As you know, Malaya Bronnaya, beloved by all Muscovites, went underwater yesterday. I mean literally went underwater — take a look:
A lot of streets in Moscow flooded yesterday (great job, Sergey Semyonovich!), but the disaster on Malaya Bronnaya left everyone utterly stunned. After all, this street was ceremoniously reopened less than a year ago after a major reconstruction:
The street was said to have been “reborn,” only to drown at the age of ten months. Pretty strange.
So I became curious — especially after yesterday’s discussion with Ilya Krasilshchik — about who exactly produced this wonderful reconstruction design and carried out the contract work.
What’s the first thing to do? Just google “Malaya Bronnaya reconstruction.” Do it and you’ll laugh. The result looks like this:
The top link about the reconstruction of Malaya Bronnaya is a series of posts by Maxim Katz about how his nonprofit, “City Projects,” proposed the reconstruction plan.
It’s all in the familiar style of Sobyanin’s PR people: colorful pictures meant to fool gullible people into believing that Moscow is in a state of eternal summer and everyone rides around on bicycles.
And of course there’s also the promise to make sure that “everything is done properly, not just any old way”:
It’s impossible to view the full project proposals now — they’re no longer available:
The internet also turns up another post by Katz, this one after the reconstruction. Naturally, it’s about how great everything is, what a great Sergey Semyonovich is, working with great architects, and “let’s look at what came out of two examples that City Projects worked on for a long time — Malaya Bronnaya Street and Triumfalnaya Square.”
Still, it would be wrong to state outright that Katz and company made money from designing Malaya Bronnaya, because: a) these pictures can hardly be called a real project; b) they do not appear in the public procurement records; and c) there is no other evidence. My assumption is that he and Varlamov serviced this project as PR men — first feeding everyone nonsense with their pretty pictures, and then writing promotional copy about “how wonderful it all is.” Entirely in the Sobyanin-Liksutov style; just read how yesterday they offered Svetlakov money to praise the reconstruction of Tverskaya Street.
“The capital’s urbanists have presented a project,” that sort of thing.
But there is one person who officially made money from this project (thanks to Lyubov Sobol, who quickly found everything today).
The design contract with BalticStroyCompany LLC, worth 10,637,940 rubles (about $170,000 at the time), was signed on February 20, 2015.
And what is “BalticStroyCompany”? That’s right, attentive reader — you’ve already seen that name in our investigation.
Read it if you have any doubts — we explain in considerable detail why “BalticStroyCompany” is Igor Chaika.
So when you’re walking along Bronnaya in knee-deep water and shouting, “Who designed it like this?!”, you have your answer: Igor Chaika, the son of Russia’s Prosecutor General.
And who turned Igor’s ideas into tile and concrete? Naturally, another official.
The tender for the actual construction work on Malaya Bronnaya Street was won by Orion LLC. Until 2012, its sole owner was Sergei Timoshin, former head of the district administrations of Kuntsevo and Fili-Davydkovo.
For a street 950 meters long, we paid these figures 112 million rubles.
Here, look: in September of last year, the city’s representatives — the state agency UKRiS — signed off on work worth 112.292 million rubles. No complaints at all; everything was supposedly just fine.
According to RBC newspaper, the builders are linked to the Kapitel Group, which has received contracts from Moscow’s municipal services complex worth more than 2.8 billion rubles.
So there you have it: 123 million rubles for a street less than a kilometer long, a reconstruction that dragged on for months, and then flooding from a heavy downpour — the kind Moscow gets several times every summer.
Conclusion one: I’ve said it before — fighting corruption is the most important thing. It wasn’t water that flooded Malaya Bronnaya; it was corruption. They paid 123 million. Thirty million was kicked back to City Hall. Three million went to the PR people. Another 30 million had to be made as profit, leaving only 60. So they cut corners on storm drainage, and on the sloppy work of laborers and foremen.
Conclusion two: dear Sergey Semyonovich, “street reconstruction” is not a joint effort by PR people and the guys bringing suitcases of cash to you and your officials. It also involves engineering work — fairly simple and traditional engineering work, in fact. But essential. No one is asking you to build a synchrophasotron (a Soviet-era particle accelerator); it’s just storm drainage, something cities around the world have been building for hundreds — probably thousands — of years.
The fact that the “urbanists’” illustrations show people carrying takeaway coffee cups changes nothing — sooner or later it will rain, water will start flowing, and it will have to go somewhere.
Perhaps you, Sergey Semyonovich, thought cyclists would carry the water away from the streets on their tires? No — you were deceived. That’s not how it works.