Today I want to tell you a personal story. I’m not just a politician — I’m also a voter. And I have a real problem that you can help me with. All of you, and especially my neighbors in Maryino and Pechatniki. Together, we can do something very important.
This woman — Lyudmila Vasilyevna Stebenkova — represents me and my neighbors in the Moscow City Duma. She is our deputy.
Things are very, very bad with Lyudmila Vasilyevna.
To be blunt, I have serious questions about her mental state. I’m not trying to insult her — don’t get me wrong — I’m stating a more or less obvious fact. Just look at how she behaves at meetings with voters. Her campaign ad raises no fewer questions.
Stebenkova has been in the Moscow City Duma since the very first day it existed, since 1993 — that is, for 26 years.
She got there as a democrat. She was a member of the Union of Right Forces party and once considered Anatoly Chubais her leader and the best man on earth. But little by little, she started to love whoever happened to be in power. Yeltsin. Luzhkov. Putin. Sobyanin. Now, of course, she’s with United Russia.
For all 26 of those years, she has cast herself as the chief defender of morality. Among the enemies Stebenkova has declared war on over the years are The Simpsons, the group t.A.T.u., the reality show Vacation in Mexico, and even the pop group Blestyashchiye. They were targeted over a music video. Stebenkova proposed banning entry into Russia for foreigners with HIV and departure from Russia for Russian smokers. Energy drinks, vapes and hookahs, and even nudist beaches — according to Stebenkova, these are what corrupt our moral spirit and undermine our “traditional values.”
It seems appropriate to mention at this point that Stebenkova is paid for all this — 7 million rubles a year.
Honestly, I don’t know why she chose our district. I’m not the only one unhappy about it — local residents are too. They sign petitions calling for her resignation and give her a distinctly chilly reception in their courtyards. You really don’t need to be an expert to see it: this person is unstable. Someone like that simply cannot be a deputy.
But it’s like in the well-known Russian joke: stupid as can be, but still making my three rubles. For all her crusading about morality, Lyudmila Stebenkova has never missed a chance to make money.
An amazing story. At one courtyard meeting, Lyudmila Stebenkova told a sad tale about why she lives not in Maryino or Pechatniki — the districts she represents — but in central Moscow, in Krasnaya Presnya. The drama, supposedly, is this: she HAD to move. A crisis hit, she sold her apartment in her beloved Lyublino, and the only place where she could afford to buy a new one was near the zoo in Presnya. She doesn’t like it there at all. The Garden Ring is nearby — nothing good about that. There’s no courtyard at all, unlike in Maryino. In short, Lyudmila Stebenkova is suffering — living in the city center is unbearable.
This story impressed us so much that we decided to check it. We turned all the old databases upside down and found it — the one-room apartment, 38 square meters, in Lyublino where Stebenkova once lived. And she liked it there so much!
She moved out 21 years ago, in 1998, and into slightly better conditions. We found her apartment on Michurinsky Prospekt: 80 square meters. So how much could she have sold that for? 1.5 million rubles?
And here is the ONLY place where she was supposedly able to buy a home with the proceeds: 4 Zoologicheskaya Street.
There, on March 25, 1999, Stebenkova bought one apartment measuring 100 square meters, and four days later another one measuring almost 100 square meters. Directly above the first. Later, those apartments were combined into a single two-level residence measuring, that’s right, 200 square meters, on the 11th and 12th floors. Today, an apartment like that costs 80 million rubles.
This whole story with the apartments on Zoologicheskaya has been dragging on since the early 2000s, but in Stebenkova’s case that doesn’t matter. By then she was already serving her third consecutive term as a deputy. Even then, she GUARANTEED could not have had that kind of money. Honest money, that is.
By the same token, she also guaranteed could not have had the money for the 180-square-meter apartment in Khamovniki that she bought in 2004, on top of her two-level apartment near the zoo.
Let me explain for those who don’t live in Moscow. The southeast of the city, including my district of Maryino, is considered a rough area. There’s an oil refinery there. There’s traffic congestion. Housing there is the cheapest in Moscow.
For me, it’s home. I lived there for 20 years and only recently rented an apartment closer to the office. Much as I love those places, I can still recognize hypocrisy.
For 26 years, get elected from the city’s outskirts. Buy yourself ultra-luxury apartments in the best and most expensive neighborhoods. And then come back to those same outskirts and feed people nonsense: oh, I’d so love to live here, right next to you. To breathe emissions from the oil refinery. But somehow my life turned out in such a way that tens of millions of rubles and apartments of varying degrees of luxury keep falling into my lap from who knows where.
Guys, what I want to say is this: even if they seem simply insane, they are always thieves and hypocrites too.
Wherever you live, take part in Smart Voting.
And if you live in Pechatniki or in the part of Maryino where Deputy Stebenkova is elected, don’t just go — run to vote against her. Smart Voting is the only chance to finally drive this madwoman out of office.