In this column for Yezhednevny Zhurnal, noted satirist Viktor Shenderovich discusses an ironic but all too representative instance of corruption within the Russian government, and issues a warning to politicians who think their impunity will last forever.

Part of their Repertory
By Viktor Shenderovich
July 19, 2012
Yezhednevny Zhurnal

The St. Petersburg City Cultural Committee designated budget subsidies for non-state theaters. Out of 15.6 million rubles, 15 million went to one theater – the Andrei Mironov Russian Enterprise Theater. The theater’s artistic director, Rudolf Furmanov, is both a distant relative of Cultural Committee head Dmitri Meskhiev, and a confidant of Vladimir Putin.

This isn’t even corruption. Corruption tries to avoid sticking out and hides from the law. But this – this is a typical demonstration of lawlessness, an insistent announcement of the new rules of the game…

Yes, this is how it’s going to be – there you go! Yes, all of the allocated budget money is going to the relative of a boyar and the confidant of a khan. Yes, we wanted to spit on what you think and say. Yes, yes, and yes once again! And no matter how much you bash your head against the wall, we’re still going to have it our way.

And they will, naturally. Until one day (hello Hegel) when quantity turns into quality, the system screws up, and the khan and boyars, emboldened by their impunity, choke on their own shit and blood (check your history textbooks, virtually any chapter).

But until then everything is going to be so cool and controlled that it’s not even going to occur to anyone sawing up the budget to disguise themselves.

P.S. Under closer inspection, this dull corruption story turns out to have a paradoxical side note: the theater intends to spend a large portion of the money it’s received on a production of Evgeny Shvarts’s version of The Emperor’s New Clothes.

This should be particularly instructive in the production of dear Vladimir Vladimirovich’s confidant:

“You’re naked, you old fool! Do you understand? Naked, naked, naked! Look at the people! Look at the people! They’re lost in thought. Lost in thought, you poor buffoon! Our traditions are shaking! Smoke is billowing above the state! (the king cries out.) Shut up!…”

And the rest is in the script.

Translation by theotherrussia.org

The new movement, which is called Vote Against Them All, will ask Russians to come to the polls and put a big cross over their ballots on voting day for State Duma deputies on December 4. The goal: to have at least seven percent of the total votes cast be marked in this manner, thus crossing the threshold necessary for a party to gain seats in the Duma.

At the head of Vote Against Them All is Boris Nemtsov, former deputy prime minister and coleader of the unsuccessfully registered People’s Freedom Party. Other members include writer Dmitri Bykov, satirist Viktor Shenderovich, leading environmental activist Yevgenia Chirikova, lawyer Vadim Prokhorov, and journalists Pavel Sheremet, Olga Romanova, and Vladimir Korsunsky.

As was discussed during the group’s recent three-hour meeting, the campaign will ask Russian citizens “not to sit at home, go to the voting stations, cross out their ballots and write something like ‘down with the swindlers and theives.'” Given that many oppositionists are on an unofficial black list that bars them from being shown on television, the movement is limited to distributing pamplets, posting materials on the internet, and holding demonstrations to spread their message.

Elections in Russia are notoriously corrupt. Despite its falling popularity, Prime Minister Vladimir Putin’s United Russia party routinely sweeps regional, federal, and local elections amidst widespread accusations of fraud from both Russian and international watchdog groups. Opposition parties are routinely denied the right to officially register, thus effectively banning them from fielding candidates. Frequent rhetoric from officials about reforming the system has generally come to naught.

A Few Words About Methods
By Viktor Shenderovich
December 7, 2010
Yezhednevny Zhurnal

I intentionally waited a few days – would anybody speak out?

Nope. All is quiet…

Impudence is bliss.

“The methods of our security services differ in a good way from the methods used by United States security services,” Putin told Larry King. “Thank God… the officers of our intelligence services and other security services are not noted as having been involved in the organization of secret prisons, kidnappings, or the use of torture.”

They were noticed, naturally, and more than once.

The difference between Russia and the US is that the people who used torture in Guantanamo are in prison, having been convicted by American courts, and the Russian citizens, kidnapped and tortured by FSB officers, won’t get justice from anywhere closer than Strasbourg.

The second difference is that the American journalists who investigated Guantanamo won the Pulitzer Prize and are all alive, and Politkovskaya and Estemirova, who investigated the filtration camp in Chernokozovo, have been murdered, and their murderers have not been found, and Putin still managed to publicly spit on Politkovskaya’s grave.

So that’s it about the methods. And not those of the security service, but of Putin and his propaganda. They are simple, like a stick: lie through the teeth, nobody will notice!

It doesn’t go unnoticed there – here it definitely goes unnoticed, because 99% of Russian citizens simply don’t hear the objections. Ekho Moskvy, a couple of uncensored magazines with a two-kilometer radius… The sweet joys of our liberal ghetto.

And on television, Putin makes a universal smear to Larry King.

In a move that was both practical and symbolic, activists had prepared 50 thousand copies of the Russian constitution to hand out to police charged with manning the event. Renowned rights activist Lyudmila Alexeyeva, who was detained in a New Year’s Eve protest despite being 82 years old, had signed each copy with the phrase “in kind remembrance.”

None of the officers present turned down their copy of the document.

A wide variety of opposition movements were represented at Saturday’s rally, and many made speeches chronicling their clashes with police violence and abuse of authority.

“I very much love the police that protect me, but I rarely see them,” said writer Viktor Shenderovich. “More often, I see the cops that beat and murder.” He stressed that the necessity for drastic police reform is a result of Russia lacking free elections, a free press, and free courts.

Referring to Russian President Dmitri Medvedev’s stated goal of wiping out corruption, White Ribbon movement representative Lyubov Polyakova pointed out that whistleblowing officers, such as Aleksei Dymovsky, had been poorly received when responding to the president’s call. “Look what they’ve done to them!” she said. “You don’t want to get rid of corruption; you say that we’re rocking the boat.”

“Yes, we’re rocking your rotten boat, which you, like beetles, have already completely eaten through,” Polyakova concluded.

Major Dymovsky was detained not long after posting two videos on YouTube in November that detail corruption in the Novorossiysk police department.

Sergei Davidis, coordinator of the Union of Solidarity with Political Prisoners, appealed to the officers themselves. Remarking that the rally was calling for rights for the officers, he asked whether they really wanted to work for such paltry salaries and extort bribes to get by, and whether they really, after all, wanted people to hate them.

Solidarity movement member Anastasia Rybachenko stressed the importance of new methods for hiring law enforcement officers. “People who enter the police force intend to get police batons and power,” while others join simply to avoid Russia’s mandatory draft, she said. With the Internal Ministry scraping the bottom of society’s barrel and paying officers next to nothing, it follows that the resulting police force is less than ideal.

Vladimir Lukin, Russia’s federal designate on human rights issues, was noted among those present at the rally.

A resolution taken at the end of the demonstration called for the management of the Internal Ministry to be fired, that political persecution of whistleblowing officers be put to a stop, and that police force not be used in political investigations.

Two groups of counter-protesters attempted to disrupt the rally. Some cast leaflets into the crowd that were printed to look like hundred dollar bills, reading “these dollars are payment for the collapse of the police in Russia.” Members from one group were detained.

While the Russian police have long been notorious for their violent abuse of authority, they came under particularly harsh criticism after Major Denis Yevsyukov killed three and wounded dozens more in a Moscow supermarket while drunk late last April. With the renewed wave of media attention to police abuses that followed, prominent government and public officials began calling for the Internal Ministry to be dissolved. Last December, Russian President Dmitri Medvedev ordered the Ministry to be extensively reformed, and in a January 24 statement said that the number of police personnel “needs to be reduced and wages should be raised.”

In the meantime, scandalous incidents of police brutality show no signs of slowing.