A video is being heavily promoted on LiveJournal, supposedly showing, via hidden camera, these terrible deeds: Yashin yashin, Oreshkin (a political analyst), and Fishman (editor-in-chief of Russian Newsweek) bribing traffic cops. Like, there you have it: the opposition speaks out against corruption, yet hands out bribes itself. Horrors.
I’m not going to post the video itself; anyone who wants it can find it in ten seconds. To my mind, the video is notable for one reason: it is important evidence that Interior Ministry officers are acting as the direct executors and organizers of a political provocation dreamed up by some crooks in the Russian presidential administration. As Yashin explained it to me, these setups are organized roughly according to the following scheme: *The guys drive away from home along a narrow street, and in front of them there’s some strange swerving car crawling along at 5 km/h (about 3 mph). The guys overtake it. Three minutes later, the traffic cops catch up with them: crossing into oncoming traffic. The guys are put into the police car, where they get their brains scrubbed for a long time, while the cop keeps conspicuously holding up an open hand: five. They give the cop that “five,” and he hands it back, saying: “What, did you really think police officers take bribes?” * If you look at who was seeding and spreading the video at the early stage, it’s clear that it was those little stooges from molodaya_gvardiya_edinoy_rossii (the youth wing of United Russia) and other pro-Kremlin youth movements. You could just chuckle at this nonsense. Like it’s some episode of the prank show “Rozygyrsh” (“Practical Joke”), directed by Surkov. In between intense work on building the Russian Silicon Valley. But what we’re dealing with here is a new development in the use of Interior Ministry personnel for political provocations. Previously, it was mainly officers from Center “E” (the anti-extremism police unit), who across the country have been implicated in intimidation, torture, and apparently even murders (the case of Chervochkin). Now traffic cops, too, are participants in a fairly elaborately organized operation. They had to track where people lived. What routes they drove. Lie in wait for them. Position a decoy car in the right place, and so on. So if I were Yashin/Oreshkin/Fishman, I would file an official complaint and demand an investigation. Who were these traffic cops? From the voices, they sound like the same officers, yet they are supposedly “patrolling” in different parts of Moscow. Why can’t their faces be seen on the tape? Where is the full version of the recording? Where are their reports about the attempted bribe? Why did an official service video end up in the hands of some shady characters? and so on. There are plenty of lawful and well-founded complaints here. At the very least, grounds for a serious internal investigation. In that context, seriously debating whether Petya, Kolya, and George are criminals when they slip banknotes to cops is simply ridiculous. A million people do it every day, because the system here is built in such a way that people are forced to do it. Just as they are forced to pay bribes to get children into kindergarten. Just as they bring boxes of chocolates to outpatient clinics. A great quote on the subject: Because everyone pays traffic cops. The entire Russian people pay traffic cops. I pay traffic cops. You pay traffic cops. He pays traffic cops. Because traffic cops are bastards, rotten through with corruption. The only people who don’t pay traffic cops are the ones who commissioned this entertaining little video forgery. Because they have official IDs, mandates, flashing lights, and all the other junk that sharply separates that vile caste from the rest of us. //////