It’s interesting to watch how quickly signatures are being collected for petitions against the "Dima Peskov Law"—the bill that would classify information about the owners of real estate, yachts, and various aircraft.
There are already 91,000 on Change.org. And here, by the way, is another petition on the international signature-gathering platform Avaaz, launched by the Russian branch of Transparency International.
The Kremlin ideologues behind the bill and the operatives in the FSB clearly did not expect such a strong reaction. After all, who actually uses the Unified State Register of Real Estate Rights (EGRP) database to expose corrupt officials?
1) Us—the Anti-Corruption Foundation (ACF)—constantly; 2) Novaya Gazeta, very often; 3) Reuters, sometimes; 4) Bloomberg, sometimes; 3) Vedomosti, sometimes; 4) RBC, sometimes.
I’ve probably forgotten someone, but those would be very isolated cases.
Who are the targets of these exposés? Roughly 20 to 50 families of the main crooks who seized power in the country and appropriated 80% of the nation’s wealth.
Who are the potential targets of such exposés? Well, maybe 3,000 families in Russia—the various attendants of these crooks, from parliamentary to media circles—who have also been implicated in illicit enrichment.
So the FSB men clearly saw this as a completely niche issue and were confident the bill would sail through without any meaningful public reaction.
Now let’s look at it from the other side:
Do extracts from the EGRP actually contain the kind of personal data that could be classified? Here is one such document from our latest high-profile investigation into Peskov’s 1-billion-ruble house (about $10–15 million, depending on the exchange rate at the time). Can you see any personal data here belonging to his wife, Tatyana Navka?
An address and a surname. Even without open access to the EGRP, we still could have shown you photos of the house, its location on the map, and written: "This is where Peskov and Navka live, in a 1-billion-ruble house, and where they got the money to buy it is unknown".
It’s just that without the extract, someone like Vladimir Solovyov and his colleagues from Olgino (a reference to the St. Petersburg “troll factory”) would have more room to screech, "Navalny proved nothing, it’s all made up"—but the substance and scope of the personal data being disclosed would not change.
But how many people use this database for work? Did you know, for example, that Russia alone has 32,000 cadastral engineers, all of whom need access every day.
Lawyers, real estate agents, notaries. It’s impossible to count them all. It would be good to get usage figures from the database administrators, but I’m sure we’re talking about hundreds of thousands of users.
That’s why people are signing so quickly. Not only—and not even mainly—because the purely political motive is infuriating (they’re hiding their palaces), but because a few idlers are making it harder for ordinary people to do their jobs. Some poor real estate agent or cadastral engineer is scrambling around a collapsed market trying to find clients and earn a living, and then the “state” tells him: buddy, starting tomorrow, your life will be worse, more complicated, and more expensive. Why? Because we can. That’s why.