VDNKh (Moscow’s Exhibition of Achievements of National Economy) responded to yesterday’s post about the skating rink. Or rather, not exactly to me personally—they simply made a public statement, pretending it was just in general and not prompted by the post.
Well, at least that’s something. It doesn’t matter to us who they were replying to—the important thing is that they responded.
Here’s the link so you can read it too and so everything is fair: Everything about why, how, and at what cost we created the “country’s main skating rink”
As I suspected, we did not find all the procurement contracts when calculating the cost, and the rink cost not 762 million but 784.5 million rubles.
Here are the figures. You don’t need to pay much attention to the line marked “price reduction”—it’s one of those standard tricks used to confuse people who are not familiar with public procurement.
The math behind their profit calculation looks, in my view, rather naive and aimed at a reader who is not especially meticulous—someone who won’t bother to find out what counts as gross revenue, what counts as income, and at what price the tickets are actually being sold.
In reality, no one expects the rink to necessarily turn a profit. What it should bring is children’s laughter and enjoyment for Muscovites and visitors to the capital. After all, we do not demand that the Friendship of Peoples fountain at VDNKh generate a profit.
The only question is whether the same amount of children’s laughter could have been achieved for less than 784 million rubles. And whether, for that money, it would have been possible to have less chaos.
Okay. The positions are clear; we’ll remember this VDNKh post and these figures and write them down in the little black notebook. We’ll be keeping an eye on the rink and the money spent on it.