This cute blonde is named Natasha Antipina. She is 38 years old.
Thanks to her, you can always say: there was this one time when I bought some blonde a BMW for 6 million rubles. And that would be the absolute truth. In Russia, we have the Federal Service for State Registration, Cadastre and Cartography, also known as Rosreestr. Our Natalia Antipina serves the Russian people precisely there, at Rosreestr. She has spent her entire life in the civil service, and only recently she was finally made the boss—installed in the top chair at Rosreestr itself. T]({{URL_2}})o make sure that no one, God forbid, mistakes Natalia Antipina for an ordinary citizen, and that everyone immediately understands she belongs to the caste of Patricians and Bosses, she is hurrying to perform one of the Great Ritual Acts: "buy*ing a car so you don’t look like a loser." *Well, that is, we’re the ones buying the car, while little Natasha Antipina gets to be the one who "doesn’t look like a loser":
http://zakupki.gov.ru/pgz/public/action/orders/info/common_info/show?notificationId=6175642 The head of Rosreestr urgently needs an official car costing 5.67 million rubles. Apparently, she simply cannot do without it.
I’d bet there isn’t a single official in the U.S. government whose taxpayers bought them a car for a comparable amount—$189,000. Well, maybe only those who are entitled to an armored vehicle. Then again, why compare a minister in a very rich country with the head of Rosreestr in Russia? Obviously, ours is more important. And therefore deserves only the very best. If we look at BMW’s official website, we can see that prices for the requested long-wheelbase BMW 750Li xDrive
start at 4.9 million rubles. But Natasha Antipina wants only the very best, so we’ll also buy an extra 600,000 rubles’ worth of options.
Probably it’s a little teddy bear with Velcro paws that she’ll hang from the side window. Let me draw your attention to the fact that the order was placed two days ago—on May 23, exactly the same day we collected more than half of the 100,000 votes needed for RosPil’s bill to limit the cost of officials’ cars to be considered by the State Duma (the lower house of Russia’s parliament). A big hello to everyone who says, "there’s no need for a special law; public pressure alone will make them stop buying these things." The signature drive continues. We have less than half left to collect, and if the behavior of state official little Natasha—with BMW options costing far more than the average Russian’s car—seems convincing enough to you, then you should spend ten minutes filling out the form on the Gosuslugi public services website; a couple of weeks later you’ll receive a letter with an activation code and be able to vote. If you’re already registered on Gosuslugi, then vote right now. If you’ve already voted, then please help promote this post or our special website. One more important thing. There are surely lots of people among you who know how to make videos and enjoy doing it. An analysis of the traffic sources going to the voting website shows that YouTube is the third most important source:
As far as we can tell, these are videos released in support of other initiatives. Something like this. So it works. The task: we need short, scandalous videos supporting the initiative that can spread virally. The simplest idea would be a montage of videos of officials’ motorcades (there’s plenty of that on YouTube) with freeze-frames explaining who is in the car and how much that car costs. Include a call to vote and a link to the vote in the first line of the video description. If anyone is ready to help with this, please write to Georgy Alburov at team@mashina.org We have also created groups to promote this initiative (and, more broadly, bills on the Russian Public Initiative platform, ROI) on VKontakte on Facebook Join them to help us (and yourselves) collect 100,000 votes faster and force the State Duma to put the issue to a vote. Update: suddenly little Natasha no longer wanted a black BMW