Simply the embodiment of brazen shamelessness and demagoguery. This same Ilya Massukh, the head of the Russian Public Initiative platform (ROI), against whom we made entirely well-founded accusations of fraud and vote-rigging (and not just us—read this very dry, strictly fact-based post on Habr), has now come out with an "emotional response": On "vote rigging". You really should read it. It’s a masterpiece. "the embodiment of the militantly opposition-minded segment of the population" "we’ve seen plenty like them before—in the early 1990s" "it’s obvious—the guys got upset—the bots didn’t get through, and they ran out of supporters" "Navalny’s fading self-promotion" "Navalny and his active supporters have no ideas or initiatives—how do you save healthcare? How do you straighten out social policy? What should be done about crime in the country? How do you help pensioners? How do you support business? What should Putin do about cinema, oil, orphans, and ministers? But then again, he does have one all-important question—why and with whose money are cars being bought for government officials". Every single time a crook gets caught falsifying something, it’s always the same thing:
*- Massukh, explain these strange spikes in the voting. We saw plenty like you back in the 1990s! - Massukh, look at these charts. Stop your fading self-promotion! - Massukh, here’s the data—can you explain this strange "stair-step" pattern?*
*- You’ve run out of supporters. - Massukh, any mathematician can see you’re cheating—here are the charts. And you don’t even know how to help pensioners or support business*. And all this ends with him presenting a chart that completely incriminates him, as Volkov quite rightly pointed out:
And old man Massukh surely understands that for an answer like that, he’s going to get dragged over the coals. And he is—read the comments on the post. But what matters more to Massukh is the cardinal rule of government crooks: whenever you don’t know what to say, bring up the 1990s and declare, "you aren’t proposing anything." Which 1990s is he talking to me about? The 1990s when I was going to school and university, while his beloved Putin was sitting in the Kremlin, in the Control Directorate, watching with satisfaction as privatization was carried out through the "loans-for-shares auctions"? Was it his Massukh-style government that "straightened out social policy," "defeated crime," and "supported business"? Or did it spend and steal its way through 13 years and 3 trillion petrodollars flowing into the country, without carrying a single reform through to completion? Talk in general terms—Massukh doesn’t like it. Ask for specifics—Massukh doesn’t like it. Well, that’s understandable. None of these various Massukhs likes anything that would remove them from power and push them away from the public trough. Still, at the end of this post I would like to thank Ilya Massukh for his post, so full of hypocrisy and arrogance. Someone on Twitter put it very well:
My dear friends, those who support the initiative but didn’t vote because of your own laziness. It is precisely thanks to you that people like Ilya Massukh exist—and all the other Ilya Massukhs, Churovs (a reference to Vladimir Churov, former head of Russia’s Central Election Commission, often associated with election fraud), and other "wizards." They feed off your laziness. Your laziness encourages them to falsify things. Your laziness gives this brazen face the chance to declare, "their supporters ran out, so now they’re just promoting themselves". Here you can see how many supporters the Kremlin’s own Massukhs actually have:
But that doesn’t bother them. They’re used to counting everyone who hasn’t explicitly signed up as an opponent as one of their supporters. By Massukh logic, there are 63,580 of us and 139,936,420 of them. It is you, dear lazybones and silent bystanders, whom Massukh has enlisted in his Massukh-Putin army. If you keep doing nothing, you’ll keep serving in its ranks. Rank-and-file soldiers supporting the idea that the Stavropol Krai Legislative Assembly, which has a budget deficit of 3.8 billion rubles, should, a month later, buy itself three Toyota Land Cruiser Prado SUVs at 2.23 million rubles each.
http://zakupki.gov.ru/pgz/public/action/orders/info/common_info/show?notificationId=6178623
So that United Russia deputies can speed around in their beautiful SUVs past schools and hospitals with leaking roofs, transparently hinting to the common rabble who the big shots are here, who the masters of life are, and who the real Massukhs are. There. Once again, I urge you to remove yourselves from the silent Massukh army, register on the government services portal right now and vote for this bill and all the ones that follow, which will be introduced by an army of normal, honest people standing against theft and the squandering of taxpayers’ money.