Sometimes you wonder what example to use to explain to everyone just how important our fight against corruption is—and against this regime that rests on corruption. But the regime itself keeps handing us examples so vivid that no others are needed:
This is a 1.99 km (about 2 km) stretch of road. You might not even spot it right away—it’s so tiiiny in the middle of the map. It’s marked in red. There is already an excellent road there. Narrow, yes, but there is no doubt about its quality: after all, this road leads to the state dachas (government country residences), and it is looked after very tenderly.
This road is being reconstructed. For 3,174,043,798 rubles. You probably find it inconvenient to count the digits in that price. Let me help: there are ten of them. Three billion one hundred seventy-four million forty-three thousand seven hundred ninety-eight rubles.
http://zakupki.gov.ru/epz/order/notice/ea44/view/common-info.html?regNumber=0348100042414000034
I want to stress that this is specifically a reconstruction, because many media outlets are writing, "Oh, what a horror—2 kilometers of road for 3 billion".
It is much worse than that. This is not the construction of a new road in the tundra or the mountains. This is not the reconstruction of a road in a densely populated city, where entire blocks have to be demolished and private land bought out.
This is the conversion of a good two-lane road in the immediate Moscow suburbs into a four-lane one.
Without any expensive buyout of private land or demolition of buildings during the preparatory phase—as the cost estimate explicitly tells us:
...
So, my friends, corruption and this corrupt regime must be fought because this regime is making us pay for the reconstruction of a road in the Moscow suburbs at a rate of 1.5909 billion rubles per kilometer.
That comes to 1.59 million rubles per meter.
That is equal to, at today’s exchange rate, 45,810 US dollars per meter.
That comes to 45.8 million dollars per kilometer.
That amounts to, taking the maximum width of the roadway into account, 211,000 rubles per square meter.
Take your pick—whichever figure you prefer.
Putin is in China right now. Let him tell someone there that the road to his "state dachas" costs $45 million per kilometer. I think the Chinese comrades would first clutch their hearts, then leap to their feet shouting, "EXECUTE THEM IMMEDIATELY," and then, a few seconds later, realizing exactly who would have to be executed, grow embarrassed and offer to have some tea instead.
You can see a comparison of road construction costs in Russia and China here.
And even if we look at the well-known (and completely false) calculations by the transport minister claiming that "roads in Russia are not expensive at all",
we will see that the reconstruction of the road to the Rublyovka (elite area west of Moscow) "state dachas" costs 398 million rubles per lane-kilometer, which is 5.3 times more expensive than the maximum cost of new construction declared by Minister Sokolov.
My friends, this corrupt regime must also be fought because we all know what roads in the Moscow region are like and what a state of collapse they are in. We understand how useful these 3 billion rubles—if spent honestly—would be for the roads of the Moscow region, the second most populous federal subject in Russia. Not to mention how badly the ruined roads in the rest of the country need those 3 billion. But this regime has different priorities: it allocates 3 billion for an "access road to the state dachas" on Rublyovka. For them, that is Russia.
This disgusting regime must be fought because its essence is perfectly reflected in the capitalized word "State Dachas" in the tender documents. We have two sacred things: the President and the State Dachas.
And finally, the cherry on top: such expensive procurements are supposed to go through mandatory "public discussion." This is what the registration sheet for the minutes of the "public discussion" of the Rublyovka state-dacha road costing 3.1 billion rubles looks like:
PS. Will the Anti-Corruption Foundation (ACF) and RosPil take up this tender? We will, although a preliminary review by the RosPil team showed that there are no formal violations on which we could get the tender canceled. They cooked it all up neatly.
PPS. Obviously, United Russia loyalists will swarm the discussion with their usual "expert opinion": "But that’s just the starting price—it will go down!" Let me point out right away that under the new law, the initial price has to be justified; it cannot just be pulled out of thin air. And practice shows that no reductions happen unless there is a media scandal and political orders from above.