Sometimes, in the course of work, you come across a small case—but damn, is it ever revealing. There ought to be a whole category for things like this: “Leviathan News,” because being surprised by it is no longer possible. We should just shrug and say: well, this isn’t a state, it’s a Leviathan—of course that’s how it works.
For example, we found an FSB general’s dacha—and not just anywhere, but right on the state border. Beyond the electric fence and the tracking strip. By law, that land is completely withdrawn from private civilian use. And yet he not only built there, he also got it officially registered.
It may seem like an isolated case, but it’s especially outrageous against the backdrop of millions of owners of dachas, garden plots, garages, shops, kiosks, and stalls, who are visited every single day by all kinds of inspectors carrying reports about how they “built it wrong, connected it wrong, marked the boundary wrong, filed the paperwork wrong.” People get fined, dragged into court, and have their land forcibly seized—they’re hounded relentlessly. And here, meanwhile, there’s a dacha on the border.
So I decided to make a new video about it:
Here’s the story.
There is the border between Russia and Finland. As required, it consists of a border zone (5–30 km / 3–19 miles), where only local residents or people with permits may be present, and an engineering and technical installations zone (2–3 km / 1.2–1.9 miles).
The engineering and technical installations zone is exactly the kind of place you see in movies about border guards: a low-voltage fence that is triggered by touch, a tracking strip, and all the rest of it.
Being in this zone is prohibited. Entering it is treated as an attempt to cross the state border illegally and practically guarantees you a criminal case (here is one example, and there are many like it).
So let’s use Google Maps images and satellite photos to take a virtual trip through the beautiful—but forbidden—areas along the Finnish border.
We see the fence.
We see the tracking strip.
We see the harrow used by the border guards.
We see a sign reading “Mines in 100 meters” (about 330 feet).
We see a dacha. INSIDE THE ENGINEERING AND TECHNICAL INSTALLATIONS ZONE.
We rub our eyes and look from above:
Yep, it really is a dacha on a lakeshore in a restricted zone, which is regulated by law as follows:
Stunned, we run to the registry:
It seems impossible, but it’s true. The dacha belongs to a private individual: Nikolai Leonidovich Kozik.
We google this remarkable Nikolai Leonidovich Kozik.
We immediately stop being surprised. He is an FSB colonel general, deputy head of the Border Service of the FSB of the Russian Federation, specifically responsible for guarding the state border.
It’s straight out of a Soviet joke. The guy privatized a piece of the state border.
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