Once upon a time, there was a deputy director of a furniture store.
Then he married the daughter of a crook,
who worked for another crook. He served as his deputy on St. Petersburg’s Committee for External Relations.
The two crooks were very successful at carving up the money in this northern city, so they trusted and valued each other. Since the furniture-store deputy director had joined the Family, he too became trusted, and from an “entrepreneur” he turned into a “STATESMAN” and began doing “state business” along tax-service lines (after all, his father-in-law ran the tax office—where else was the son-in-law supposed to build a career?). When fortune smiled on the chief crook of their little group and started carrying him upward,
the deputy crook was dragged along behind him. He even became prime minister and to this day still sits atop the main cash drawer the gang of crooks uses to take money from—Gazprom. And our furniture-store-deputy son-in-law took off like a rocket too: deputy head of Interdistrict Inspectorate No. 1 of the Federal Tax Service in St. Petersburg (a specialized office working with the city’s largest taxpayers); deputy head of the Ministry for Taxes and Levies office in St. Petersburg, and in November 2001, head of that office; head of the Ministry for Taxes and Levies office in Moscow; deputy minister of taxes and levies of the Russian Federation; head of the Federal Tax Service of Russia; Minister of Defense of the Russian Federation. Everything was going well for the son-in-law, because he remembered the main rule: honor the Family. It gave you everything. It doesn’t matter whether the crooks are Italian or from St. Petersburg. The rules are the same. Little things like tax theft carried out by his direct subordinates (plainly not without his knowledge; he even took those subordinates with him to the Defense Ministry), a small part of which surfaced in the “Magnitsky case” hellish procurement deals in the Defense Ministry (even the scraps exposed by RosPil—Alexei Navalny’s anti-corruption project—were stunning in their brazenness; for example here and here) and so on were all water off his back. But then, as so often happens, she appeared:
Yevgenia Vasilyeva, age 33. Let’s not spread indecent rumors here; let’s stick to the facts: the young official worked with our son-in-law; she is clearly a very talented young woman, because by her age she had somehow managed to earn enough for a 13-room (!!!) apartment on Arbat in a detached, guarded residential building. Whether our son-in-law helped Yevgenia Vasilyeva realize her entrepreneurial talents is unknown, but the Family sensed that the son-in-law had forgotten the real reasons for his successful career and had grown too cocky. After that, the son-in-law was found in a highly humiliating fashion early in the morning in that very 13-room apartment on Arbat during a search of the premises. In the worldview of our authorities, betraying the Family is a far more serious crime than the theft and killing in the “Magnitsky case,” and so today the son-in-law ceased to be Minister of Defense. Or rather, the son-in-law ceased to be a son-in-law, so a different minister was needed. When you don’t know whom to appoint, appoint Shoigu. So as of today, he is the one defending us from our enemies. His five-month (!) governorship of Moscow Region will obviously have only two consequences: bewilderment among the residents of Moscow Region (whom, generally speaking, nobody really cares about); a line in Shoigu’s own biography saying he “successfully led Moscow Region.” That, then, is a story about top-level кадровая policy in the 21st century, in a country with nuclear weapons that occupies one-seventh of the Earth’s land surface.