Bigfoot near Moscow?

[Aleksandr]

I’ve been looking at some Russian-language reports and videos of alleged wildman sightings.
One clip that’s circulated is said to be from near Moscow:

Source: https://youtube.com/watch?v=I_iof5YBWrw

To my eye it’s ambiguous — could be a person in a suit, could be something else.
Has anyone here looked at Russian Bigfoot footage before?

Does this particular one strike you as interesting, or does it look like an obvious hoax?

[Bill Ryan]

Aleksandr, many thanks for this, and a very warm welcome to the forum!

Of course, it's not easy to analyze the video, which at first sight does look like a video of a sighting that could indeed have been real.

But as I'm sure you know, there have been many reports over the years of Russian 'wild men', some of them large and Bigfoot-sized, and others more human-sized (but very strong and muscular) known as Almas.

Do see this forum thread from 2016, featuring an astonishing story which you may already know about: (And which I'm as sure as I can be is a real one)

• The story of Zana/ Zanya/ Zena: a female Alma (wild man), captured in ~1850 in Georgia

[Aleksandr]

Thank you, Bill — and thank you for the warm welcome.
I hadn’t read that 2016 thread yet; I’ll look at the Zana material carefully. As I understand it, her story belongs to the Caucasian / Georgian side of the “wild man” tradition, together with the broader Almas reports.
There is also a more local example, tied to an area much closer to the Moscow–St. Petersburg transport corridor. In and around the town of Malaya Vishera (Novgorod region), residents have long spoken about a hairy biped they call Avdoshka. Sightings are reported in the surrounding forests, and the figure is treated as part of local folklore rather than a one-off sensation.
In 2018 the town even installed a public sculpture of Avdoshka on the central square:



It’s a small but interesting case of how these stories can become embedded in ordinary regional life, not only in remote mountain areas.