So much for the issue of surveilling minors and the line that “children are off-limits.” This isn’t digging through the Instagram of some 25-year-old slacker in a Ferrari.
Today Yulia and I got up at five in the morning and drove to Sheremetyevo Airport to meet the kids. They had flown in from a summer camp in the States. We try to send them to camps like that for a month every summer so they can learn the language. By the way, I highly recommend it to anyone who has the means — it’s a wonderful investment in education. Otherwise, you’ll spend even more later on tutors to “brush up the language” for admission or “fix pronunciation.”
So we went to the arrivals hall and met them. There were several minors there traveling without their parents; an airline representative was escorting them.
I even thought to myself: wow, for the first time in several years no one is filming us at the airport. Last year, when we were meeting Dasha and Zakhar from camp, some degenerates were shoving cameras right into their faces.
We loaded the luggage and drove home. I lay down to get some more sleep. I wake up, and someone sends me a link to yet another “report by citizen journalists”:
Same as always. The Interior Ministry and the FSB immediately leak all information about my movements and those of my family to the Kremlin’s trash-media outlets. As soon as the children were brought out of the screening area, people with cameras immediately surrounded them and filmed from two different angles. Fairly clever this time — I didn’t notice a thing.
We live under a microscope. Any vacation — and no longer only inside Russia — turns into a “Behind Glass” reality show (a Russian reality TV reference), with endless “operational footage” passed along to various LifeNews-style outlets for laundering and publication. They even pass off airport surveillance footage as material “sent in by citizen correspondents.” Security-service operatives follow us constantly and literally set up camp near the places where my family and I are staying.
And what exactly did they film? Proof that our way of life is no different from that of a huge number of other families who also fly somewhere through Sheremetyevo, swim in a lake, jump into a pool, stay in a hotel, or cook fish soup on the shore.
In the beautiful Russia of the future, hundreds of thousands of our children and students will go to summer camps abroad, because being surrounded by native speakers makes it easier for them to learn English, Spanish, or Chinese. And in that beautiful Russia of the future, education will be highly valued and well funded.
But that’s not even what I really want to talk about. All this is happening against the backdrop of the terrorist attack in Surgut, which they still do not want to recognize as a terrorist attack and which federal television is covering only very reluctantly.
You Kremlin thieves would do better to spend this much effort on surveillance and operational work among Islamist extremists. We haven’t been able to open a campaign office in Surgut for months because the local siloviki — security and law-enforcement officials — are simply terrorizing anyone willing to rent us space for a headquarters. The moment you start negotiating, they show up.
In other words, surveillance and wiretapping — everything is being used. If these idiots were doing what intelligence services are actually supposed to do, maybe none of this would have happened. No one would have been running down the street with a knife.
As for the TV channel LifeNews, I’d send my warm regards, but I hear it’s being shut down because all those gigantic budgets were stolen and squandered.
I hope its founder, Gabrelyanov, still has some money left so that he too, like me, can pay Aeroflot 2,000 rubles (about $30 at the time) for the “unaccompanied minor” service if his fool of a son ever comes back from the United States, where he moved to live in 2014, having very quickly forgotten how not so long ago he and his father were loudly denouncing the “damn Americans.”
Then again, no — he won’t be coming back. New York City is incredible. Of course it’s incredible. It has neither his propagandist daddy, nor Putin, nor all the rest of the lying thieves who are holding our country back.
All right then. No need to order the “unaccompanied minor” service. Let’s spend the money we saved on new reports of the “we are outraged: opposition politician Navalny went abroad” variety.