Exposed: Russia's elite spy academy trains hackers for election interference

Last April, Vladimir Putin toured the campus of Bauman Moscow State Technical University, situated on the banks of the Yauza River in the city’s east and home to many of Russia’s leading scientific talents. He walked the grounds, spoke with undergraduates and highlighted Moscow’s ambitious plans for lunar and Martian missions. “You have everything it takes to be competitive,” Putin told the students.

What the Kremlin’s readout of Putin’s visit omitted was a covert faculty within the university, known simply as Department 4, or “Special Training”. There, a select group of students is quietly prepared for careers in the GRU – Russia’s military intelligence directorate, whose operatives have hacked Western parliaments, poisoned dissidents abroad and interfered in elections across Europe and the United States.

Until now, the role of this unit in training future intelligence officers has remained largely hidden, known only to a small circle of insiders. “Sometimes you are first spotted at school, then go to Bauman and join the services … it is part of a pipeline,” said a former senior Russian defence official.

The existence of this pathway – from one of Russia’s most prestigious technical institutions straight into its military intelligence apparatus – is disclosed for the first time in more than 2,000 internal Bauman documents obtained by a consortium of journalists from six outlets: CuriosityNews, Der Spiegel, Le Monde, the Insider, Delfi and VSquare. The files, spanning several years of activity up to 2025, contain course syllabuses, exam records, staff contracts and the career assignments of individual graduates, tracing their trajectory from classroom exercises in hacking and disinformation to postings in some of the most notorious cyber‑units of the GRU.

Bauman, one of Russia’s foremost technical universities, has never concealed its links to the military. Founded in 1830, it trained the engineers and scientists who built Soviet rockets, tanks and weapons systems and continues to do so today. In a 2013 internal letter seen by CuriosityNews and addressed to then‑defence minister Sergei Shoigu, the university’s rector wrote that it conducts more research and development than any other higher‑education institution in Russia, with over 40 % of that work carried out in the interests of the defence ministry.

The curriculum

Embedded within the university’s military training centre, Department 4 is divided into three specialist streams, according to the documents. The most prominent, bearing the code 093400, is titled the “Special Reconnaissance Service”. The documents indicate that the GRU directly controls recruitment and grading – sending its own officers to administer exams, approve candidates and supervise placements. The picture that emerges is of a programme where the line between professor and handler, and between teaching and recruitment, is blurred.

The department is headed by Lieutenant Colonel Lt Col K.