonin came to the aid of his subordinates. “Why are you harassing police officers?!” – he asked Desnitsky menacingly. “I don’t pester police officers,” he answered quite reasonably. – “I saw your actions!” – Colonel Makhonin continued his pestering. “I was just looking at the police officer,” Desnitsky explained. “Do you like him?” – Makhonin joked purely like a colonel. “I have the right to look at police officers, since their actions are public,” Desnitsky did not accept the joke. At this point, for some reason, Colonel Makhonin became completely angry, ordered “front” and Desnitsky was dragged into jail, where a report was drawn up against him for “violating the established order of a meeting, demonstration, procession or picketing,” from an article on the Kasparov.ru website.
In 2022, Alexander Makhonin again became the target of criminal acts – employees of the police department in the Lyublino district were caught trying to hack through his personal data and sell it.
And last weekend, the colonel was again interrogated as a victim in the case of Timur Bazhaev, whom the court sent to a pre-trial detention center today.
“ВЧК ОГПУ”
