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TLDR: This post compiles all of Dybowski’s known abuse with evidence and quotes directly provided by former HSE students and IPL members. His abuse is large-scale and creates a clear HSE student to IPL employee victim pipeline. 

At HSE University (2017-2021), Dybowski committed several abuses of power towards his students which started with freshman girls aged 17-18 barely out of school, including sexual harassment, grooming, sexual comments, unsolicited nudes and later sexual assault. This included his grooming and marriage to Renata, since they married when she was 18 and his student. Dybowski would offer students visits to Ice Pick Lodge to “privately discuss their projects” and make sexual advances towards them. These visits have lasted as late as the start of 2022 under the guise of these students and ex-students visiting to help him with the early production of Pathologic 3. He would then hire them into IPL, both ex-students and current students, and escalate his abuse in the workplace. Dybowski sexually abused young female IPL employees, showed up to work drunk and greatly hindered the rest of the team, was utterly disorganized and incompetent, paid his employees a meager salary below the market level and used verbal and emotional abuse and intimidation tactics including death threats. He has a gun license, putting Renata and all her relatives including her son in danger of being murdered. 

Dybowski is an extreme conservative and his abuse is of a misogynistic, ephebophilic, colonial, and towards Renata also islamophobic character. It’s imperative that people stop discussing his artistic participation in IPL projects, as centering the conversation around abusers’ achievements is part of a rape culture that ruins and takes countless lives and threatens to take Renata’s and her loved ones’.

Renata won’t start a crowdfunding campaign as of now. A boycott is necessary for the IPL members’ safety, but CURRENT action should be focused on paying close attention to Renata’s posts and what she asks for from the public, sharing her story and that of IPL members and HSE students and fully siding with them. 

We openly appeal to compiling a list of Dybowski’s crimes and legally dubious activities so legal action is possible and widely called for. Judges are very influenced by public opinion and media. You can and should politely comment on the posts of IPL members who have come forward with the intent of collecting evidence of Dybowski’s abuses and illegal activities at the studio. It’s Renata’s express wish that you treat IPL members as her fellow victims and do not harass any of them, even those who’ve remained silent.

Google Docs version:

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I’ve been in contact with former HSE students and IPL members who wish to remain anonymous for safety reasons and I had their approval to share what I’ve been told. This is a relaying of all of Dybowski’s known abuse and a clarification of his situation at Ice Pick Lodge as it contains more evidence that can legally incriminate him. These former students and employees are now collecting evidence to back Renata’s claims in court and working on a statement/manifesto and I’m relaying their wishes, summarizing their accusations and preparing people for what they’ll publish before they manage to finish the document, as well as offer plans for action against Dybowski.

As it’s already widely known, Nikolay Dybowski taught as a game design professor at HSE University (School of Art and Design) in Moscow from 2017 to 2021 and has groomed several students of his from the ages of 17, with his abuse also targeting girls as young as 15 and dating to even before his tutorship at HSE. His sexual advances reached dozens, and his sexual comments hundreds of students. 

Renata herself is only 24 years old. She was an HSE School or Art and Design student and Dybowski married her when she was barely 18 and his first year student. During her second year (2019-2020), she had Yuriy at 20 years old and had to interrupt her studies to raise her and Dybowski’s child, only resuming them in 2022-2023. This year (2024-2025) is her final year at HSE. Many of the students working on this case were her classmates, know her closely and have seen her suffer all these years.

Dybowski was the head lecturer of the game development specialty at HSE and mostly a freshman year lecturer. He presented himself as a quirky, sweet fatherly figure which naturally made freshman students love and feel comfortable around him. He would start grooming students and openly flirting with them in their 1st year. There is extensive evidence from dozens of former students of his sexual harassment as well as unsolicited nudes. He appointed freshman students as his assistants and many volunteered because he’d created the image of a busy, genius found father and they felt the need to help him only to be left doing all his work for him, from making PowerPoint presentations for lectures to evaluating homework. At the same time these assistants would spend more time with him and thus be more accessible victims. He would have inappropriate conversations with students, making romantic propositions and sharing disturbing details about his personal life. There are numerous accounts by students of a story told to them multiple times by Dybowski consisting of him claiming he had placed a gun in his mouth in front of Renata's child. We could assume these claims were made to create an image of a troubled, unhappy person so as to make students feel sympathetic for him.

He would then invite these students to his studio claiming it was a reward for their brightness and artistic achievement, offering to discuss their projects with him in private, and then make sexual advances on them. This behavior continued during the early production of Pathologic 3 (2021-2022, until a bit after he was fired as he would still keep brief contact with his freshman students before they were warned of his behavior), when he would take girls and female-presenting students to IPL under the guise of them helping him with the game. At this point, all IPL members were very aware of Dybowski’s misconduct and some of them tried to shield the girls by telling them to leave the studio.

There’s also extensive evidence of Dybowski’s alcoholism and professional irresponsibility at HSE. He drank constantly during lectures, project presentations, evaluations and Zoom calls. Although Dybowski was the gamedev head lecturer, his specialty is writing and he knows little about actual programming and game design and as a result did an extremely poor job as a professor, but reputation holds a lot of power. Dybowski is aware of the societal support he has and bloats it to intimidate people. His former students confirm that when the 2021 allegations surfaced, Dybowski threatened one student who spoke up claiming HSE would file a defamation lawsuit against them with him as a witness, but this never actually happened. As former HSE professor Kirill Martynov pointed out at the time of the allegations, HSE as a whole is unable to file defamation suits, so Dybowski still tried to do this using IPL’s name instead. If Dybowski wasn’t guilty and this was indeed a case of defamation, he would have filed the lawsuit under his name. Instead, seeing that he would have no ability to prove himself innocent he wanted to use the collective HSE or IPL names as a shield and claim the lawsuit was lost because the institution itself didn’t present enough evidence of defamation. Proof of his failed attempt at filing a lawsuit with the IPL name as well as the court’s response to his appeal can be found in websites for legal monitoring of court cases and appeals:

There are no registrations of any lawsuit appeals against students in HSE’s name from this time period.

However, the HSE University higher ups did protect him in subtler ways. With these allegations there was a collective assumption that the game development specialty would be closed if Dybowski was taken to court as he was the face of the department precisely because of his fabricated image of a game developing genius. One lecturer approached a victim and relayed their evidence to the university heads and this made HSE quietly appoint another professor as head of the gamedev speciality while still keeping Dybowski employed under the condition that he stopped his abuse of students, which he obviously didn’t stop. This got him eventually fired with no official statements and no additional legal procedures. This situation was made all the more difficult because of Russia’s inadequate age of legality laws.

Many of the hirings at Ice Pick Lodge are his grooming victims, many of them still studying with him at the time of hiring, which to Dybowski means easy targets with no social or industry influence who will take any payment. Ice Pick Lodge having no official internship programs means he can hire very young people, barely legal teenagers, while raising no suspicion. After grooming and taking them to visits to IPL in their 1st year, he would then proceed to hire them, sometimes right after they finished their studies and other times while they were in their 2nd and 3rd years. Sometimes their work at IPL would be counted and reported as practice for their final year, which means HSE University was fully aware this HSE to IPL pipeline was established. This also means that Dybowski would have simultaneous control over significant parts of his victims’ lives, both academic, professional and financial. Success in all of these fields was, of course, dependent on how well they kept silent and yielded to his sexual demands. Many of his students seeked work in IPL because it was the easiest, most immediately accessible job opportunity they could get to pay for their studies. Some of them were in a dire financial situation after the COVID pandemic and the start of Russo-Ukrainian War, with many coming from poor regions of Russia and occupied territory such as Crimea and Donbas, Ukraine. 

In addition to his deeply irresponsible professional behavior at IPL which greatly hinders his team including irregular attendances, drunk tantrums, deleting entire chunks of story text and leaving the employees to rewrite it, using their work computers to flirt with other employees and on one occasion showing up drunk to a call with indie game studio of Disco Elysium fame ZA/UM who had offered them a collaborative project proposal in 2021/start of 2022, Dybowski has sexually pressured and abused several female and female-presenting IPL employees. In one case, he hired an incredibly talented student and then around 2021/2022, almost immediately after the allegations surfaced, still made numerous romantic and sexual advances towards her and then reacted to her rejection by firing her on the next day, which is illegal in Russia. He then proceeded to spread lies about her to his colleagues and other IPL members in order to ruin her reputation. Dybowski uses manipulation and intimidation tactics to keep many of his employees in silence, having gone as far as death threats. Dybowski is confirmed by a former IPL employee to have a gun license.

All of this has created a toxic and fear-based environment where the employees essentially believe they’re worthless and powerless without Dybowski, despite the fact that he clearly just orders people around and demands changes and general directions for the games’ themes and narratives while the rest of the team does the large majority of the actual work. Former HSE and IPL members claim IPL’s misogynistic abuse simulator Franz (2023) was fully written and largely designed by him, as indicated by its lack of quality and coherent vision.

As is also common knowledge, Dybowski was said to have sold IPL so as to make himself more financially unstable to dodge having to pay alimony in court, with the studio now having Popov Nikita Alekseevich as its current CEO. It’s legal for Russian companies to register the company in someone else’s name, in this case Popov, while the former CEO is still a shareholder and the de facto head of the studio, which certainly seems to be the case here. Russian law is very lenient with this practice and will only consider it illegal if there’s suspicion of money laundering involved, which doesn’t seem to be the case with IPL.

A comprehensive account of Dybowski’s behavior at Ice Pick Lodge was provided on Dec. 23 by a former IPL member writing under a pseudonym:

Here they also mention that when IPL was moving its offices to Kazakhstan and Cyprus (from 2022 to 2023), Dybowski was the first to move to Cyprus around the summer of 2022 and took Renata and her son Yuriy with him, only to completely disappear and become unreachable whenever he visited Russia. By 2024 they were living in Moscow again.

All of this has culminated in the current situation, with his soon-to-be-ex-wife Renata on DTF, where she accuses him of several types of abuse including verbal and emotional abuse, physical abuse in front of Yuriy, infidelity, financial blackmailing and finally child kidnapping:

One element of Dybowski’s abuse that I haven’t seen anyone tackle yet is that he targets an intersection of people belonging to many different minorities and is fully aware they’ll be more vulnerable because of it. This is important to understand so as to shatter the collective illusion that he’s anything other than a hypocritical lying conservative loser, and also be fair and take into account the full scope of the pain of his victims. Renata is Crimean Tatar, an indigenous Muslim minority with a long history of Russian oppression. He had a traditional Muslim wedding with Renata which personally meant a lot to her only to then abuse her, her child and her parents, send her father to the hospital with a traumatic head injury, and make claims such as: “I am saving this poor religious girl from a barbaric Muslim over-religious family. She is like a daughter, like a sister to me even more than a wife.” as reported by HSE classmates of Renata’s.

He has used the vulnerability and plea for work and networking connections from students who were victims of Russia’s imperialism, who were affected by poverty and the pandemic to coerce them into sexual acts and romantic relationships, immediately turning their conversations inappropriate when they asked him about job offerings at IPL and assessing homework.

The HSE School of Art and Design also includes many queer students and Dybowski was willfully dismissive of their identities, inclusively treating pre-transition trans men as women who need to be fixed and preying on them.

Abuse is just oppression at a small scale, as with many other cases his abusive views aren’t just reduced to one group (white cishet Russian women and girls). Despite presenting himself as an open-minded supporter of the Russian opposition, he’s a fascist and I hope this isn’t a surprise to anyone. He has given interviews to fascist Russian celebrities like Светов (Svetov) who inclusively is rumored to be a pedophile. Here is one:

It’s extremely concerning that a lot of the fandom is focusing on the amount of artistic participation Dybowski has in IPL when that’s precisely what he would want. I suggest that you re-read Renata’s post and let it sink in, understand every word of hers, every picture, the way Yuriy recoils in discomfort when Dybowski grabs him, the way his mistress and accomplice is noticeably very young, because I get the impression that most people talking about this situation are severely downplaying its gravity. Dybowski knows where Renata and her parents live. He has a gun license. I need everyone to understand that Renata, her child and her relatives are in real mortal danger.

The focus should be on her. Here is another article released by Holod (Холод) on Dec. 24 about her background with comments by other former HSE students: https://holod.media/2024/12/24/sozdatelya-videoigr-obvinili/

Dybowski wants his crimes to be an afterthought, insignificant in the face of his social influence and the supposed intellectual gifts he has to offer the world. He knows his name alone will give him a huge net of support aside from how the law is inherently constructed to protect abusers. This is what complete impunity escalates into.

Sexual abuse isn’t just some awkward flirting and a quick fuck, it’s a threat and a statement of power. It’s a man taking a young wife to pose as a daughter, easy to control and abuse. It’s taking advantage of desperate minorities, of poor people, because they’re easy to threaten and they’re seen as subhuman. It’s abusing neurodivergent people, including those with mental illnesses from prior abuse, because they know they won’t be believed. It’s partners, relatives, children being financially trapped into what is essentially years-long sexual slavery. It’s victims having to go into hiding after speaking out so they and their loved ones don’t get killed. It’s abusers being able to sue their victims for defamation over their accusation and reaping a fortune and social worship from it and then getting the bonus of ruining the victims’ social and professional lives forever. It’s an abuser being wholeheartedly supported by people even when the victims beg to be heard, even after the cat’s out of the bag, with former friends who turn on them still praising their talent and “brilliant minds”. It’s the evidence of dozens of students, so many they themselves have lost count, being considered worthless and them not being able to lay a finger on one man because a rapist’s name is pristine to everyone else. It’s someone being “almost” certain or “not knowing what to believe” even when they see the truth in front of their eyes.

Take it from personal experience: Dybowski DOES NOT love his son. Like all his other victims, Yuriy is a puppet. If it benefits Dybowski, he will kill him as well, and try to twist reality to blame the crime on Renata.

I need you to understand and accept this before making any decision.

OPTIONS FOR ACTION:

Dybowski will not be pressured into even the slightest change. If it’s even possible that he’s fired from IPL, he will not stop there. The only way to keep his victims safe is if he is either [redacted] or imprisoned, ideally for life.

The situation at IPL is, as I said, seriously grim. Dybowski is figuratively making an entire studio hostage and it’s very unlikely that they’ll release a formal statement. If they do, it’ll probably be imposed by Dybowski to make everyone think the situation is solved and dissipate attention. Do not trust authority or PR, trust each other, trust the victims. 

Renata has expressed she won’t start a crowdfunding campaign at the moment since she’s focused on surviving until her divorce proceedings end and is certainly concerned that asking for money will turn the public against her. We should stay attentive to news and guidance from her.

A boycott is still a necessity but as a LAST RESORT. As I’ve relayed and as Renata herself has stressed, the IPL employees are her fellow victims and she pleads that we don’t direct any blame, harm or vitriol towards them. However, Dybowski himself will reap significant social praise, media publicity and wealth from Pathologic 3, which will allow him to persecute his own employees and ex-employees if he so wishes. I doubt they’ll receive residuals for the game’s profits and the IPL members’ survival and safety matters more than any symbolic reward they’ll get from the game’s release which will be meager since Dybowski will once again center all the attention on himself to try to clean his name. Allied to this is the fact that if potential investors see Dybowski’s initiatives keep making money, they will do everything to protect him from consequences, aside from the fact that loss of profit will be the biggest incentive for the currently appointed CEO to take a stance on the situation, especially if we’re clear about our goals of protecting the workers and seeing justice against Dybowski. We stress that a boycott is not a priority because precisely for these reasons we need to put all our focus on bringing Dybowski to justice before he can reap the benefits of Patho 3 and hurt the IPL members and Renata. Taking any longer might be too late. 

Until then, what we can do about this is quietly cancelling all our pre-orders of Pathologic 3 and sharing information about the abuse of IPL workers, standing unconditionally by their side.

THIS CAN BE DONE BY:

- SHARING HIS VICTIMS’ STORIES (RENATA, IPL, HSE), UNCONDITIONALLY STANDING WITH THEM. Now isn’t the time to be impartial. Dybowski’s power is in his words and the social influence he holds. Turning this tactic against him is very important: JUDGES ARE SIGNIFICANTLY INFLUENCED BY PUBLIC OPINION AND MEDIA. I’m already trying to get into contact with YouTubers and will share news as soon as possible. If Dybowski starts to understand he will see consequences for his actions, lack of job opportunities, severed connections, legal consequences, he will grow too afraid to kill. We need to make him fear us. This will make the next steps much easier:

- COLLECTING EVIDENCE. With more social pressure, it’s possible more former IPL members will come forward to share their experiences. You can and should politely comment on the posts of these IPL members with the intent of collecting evidence of Dybowski’s abuses and illegal activities at the studio. Ask them about the studio’s structure, the number of members, if they’ve ever had specific issues with their salary payments, anything you can think of that you think might help. Once again it’s Renata’s express wish that you treat them with kindness and do not harass any of them, even those who’ve remained silent.

- LEGAL ACTION. I appeal to anyone who has knowledge of Russian law to compile a list of Dybowski’s crimes and legally dubious activities, share it and send it to me as well so I can pass it to former HSE and IPL members. I also encourage anyone knowledgeable to open debates about Russian law and the steps necessary to bring Dybowski to justice, so Renata, or for her safety, someone else, will be widely supported and prepared when charging him with these crimes.

What Dybowski wants is for people to believe his power, authority and qualities are insurmountable and not up for debate. Abusers do this a lot or else they wouldn’t be able to keep abusing and this is why the idea that his artistic work has any real value needs to be shattered. Dybowski has lied before. He threatened to sue a former student under a bigger name, HSE or IPL, because he knows that without a world that pampers him he’s just one man. He lies because he knows he won’t get away with the truth. He’s nothing worth pointing out if not a pathetic, deeply cynical loser preaching about his right to dictatorship and we do not need him, neither does IPL. His reputation and life of comfort won’t survive having his victims, subordinates, fans turn on him. Even after all this he’ll switch the narrative and try to make himself small, pitiful, claim the way we treated him was unfair and he only abused people because of his own hardships. Any unhappiness abusers may have is a product of their own actions. They refuse to have meaningful connections because they refuse to see their victims as equals, and that kind of loneliness is nothing compared to the one felt by their victims who they force into extreme isolation.