While the bikers from the "Night Wolves" movement are riding around Europe in a mighty convoy of one motorcycle and two cars carrying diplomats, and also lying about cooperation with war veterans from the Urals, we would like to help the public answer a simple question: what exactly do the "Night Wolves" live on, and who finances them?
It has been written more than once that Zaldostanov won a grant here and there, but it seems to me that very few people grasp the true scale of how the "Wolves" are being fed from the state budget.
The results of grant allocations are publicly available on a special portal run by the Civic Chamber (a state-backed consultative body). Searching there is horribly inconvenient, but it is possible to reconstruct the results of competitions going back to mid-2013. If you look for the Night Wolves in the results of five competitions (two in 2013 and three in 2014), it turns out they won 21.5 million rubles in grants over two years. State funding was provided for two New Year children's shows (!!!) — we will come back to those — and for a stunt festival.
But here is the catch: the legal entity "Night Wolves" is not the only legal entity belonging to Zaldostanov and the other owners of the biker club.
Zaldostanov and Strogov, two of the founders of the Night Wolves, are also founders of another movement called "Russian Motorcyclists," also known as the "Bikers' Association."
This public organization also took part in the grant distribution process and also won two grants. The bikers disguised themselves cleverly: one year they applied under the brand name "Bikers' Association," and the next under the different name "Russian Motorcyclists," but the Primary State Registration Number (OGRN) of the grant recipients was the same.
In 2013, they received 3.5 million rubles to create patriotic video content:
And in 2014, another 7 million rubles for a project aimed at the "synthesis of tradition and innovation" and at "identifying the place of motorcyclists in the spiritual life of Russian society." Seriously, this is not a joke — see for yourselves:
In addition, Yevgeny Strogov, co-founder of both the "Night Wolves" and the "Russian Motorcyclists," owns a stake in yet another public biker association. It is called the "Motorcycle Tourism Federation," was registered two years ago, and organizes various rides together with the "Night Wolves."
And they too followed the well-worn procedure, applied for a grant, and of course received it: a full 9 million rubles to hold the "Road of Friendship" car-and-motorcycle rally for the purpose of carrying out "people's diplomacy":
If you add up all the data found on the grants portal, it turns out that the "Night Wolves" and biker associations directly affiliated with Zaldostanov received 41 million rubles over a year and a half.
The average presidential grant awarded in 2014 was, by the most generous estimate, somewhere around 2 million rubles. In the bikers' case, one set of hands received 20 times that amount.
Getting grants is not like driving to Berlin in a motor rally — nothing can stop the "Night Wolves" here. 41 million rubles in presidential grants was not enough! In July 2014, they went and got their biggest grant yet — 15 million from the Ministry of Culture.
This was that very biker show in Sevastopol that many people remember. The performance caused a major stir at the time:
So, over 18 months, a total of 56 million rubles in public budget money was received in the form of grants.
So technically, the term "grant-eaters" applies perfectly to the "Night Wolves," not to the opposition they like to denounce.
Returning to the presidential grants, special attention should be paid to the children's New Year shows.
First, there is a whole series of questions for the National Charity Foundation, which allocates budget money to the "Wolves" for this event every year. Does it not trouble the management of this CHARITABLE foundation to award multimillion-ruble grants for a commercial event?
This event has been running for a long time, and tickets for these New Year shows cost 2,000 rubles per child and 1,500 rubles per adult. The performances run for a whole month, and the "Wolves" themselves claim that they are sold out and that more than 4,000 children attend each season. Even assuming that each child is accompanied by only one parent, that means the "Night Wolves" make about 14 million rubles from ticket sales alone.
And on top of that, they ask for state support.
What is also interesting is that the National Charity Foundation allocated 3.5 million rubles for the New Year shows in 2013, and the following year, without batting an eye, assigned two and a half times more for those very same shows — 9 million rubles. Before 2013, the bikers' New Year shows had existed perfectly well without any state support at all.
The content of these children's New Year shows also deserves attention. We watched excerpts from these performances over the past several years and are retelling the plot for you in brief. No jokes, no exaggeration — completely seriously.
The 2015 сценарий. Evil forces try to sell the motherland, symbolized by a giant key, for "foreign grants." An animated Statue of Liberty arrives in a sheriff's car carrying a suitcase full of grants. Then she climbs onto some kind of platform and starts throwing banknotes and entire boxes labeled "grants" from above. People in traditional Russian costumes (in the background) catch the boxes.
They either steal the key or buy it, and plan to use it to erase the year 2014 from memory. You may ask why the Statue of Liberty would want to erase 2014. The answer is in the poem below. It is recited by two of the Statue's companions in black suits riding in a menacing vehicle.
In 2013, the children's New Year show was devoted to the idea that a world government wanted to stage a coup in Russia on New Year's Eve (it did not work out). In 2014, America is again trying to conquer Russia; in the play, Baba Yaga hides Koschei's money in offshore accounts (seriously) and tries to help America steal a magic sword from Russia.
The author of all these scripts is Alexander Zaldostanov. Paid for out of your and my pocket.