You’ve probably read the news story—horrifying in substance, but treated by the media as comic relief, because every other story these days is horrifying.
It’s just that the Soyuz-2 space rocket turned out not to fit the dimensions of the facilities at the Vostochny Cosmodrome. Considering that 140 billion rubles have already been spent on the cosmodrome (about $2.2 billion at the time), that God knows how much more will be spent in the future, and that the project has supposedly been placed under the “special personal control” of the country’s entire leadership some three hundred times—this really does sound like an indictment of the modern system of managing the military-industrial complex.
Still, it’s impossible not to ask: HOW could this happen? What scale of chaos and theft must be going on at the country’s main construction project (now that the Olympics are over) for a “rocket not to fit the size requirements”?
That question is answered by Lyubov Sobol of the ACF (Anti-Corruption Foundation), who has studied mountains of material and is publishing her investigative special project today: “Vostochny Cosmodrome.”
All the cosmodrome’s facilities are divided into 8 complexes:
— launch, — airport, — fuel component storage, — communications system support, — impact zone operations, — residential, — administrative, — road infrastructure.
And based on official documents, it presents diagrams showing how the design and construction were actually carried out, compared with how they were supposed to be carried out.
Here it’s hard even to say whether the chaos gave rise to corruption, or whether the chaos was created for the sake of corruption—but the following facts have been firmly established:
— most of the facilities were started without design documentation that had passed state review;
— during construction, the documentation was constantly rewritten, and the contracts signed for development were essentially fictitious.
Yes, of course, there has never been a construction project where everything was exactly on schedule and perfectly in line with the design. But this is a spaceport, guys. You would expect that at least here, design work is done for something more than just stealing money through it.
In short, take a look, join the campaign to send complaints to Rogozin (the formal overseer there), and once again grasp the degree to which the system of power has degraded: even in the one field where Russia could say “we’re the best on the planet,” there is total disintegration and collapse—and this happened not in the “cursed ’90s,” but under “mature Putinism,” starting in 2011.