A must-watch video. "You couldn’t call the village of Maly Shaplak prosperous, but it received its share of wealth on August 9, 2010. That was the day the President set foot on their land".
via a link from smitrich RTR journalists Natalya Tarnovskaya, Lyudmila Vasyutina, and Alexei Vartegov can, of course, be regarded as record-setting media prostitutes. They have clearly outdone even the Brezhnev-era figures. But their names are worth remembering not for that reason. Rather, because they articulated with remarkable precision the idea of how national wealth is distributed in Putin-Medvedev Russia. So: Mari El. August. Monstrous fires that no one is able to bring under control. The village of Maly Shaplak. (not exactly the back of beyond—15 km from Yoshkar-Ola, the regional capital.)
The impoverished villagers are washing the asphalt. The impoverished local administration is repaving the road twice. The villagers are anxious—they were promised a water line. Will they get it? It’s nerve-racking. A water line is an expensive thing. Not, of course, as expensive as the vehicles used by the Emergency Situations Ministry leadership, but still. Will the honored guest be pleased? Will he take offense? Will he turn instead toward their age-old enemies—in Bolshoy Shaplak? Will the people of Maly Shaplak be able to reach the national storehouses, as some lucky individuals have done? That’s how oil prices have changed over the past 12 years.
source Over these years, we have seen record prices for oil, gas, metals, timber, coal, grain, and fertilizers. None of it affected the residents of Maly Shaplak in any way. (to be fair, 85% of Muscovites saw this wealth only on television as well). Money was made from oil by Roman Abramovich and Gennady Timchenko (and for a while Mikhail Khodorkovsky too, but he was quickly put in his place). From gas—Arkady Rotenberg and friends. From metals—Oleg Deripaska, Vladimir Potanin, Vladimir Lisin, and Alisher Usmanov. From fertilizers—Dmitry Rybolovlev. Well, everyone has seen the Forbes list. All this time, the residents of Maly Shaplak waited. And drank, of course. Well, what else were they supposed to do? They hadn’t been trained at the district Komsomol committee (the Communist youth organization), the USSR KGB, or the Soviet trade school. So from the outset they were written off as “ballast.” But now it is finally their turn to celebrate. They received their share of the national wealth. The President set foot on their land. The joyful uplift in their hearts and the triumphant TV report on state-run RTR became the slice of the raw-materials pie that fell to Maly Shaplak. If the money isn’t stolen along the way, they may even get their water line. Then Bolshoy Shaplak will surely die of envy—they will never get one.