I’ve gone on vacation with my family, so for the next little while you’ll get a bit of a break from my stories about how everyone has been robbed, the money has been stolen and squandered, and all Russian people have been offended. You won’t be able to get away from those stories entirely, because first, regardless of whether I’m on vacation, people are still being robbed, looted, and mistreated; and second, there are people in the office who are fighting this as best they can. They keep feeding me material for posts. Take a look at Vova Milov’s interesting article about the “Electronic Government” program. Really, this whole “Electronic Russia” story is a completely epic and instructive failure despite all the favorable starting conditions: we had money to burn, good programmers, we were among the first to come up with all this, and the program was personally championed by Putin and Medvedev—yet it all came to nothing. They spent ten years building something and ended up with nothing but the Gosuslugi public services portal, which everyone and their dog loves to kick. It would be very useful if someone put together a comprehensive analysis of what happened over those ten years—not just, or even mainly, to punish those responsible (though surely there ought to be someone personally accountable for the failure), but to draw conclusions for the future. Also read Sergei Petrov’s excellent hard-hitting article (a State Duma deputy and owner of ROLF), “The Unnatural Selection” of Bureaucracy. And definitely read Maxim Trudolyubov’s article, “A Deposit of Legitimacy”. Max writes that right now in our country, online decisions and initiatives are in fact more legitimate than the nonsense from government meetings shown on Channel One (Russia’s main state TV channel). Because behind online initiatives there are actual living people, whereas Putin’s government really is made up of “virtuals.” Tomorrow there was supposed to be a court hearing with the bitter Vladlen Stepanov. We asked for the case to be postponed. As stated in point 1, I’m on a long-planned vacation, and however much I’d like to see this man in court as soon as possible, there was no longer any way to reschedule the trip. We’ll be perfectly able to litigate in late August or early September. I hope Vladlen Stepanov’s honor and dignity can hold out a little longer. And now, for entertainment: a new hit from Surkov and his “Vasya from the 29th Complex,” which I just found in the “LiveJournal top posts.”
The line that “Navalny is an American agent” has obviously been dropped as ineffective, so now they’ve decided to push the line that “Navalny is a Kremlin agent.” There’s an obvious flaw in the video: they should have extended the logical chain. If I have the power to open and close criminal cases against myself, and am generally “invulnerable to the Kremlin,” then that must mean I’m also the one giving orders to Surkov and Vasya. And if I’m the one directing them, then I must also have commissioned this video against myself. The final shot—“Navalny will definitely promote this video on his blog, because he is in fact its main заказчик”—would have been striking and would have confirmed itself.