Oh yes, I forgot to mention this. On Friday, at about eight in the evening, my wife calls me at work: There are three cops standing outside our apartment door asking for you. They won’t say why, and they’re talking in a very rude way. So I thought it was all about the Kirov case, asked my wife to get the police officers’ phone number, and asked my lawyer, Olga Mikhailova, to find out what was going on. Mikhailova met with them on Saturday. It turns out the Kirov case has nothing to do with this. Remember that chubby loafer from the Party of Crooks and Thieves, deputy Pavel Zyryanov?
The very same one whose parliamentary work consists of "business trips" to Cuba, Germany, and Taiwan? By the way, I just dropped by the young United Russia member’s LiveJournal to see what he’s been up to: his second-to-last post is about how he went to a media forum in Leipzig, where he bravely stood up to some overbearing Georgians and debunked the "mythical Osama bin Laden project". So, following a parliamentary inquiry from this pointless creature, the Prosecutor General’s Office is conducting a full-scale investigation into whether the RosPil logo constitutes desecration of the Russian state coat of arms.
They’re handling the investigation in dead earnest—they’ve even extended the deadline. Clearly, this is a very serious crime. They’ve brought in, so to speak, the finest detectives and “analysts.” And that is why I now have to appear and give a statement.
Well, of course I’ll go—what else can I do now. I’m not exactly eager to waste half a day on this, but if the interests of society and the state require it, then so be it. It’s a real shame, of course, that the Prosecutor General’s Office does not conduct equally vigorous investigations into my complaints about corruption and embezzlement at VTB, Gazprom, or Transneft. Apparently, those investigations do not serve the interests of society and the state. PS This is the first time I’ve ever seen an official paper that says "sumons to the police." The cultural codes buried somewhere deep in my head immediately make me scan the text for the phrase "bring with you chicken, milk, eggs und ausweis (ID papers, in mock broken German)."