bald and bankrupt

In June 2018, a Brighton-born Englishman in his mid-40s started a YouTube channel with, he says, about $200 in the bank and a failed business behind him. He named it after the two things he expected critics to mock. Benjamin Rich, who calls himself "Mr Bald", built Bald and Bankrupt around loosely planned films about ordinary people in the backstreets, apartments and trains of the former Soviet Union and far beyond. Along the way he fled Kyiv as Russia invaded, was detained at Baikonur and was expelled from Russia. In 2026 he completed a goal he dates to his teens: filming in all 15 former Soviet republics. By October 2026 the channel had more than 4.5 million subscribers.

Brighton, Perestroika and a Moscow Homestay

Rich was born in Brighton in 1974. He traces his fascination with the Soviet Union to the fall of the Berlin Wall and perestroika, when he was about 15, and says travelling across the former USSR was "always my dream." As a teenager he took Russian lessons from a teacher he remembers as "Anna", and he credits that class with starting his ambition to see all 15 Soviet republics.

By his own account, his first trip to Russia came in 1993, when he was 18: a two-month homestay in Moscow, booked through a small company called Kremlin 2000 that he had found advertised in Private Eye. Nobody had told his host family when he would arrive, he says, and his first night was chaotic. He says he has visited about 80 countries since he started travelling at 18, and recalls doing "the backpacker thing" around Europe at about 27.

Bankruptcy and a $200 Gamble

Rich told Radio Prague in 2020 that his business had failed and he was made bankrupt "just before" he started the channel, which was partly a way "to get myself out of bankruptcy." He also describes being "miserable" in a dead-end job at 44. The name, he explained, disarmed critics in advance: with the baldness and the bankruptcy already in the title, they had nothing left to attack.

In 2018 he also published The Burning Edge: Travels Through Irradiated Belarus, a 201-page book released independently under the pen name Arthur Chichester. Reviewing it in 2021, Arcadia Pod called it a starting point for his best Belarus films.

The channel launched on 12 June 2018, and its first 14 videos were all filmed in India. His early film "Why I Returned To India After 20 Years" passed a million views within about a month. By August he had turned to Russia and the post-Soviet world. Looking back in 2026, he said it was in Belarus, filming in Babruysk, that he first used the word "Soviet" on the channel and that his Soviet series began.

His approach involved little homework. He says he picks a country, reads a bit, lands and sees who he meets, and insists the channel is "not really about me" but about those people.

Moldova, Bolivia and the DangerTuber Label

In 2019 the audience took off, growing from about 338,000 subscribers in March to more than a million by October. The biggest films of that run came from Moldova and Transnistria, from a vodka session in a Soviet apartment and from what he billed as Bolivia's "most dangerous hood". In November 2019, remarks about Chechen women in a video filmed on a train to Chechnya ended in a forced apology on camera.

When VICE examined the rise of "DangerTubers" in May 2020, his travels had taken in a boxcar train across Mauritania, a Roma wedding in Slovakia, Beslan, Chernobyl and "Europe's cheapest hotel", and he had just smuggled a cat out of Cuba. The magazine called his channel "perhaps the purest and most popular example" of the form, while faulting the genre for a "palpable sense of intrusion".

Rich said in 2020 that he had been married to a Belarusian woman, and that his Belarusian in-laws shaped his belief that the country's people should be kept separate from its governments. During the 2020 protests he criticised President Lukashenko, said he had turned down a government approach to make positive films, and declared he "would never betray the Belarusian people", expecting to be blacklisted for it. By then he regarded Prague as home, calling it "the most liveable city", and had set his sights on all 15 former Soviet republics, with Central Asia next.

2022: Kyiv, Baikonur and Expulsion

Rich was in Kyiv when Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022. He fled with fellow vlogger Johnny FD, and "Leaving Kyiv On A Refugee Train" went up on 28 February. In April he released a film from Syria.

On 7 May he and travel partner Alina Tseliupa trekked overnight through the Kazakh desert to the abandoned Buran hangars at Baikonur. Roscosmos said they were detained near Site 112, and international outlets reported an arrest. "I wasn't arrested," Rich said, describing a few hours of questioning and a £60 administrative fine. Tseliupa said they paid £50 each, and Dexerto later reported a three-day jail term. He sat on the footage for about three months before releasing it in August as a 40-minute film, later retitled "The Greatest YouTube Video Ever Made!"

That summer he toured Cornwall, Blackpool and Bristol with Backpacker Ben for "This Is Britain!" and told an interviewer he expected to carry on for "another nine months, a year" before moving to other creative work such as writing or photography.

On 1 September he posted "The Journey Is Over". In it he said he had been taken to a police station, jailed "for a few days", found guilty in court and expelled from Russia with a ban on re-entry. The video shows him crossing into Estonia. Other channels circulated footage of police questioning him about calling Putin "crazy" and about fundraising for Ukraine. In February 2026 he released "How I Survived Being Thrown In A Russian Prison", saying he was telling "the stories behind the headlines for the first time."

Locked Out of Russia

Barred from Russia, Rich ranged wider. Afghanistan came about five weeks after the expulsion. In 2023 he crossed the Darién Gap with migrants, rode Mexico's migrant train "The Beast" and filmed in Pakistan. Growth slowed after the ban: by CreatorDB's count, the last 900,000 subscribers took about four years.

A September 2024 film, "I Visited India So You Don't Have To", drew a wave of criticism in Indian media. Rich said commenters wrongly assumed he had an "agenda", and rather than delete it he added "(And offended 1 billion people)" to the title.

He says his bank balance has gone from $200 to "a lot more". In July 2024 the Invest Like a Boss podcast, co-hosted by Johnny FD, billed him as a "certified millionaire" in an episode titled "From Bald and Bankrupt to Bald and Banked Up". He also sells books through his own site, among them The YouTube Blueprint, an e-book of almost 300 pages that mixes his story with advice on earning a living as a creator, and a language-learning guide.

His 2025 journeys swung between old haunts and front lines: Chișinău and Tiraspol with Backpacker Ben in January, the border between China and North Korea in March, and a 62-minute film from Ukraine's eastern front in April. In September he returned to Kharkiv's KhTZ district with Johnny FD, four years after a pre-war visit, this time under drone attack. He crossed the Caspian Sea by ferry from Azerbaijan to Kazakhstan and, having vowed after 2024 never to return to India, went back anyway to ride "general class" trains through Assam and West Bengal with Backpacker Ben.

He now releases roughly one film a month, and by October 2026 the channel had nearly 750 million views across 236 videos.

Fifteen Republics, Thirty-Five Years

In February 2025 Rich wrote that finishing the 15 republics had been his dream since he was 16, and that 2025 "will probably be my last year in this niche." His remaining wishes included Latvia, North Korea, Turkmenistan, China, Australia and the USA.

In December 2025 he filmed in Daugavpils, Latvia, including its White Swan prison. In April 2026, with Joe Penprase credited on the trip, he reached Turkmenistan, the 15th and final former Soviet republic. A month later he ranked all 15, saying he had visited them over 35 years. As the Belarusian outlet Nasha Niva reported, Belarus, the subject of his first book and the place where his Soviet series began, came first, and Turkmenistan came last.

Completing the set did not end the channel. In June 2026 he filmed in post-Maduro Caracas, in August he explored the Czechia "tourists never see" with Backpacker Ben, and on 1 October he released "I Investigated What Remains Of Yugoslavia", the first of what he hopes will be a three-part series.