Charitable and sports foundations for Afghan war veterans and disabled athletes became one of the signature financial vehicles of Russia’s early 1990s, thanks to genuine, broadly popular tax and customs exemptions granted to organizations supporting veterans and the disabled. In practice, a number of these foundations, most infamously the National Sports Foundation, were run or co-opted by figures with close ties to the security services and organized crime, and used the exemptions to import huge volumes of alcohol, tobacco, cars, and consumer goods duty-free, undercutting legitimate importers and generating enormous, effectively untaxed profits, with a share flowing back to the officials who protected the arrangement. Anton’s own «charitable foundation» is a smaller-scale, fictionalized version of exactly this real and well-documented pattern.