I used to regularly post all sorts of Surkov-Yakemenko-style hit pieces about me. Then there got to be too many of them, and besides, everyone could already see them anyway—they’re constantly sitting at the top of LiveJournal. But today they sent me two that are simply impossible to ignore: Shocking revelations from a vice governor People told me: "You and the bloody KGB will break your teeth on Navalny" At one point, Belykh, on the recommendation of an acquaintance, hired this guy. A certain Sergei Karnaukhov.
The guy had worked as some kind of secretary to Nurgaliyev, got fired (I don’t know what for), and was badly in need of a “status position.” So they put him in charge of liaising with the “siloviki” (security and law-enforcement agencies). He promised to throw everyone in jail and unleash all kinds of repression, but as often happens, what he became famous for instead was that, despite never having worked anywhere except as a low-level police officer, he showed up in Kirov in a Mercedes G 500 and organized a “fashion show” for his designer wife (here he writes about it himself). He didn’t manage to jail anyone. The local FSB officers and cops didn’t want to deal with him and wouldn’t even let him into their meetings. So he was asked to find a new job. I don’t know what the final straw was, and I won’t make things up, but my impression is that it was his blog. Here it is on LiveJournal. And here it is on the website of the newspaper "Vyatsky Nablyudatel". See for yourselves. HELL. Journalists were howling with laughter, the public was choking from laughing—it was awkward. All in all, there was nothing especially remarkable about this Karnaukhov: just an ordinary police-bureaucrat, only a graphomaniac to boot. He moved on to Kaliningrad as a deputy governor, where he did... something. The only reminders I got from him were the occasional text messages along the lines of, “Alexei, hang in there, they’re all scumbags, victory will be ours.” And then SUDDENLY: "after ten years working in the intelligence system, he was ‘assigned’ to Nikita Belykh to coordinate anti-corruption efforts .... That was when Karnaukhov’s confrontation with Alexei Navalny began. It was he who for a long time pushed for criminal prosecution of the well-known blogger...." I can imagine how everyone in Kirov Region must have laughed today. Especially at the parts about being “assigned” and “ten years working in the intelligence services.” Then comes a hellish mix of the usual “Navalny stole Russia’s timber” and the magnificent “I immediately understood that he was an American spy,” “together with the intelligence services, we worked out ‘soft’ ways of curbing his activities,” “heads of corporate security services offered any help at all, if only the minority shareholder would calm down and enter into dialogue.” Read it, it’s funny. All in all, quite an article. It’s a bit unpleasant on behalf of Russian Reporter, which is rapidly turning into a monstrous trash heap. Sure, they pay, yes. But they still could have fact-checked gems like “they were waiting for him with handcuffs, but he fled to Moscow, then to the embassy (where he stayed suspiciously long), and then to America.” Even a cursory look at the facts (or at least at my LiveJournal) shows that in Kirov I was there with my wife and two children, and only moved our things back to Moscow in three trips. I got into Yale in April, wrote about it on LiveJournal in May, and left in July, etc. What criminal case? What confrontation? What nonsense is this? The editor-in-chief of Russian Reporter is a certain Vitaly Leybin. I googled him, and the first thing that came up was an article: Vitaly Leybin: “The media is a business, not philanthropy”
Dear Vitaly Leybin, by all means go about your business—make money, or pay back favors, whichever you prefer. Just be more careful, more careful. When Russian Reporter did a piece about me, they checked everything thoroughly. So you can do it when you want to. I understand why Russian Reporter printed this; I don’t quite understand why Karnaukhov is saying it (maybe he’s currying favor, maybe he wants fame), but in any case, it’s all complete nonsense compared with the other masterpiece. 2. In St. Petersburg, they sawed up Navalny. A Komsomolskaya Pravda article accompanied by a video, which I can’t even call hellish. It’s hellishly psychedelic. See for yourselves. It’s all serious business: actors, extras, an audience, canned laughter.
There’s only one explanation. Surkov has either hired some drugged-up idiots, or punks so aggressively conceptual it’s actually frightening.