At almost every meeting with voters, I told horror stories about the insane and utterly unjustifiable cost of building interchanges and roads in Moscow. Sobyanin’s propagandists would just as routinely “debunk Navalny,” saying the prices weren’t actually that high and that I was distorting the facts. The mayor’s office claimed it would build a huge number of roads with the money allocated for road construction. Well, the election is over. The investment program has been approved, and it contains the actual figures. I am forced to admit: my horror stories about the cost of the North-Eastern and North-Western Chords (major expressway projects) do not correspond to reality. It’s much worse. Read this excellent Vedomosti article analyzing the road investment program:
Moscow Will Remain Gridlocked Because of budget cuts, the city authorities have reduced spending on road construction; building will slow down and become more expensive Read the full article
The chord highways—neither the North-Western nor the North-Eastern—will be completed by 2017. But they will cost more. In the previous version of the Address Investment Program, 92 billion rubles had been allocated for the North-Eastern Chord, but now it is 120.33 billion; spending on the North-Western one will multiply: from 28 billion to 140.5 billion rubles. ... The lion’s share of this money will be absorbed by the company Mostotrest. This company received the contract to build roads around Skolkovo (a government-backed innovation hub near Moscow) by order of Dmitry Medvedev, and it will build them for 80.5 billion rubles: the southern section of the North-Western Chord — 54 billion, Kutuzovsky Prospekt from the Garden Ring to the MKAD (Moscow Ring Road) — 14.4 billion, the Mozhayskoye Highway interchange with the MKAD — 7.6 billion, and the interchanges linking General Dorokhov Street with the MKAD and Aminyevskoye Highway — 4.5 billion rubles. Just as a reminder to everyone, the main shareholder of Mostotrest is my old favorite duo—the Rotenberg brothers, who control it through a Cypriot offshore company.
They moved from coaching jobs to supplying pipes to Gazprom, and now they’re building roads for us. The most expensive in the world. It’s amazing how quickly, and how shamelessly, Sobyanin moved to fulfill his campaign promises. Not the ones he talked about on TV Center to old ladies, but the real ones—the ones he made to his only voter:
to finally turn the Moscow budget into a source of replenishment for numbered Swiss bank accounts. We need to do more educational outreach with Muscovites—and with Russian citizens in general. Especially those who don’t read *Vedomosti*. They, too, will find all this very interesting.