In any contest for sheer capacity to astonish, both the starry sky above and the moral law within surrender first place without a fight to those remarkable people who, for lack of a more precise term, might be called the “right-leaning Moscow intelligentsia.”
Right-leaning not in the sense that they Sieg Heil and deport migrants—quite the opposite—but in the sense that they’re supposedly all about “business processes” and “efficiency.” No one knows exactly what that means, and they themselves can’t explain it. Still, that’s how you can identify them, because they never stop talking about efficiency and judge everything in the world by that standard.
- But is it efficient?
The correct answer: yes, it is very efficient.
- And is that efficiency confirmed by specialists?
The correct answer: yes, the efficiency has been confirmed by specialists.
- And there isn’t any leftism or populism here, is there?
The correct answer: no, of course not. Absolutely not. Specialists have confirmed the absence of leftism. Even one expert has.
- And are business processes present?
The correct answer: of course, this is all made up of diverse and extremely efficient business processes.
At that point, the right-leaning Moscow intelligentsia calms down, regards the phenomenon positively, and, when the occasion arises, praises its efficiency.
So today I’m reading a post by Ilya Krasilshchik (he now works at Yandex) along with comments by Elizaveta Osetinskaya (she now owns the publication The Bell). They are both very good people, I’m very fond of both of them, and so I genuinely got upset while reading.
Both Ilya and Elizaveta are simply typical representatives of the “right-leaning Moscow intelligentsia,” and they have already taken to Russia’s new prime minister, Mikhail Mishustin, showering him with the highest praise available in their value system. He is “normal.” He is an “active and efficient manager.” He even—just imagine!—improved the work of the tax service over 10 years.
And I realized that over his 20 years in power, Putin has learned to work these very smart people—no irony, they really are smart—absolutely perfectly.
Two factors are needed here:
Show them a person who does not, at least visually, look like someone who is going to beat them up and take their pocket money.
That person must utter the magic words: business-schmusiness—KPI; efficiency and agile.
That’s it. Nothing more is needed. The right-leaning intelligentsia instantly, in ecstasy, clutches The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People to its chest and starts shouting at random its various sacred words and phrases: “Six Sigma,” “we map this out on a Kanban board at Yandex,” and “even German Gref would approve of this” (head of Sberbank, Russia’s largest state bank).
And the end result is 100% identical to the effect of the cocktail called Bitch’s Entrails, as described in the Great Russian Book:
And after that, that is exactly what happens. Putin, and any Putin official, comes within one and a half meters—about 5 feet—of them and starts spitting in their face. In regular half-hour sessions. And they do not even notice.
Dear Ilya and Elizaveta. And all the other participants in the movement “right-wing intelligentsia for authoritarian modernization.” Please, don’t drink this cocktail. Your liver is going to fall off from it soon. This is no longer Stockholm syndrome—it’s some kind of perversion.
Forgive me, of course, but I’m not preaching or moralizing. I’m simply trying to persuade you otherwise, because without you there will be no Beautiful Russia of the Future, and the country cannot be modernized without people obsessed with efficiency. That is why it is critically important to bring you over to the side of a critical attitude toward any “right-business” actions by any Putin government, because all of them are guaranteed to be purely decorative.
What the hell kind of “normal prime minister” and “active, efficient official” is this supposed to be?
Mishustin became a civil servant 22 years ago. Since the start of his career, the density of compromising articles about him has been such that it is impossible not to react to it. Don’t believe the articles? Good—check for yourself. I assure you, it will all be confirmed.
Are we going to ignore 800 million rubles in income earned by his wife from an unknown business? Shall we consider it a manifestation of efficient business processes?
And we’re not going to notice the property being hidden in panic, either?
And as for digitalization and improving the tax service—well, that’s just laughable.
It’s one of those jokes along the lines of: “In 20 years, Putin achieved the feat that computers became ten times smaller and a thousand times faster.”
Thanks to the efficient officials of the early 1990s, fax machines were introduced into government business processes.
Yes, 10 years ago accountants stood in enormous lines. Filing quarterly reports was unbearable torture.
And then publicly accessible internet appeared, along with digital signatures, and everyone started filing reports remotely.
WELL WHAT DID YOU EXPECT—THAT OVER 10 YEARS HE WOULDN’T EVEN MANAGE TO DO THAT?
And who created those lines in the first place, think about it. Who was that inefficient scoundrel, that strangler of business? Wait a second—why, he has exactly the same name as the noble liberator of business, M.V. Mishustin!
A certain Mishustin, while heading the tax service from 1998 to 2004—first as deputy, then as chief—erected a huge number of administrative barriers and turned it into the most inefficient agency around. He worked at that for six years.
What a blessing that another M.V. Mishustin then spent ten years fixing it.
He introduced electronic accounting. After the entire rest of the world had already done it. Or are there still developed countries where an accountant drives somewhere every three months carrying a heap of printed spreadsheets?
There have already been many like him. The energetic Chubais created some really terrific, efficient business processes. He left us the loans-for-shares auctions. A monopolized power sector. And now he has set up such an amazing business process that nothing like it exists anywhere else in the world. He fabricated an entire industry that does not exist, but consumes hundreds of billions from the budget and produces Kagocel—which doctors call nothing but “fuflomycin” (Russian slang for a useless fake medicine)—and reports about how wonderfully nanotechnology is developing in Russia.
Liksutov. How you all adored him. The champion of business processes and an advocate of bicycles. Turned out to be a leader in corruption. A sham divorce from his wife, who keeps having his children. He buys metro cars from himself at absurd prices. Contract terms longer than those for procuring nuclear icebreakers. He is destroying the transport system with his commercial transport hubs. He’ll steal everything he hasn’t already stolen and then go off to Estonia to live as the richest man in the Baltics.
And do you remember how much you loved Nikolai Nikiforov? He was so sweet, so charming.
An IT guy. Gold medalist. Loves business processes. Successfully did something or other in Tatarstan. Also one of the “right-wing intelligentsia.” One of your own, so familiar, so close.
He won’t beat you up and won’t say a rude word. It makes you want to put a plaque on a bench saying, “We are of the same blood.”
Then highly efficient little Kolya became a minister and announced that the internet needs censorship, and Russia needs digital sovereignty.
And then it turned out that this dear, familiar Nikiforov had plagiarized his dissertation. And then—whoops—his wife turned out to own the traffic-violation camera system. Efficient!
No one did more damage to the sector than sweet, efficient Nikiforov.
If you dropped an atomic bomb on Voronezh, the damage to the economy would be less than what Nikiforov inflicted during his time in office.
Yes, he was following orders. But he carried them out with pleasure.
Technocrat governors! Dorks with identical haircuts and identical square glasses. About every one of them, our right-leaning Moscow intelligentsia wrote enthusiastically that they would finally introduce the proper efficient processes. They are far from politics, but they will “be able to attract investment.”
And the only things our technocrats have excelled at are rigging elections and destroying independent local media.
And it was precisely these efficient, energetic officials who cracked you over the head with truncheons. Liksutov, Sergunina, and Sobyanin won’t just break up protests. They will organize a business process for bringing tanks into the city if their uncontrolled grip on the Moscow budget is threatened. And they will do it a hundred times faster than any FSB officers.
It’s time to stop this masochism already. Twenty years is long enough.
This is not an assumption or a hypothesis, but a tested and established fact: in Putin’s system, every high-ranking official is a thief. There are no others. It is a basic qualification requirement.
A thief, a liar, a hypocrite, and a very, very inefficient manager, incapable of organizing anything at all. We have been testing this for 20 years, and by now there cannot be the slightest doubt about it.
The entire right-leaning Moscow intelligentsia adores and worships Lee Kuan Yew. Very well—Lee Kuan Yew was indeed formidable. But please, if you are going to worship him, then reread his 2005 interview that he gave to Maxim Trudolyubov.
I reread it constantly myself and find it extremely useful. From the vantage point of 2005, that great authoritarian grandfather—who crushed the opposition and free media far more harshly than Putin—explains in simple terms why our own authoritarian grandfather and all his Mishustins will achieve nothing. As long as Putin is in power, we are doomed to grow poorer and to degrade.
The best and most effective thing one can do right now for the good of our country is to hate the Putin regime in all its forms and manifestations. Not to cooperate with it in any way whatsoever. To take part in all business processes directed against this власть: from working in independent media to attending protests and participating in “Smart Voting”.
To campaign and work against them at every opportunity. Each in their own place.
And stop looking for—or inventing—something good in Putin’s retinue. If they are already there, then they have only one task: to spit in your face from one and a half meters away—about 5 feet—and then empty your pockets while you squeeze your eyes shut and imagine it is thermal water moisturizing your skin.