Take a look, and don’t be surprised anymore by how desperately some people profess their love for Sobyanin and Liksutov.
Yesterday I saw so many reposts of that sycophantic interview article with Sobyanin in Rossiyskaya Gazeta (the Russian government newspaper), and so much surprise that it was that sycophantic. You simply have no idea how much they pay for this.
Here’s an excerpt from the hacked correspondence of Gabrelyanov—a con man and political prostitute, and the owner of LifeNews and Izvestia:
Just to pathetic Izvestia, which nobody even reads, Liksutov’s people funnel 60 million rubles a year. That’s 5 million rubles a month for a single column.
Obviously, that amount also includes a “block on negative coverage.” In other words, Liksutov pays *Izvestia* alone 5 million rubles a month so they won’t write anything bad about him.
Sobyanin, meanwhile, costs 180 million. So a “positive image of Sergei Semyonovich in *Izvestia*” costs 15 million rubles a month from the city budget.
Governor Vorobyov costs the residents of the Moscow Region the same amount.
Let me repeat: this is just one newspaper—and a miserable, low-circulation one at that.
Now imagine the rest of the budgets. Hundreds of millions and billions are being spent on paid pro-Sobyanin and pro-Liksutov propaganda. And, as you can see, it moves through different channels, including PR firms like “Mikhailov & Partners.” So when you hear, “I don’t take money from city hall (or from Liksutov), I just genuinely like what they do,” it means one thing: they do take money, and a lot of it—just through a different channel. Sometimes it’s a direct contract, sometimes cash, sometimes through PR people, sometimes a “design contract”, sometimes a contract from a friendly state-owned enterprise (FGUP), sometimes a “fee for hiring an expert,” and so on.
I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: the entire “efficiency” of Moscow City Hall—a corrupt and chaotic structure—shows itself in only one thing: they were the first not to hesitate to allocate such gigantic budgets for bribing journalists, bloggers, and experts that previously no one could even imagine them.
P.S. And this is how the budget of “Mikhailov & Partners” gets filled up: everyone chips in, from the metro and the zoo to VDNKh (Moscow’s Exhibition of Achievements of National Economy), so they can pay 5 million per article. They “win tenders.” Thanks to Sobol for quickly finding the contracts:
They tossed in half a billion.
So the next time you hear that city hall can’t come up with a couple of million rubles for surgery for a sick child, remember these tables. It’s useful.