The accountant from one of the nonprofit organizations whose leadership I’m part of came by. He brought a reporting form. Under the new rules, all NGOs have to fill it out for yet another idiotic oversight body. You have to report on: Core activities / the issues addressed. Projects carried out (including unfinished ones). Separately list all events held, their time and place, and their purpose. The number and composition of participants. Commercial activity, if any took place (with full details). Sources of property/assets formation (a long list of options is given, with special emphasis on nongovernmental organizations, especially foreign ones). List in full detail all congresses, conferences, and meetings of other governing / supervisory / trustee bodies and the thing that finished me off most of all: **Coverage of activities (media, including the internet, and lectures(!)). **and a lot more besides, over several pages. So tell me, why the hell does some fat-faced guy in the registration service need to know about every LECTURE where my NGO’s activities were discussed?! A list of ALL events, with the participants named!? The practical value of this is negligible. I can even understand the desire of all these “sovereign” idiots to know about every instance of our NGOs receiving foreign money. And about their finances in general. Let’s assume, fine, that the CIA wants to bring down Mother Russia through NGOs. But all of this information is already in the regular accounting reports! Who got what from whom. And where it went. And those who get cash under the table obviously won’t put it in any report, even if you make them file a million of them. If these “sovereign” idiots wanted to squeeze all those “human rights activists on salary,” that won’t work either. Everyone who gets grants has staff whose only job is to churn out these reports. And the Moscow Helsinki Group (a major Russian human rights NGO) and all the Lev Ponomaryovs (a jab at veteran human rights activist Lev Ponomaryov and people like him) have gotten so practiced at producing reports that for them it’s practically a pleasure. But the people who really got squeezed are the real grassroots NGOs. Especially in the regions. The ones that have never received a thing from the European Commission in their lives and never will. And they got squeezed hard. Can some “Smolensk Society for the Promotion of Sobriety” hire another person just to fill out this crap? No. What about “Uryupinsk Orthodox Enlightenment”? Can it produce a report on all its little gatherings? No. The “Khabarovsk Society of Siamese Cat Lovers” will have nightmares about the report they are REQUIRED BY LAW to write after every exhibition. And all those wonderful crazy people I often run into through KZM, who devote their lives to various homeowners’ associations and the like? Will their leaders find three free days to fill out this nonsense? No. And environmentalists? Some guy is crawling through a swamp, saving some scraggly little bird, taking pictures of it, even made a website for it. And now he has to write a report too. We should be thanking him for doing it for free in the first place. We should be giving him haloperidol at the state’s expense! Instead, they’re making him write a report. Here’s what I’ll tell you. All members of the Public Chamber (a state-established consultative civic body in Russia) are scumbags. THE PUBLIC CHAMBER SHOULD BE DOING NOTHING ELSE RIGHT NOW EXCEPT TRYING TO GET ALL THESE ROTTEN REPORTS ABOLISHED. And if some member of the Public Chamber says he’s against this reporting requirement but is busy with something else, then he’s a fraud. Someone who is consciously working to destroy this so-called civil society they talk so much about on the zombie box (slang for television propaganda). The very same civil society to which our new guarantor (a common ironic term for the president as “guarantor” of the Constitution) recently presented his program.
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