A Gazprom Pensioner

"Parasites and drunks" — that’s what a deputy called them.

He was referring to all pensioners who

receive pensions of around 9,000 rubles (about $100) a month.

So today, we’re going to

take a look at how a pensioner lives — one who

meets United Russia’s standards.

[music]

Hi, this is Navalny. We all know, of course,

that 8,800 is a typical pension amount

received by many millions of people who honestly

worked for 40 or 50 years. But United

Russia obviously knows better: one of its deputies called

all such pensioners parasites

and drunks living off pensions paid for by those

who actually worked. But when ordinary people

were working, were they given decent wages

or a decent pension today?

Or is it somehow their fault that the funds from those years

produced this result? "Drunks" — and that

gave me a simple idea:

to show you how a pensioner lives — one who

is perfectly acceptable to the party of power,

to the ruling party and the government — what, so to speak,

a Putin-style working man looks like. For the sake of

a clean experiment, I decided to find a pensioner

who worked in the very same place

as the deputy who considers everyone

parasites — and that deputy works at Gazprom.

What’s more, we need a pensioner who

is close to the authorities, just like our brazen

United Russia man. We had to dig through the news

about Gazprom, but we found exactly the right person

for you.

Luckily, a couple of weeks ago, one of Gazprom’s

deputy chiefs resigned.

It was one of the top boss’s deputies: Valery

Alexandrovich Golubev. So he is our

ideal United Russia pensioner for today.

And, not coincidentally, given his closeness to

the authorities, everything in his life is just wonderful. The thing is,

Valery Golubev doesn’t understand a damn thing

about gas, energy, extraction, or

drilling. But he did serve in the

Leningrad KGB, and later in the secretariat of

the St. Petersburg mayor’s office.

Then he became head of the Vasileostrovsky

district, where he performed the main feat

of his life — something well documented in

numerous media reports.

Golubev once allocated an apartment to

a not particularly important St. Petersburg official

named Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin.

By the standards of the time, it was an incredibly luxurious

living space — and by today’s standards too, frankly.

We’re talking about an apartment measuring 140

square meters (about 1,500 square feet), in this building on

2nd Line of Vasilyevsky Island.

Golubev himself moved into the same building and

the same entrance, one floor below. In other words,

they served, worked, and lived together. Then their

paths diverged for a while: Putin left for

Moscow, while Golubev stayed behind and held

not especially important positions in

St. Petersburg — he was a member of the

Legislative Assembly and head of the city’s tourism committee.

In 2002, he was delegated to the

Federation Council (Russia’s upper house of parliament) and moved to Moscow. And

here comes my favorite part: how does some

tourism committee chairman end up

in the post of deputy chairman

of the country’s largest and most important

state company — our so-called national treasure,

Gazprom? Like this: Golubev once

attended some kind of

meeting with Putin, and as Putin was leaving,

he noticed him in the back rows,

recognized him, and asked, "Valera, what are you doing here?

What are you working on?" And within a couple of months

after that meeting, in early 2003,

Golubev left the Federation Council, to which

he had only just been elected, and was appointed

CEO of a Gazprom subsidiary.

He joined Gazprom’s management board and later

became deputy chairman, remaining in that role until

2019.

And you say there’s no career advancement in Russia.

So, we’ve established that

we have before us

a model Putin-era

pensioner: he’s from Gazprom, he’s close to

the authorities, and now we want to see what

a dignified old age looks like for this

hard worker — not some parasite,

unlike you and me. For any

pensioner, a dacha (country house) is terribly important.

That’s where we’ll start. Let’s just search online.

Luckily, the country’s main

state news agency, in its

business section,

informs us that because of the Yamal-Europe gas pipeline,

Golubev’s dacha lost its porcini mushrooms.

Our hero laments: "The pipeline went through

and cut across all the

cow migration routes. The cows can’t go

into the forest and eat grass. Before, the cows

used to wander through the forest, knocking over the mushrooms, but

now they don’t go into the forest.

They don’t eat the grass there, the forest is overgrowing,

and the porcini stopped growing. There used to be

excellent little porcini, like champagne

corks." Besides the porcini and champagne corks,

the article also states fairly precisely where

the dacha is located. So of course,

we sent our special

correspondent there, hoping to film yet another

palace.

[music]

[music]

Well then, the place is certainly strange, but

the rich have their quirks.

[music]

I’m baffled. We’ve never seen anything like this.

But it seems we’ve found an honest Gazprom

man. Here is his palace:

[music]

And that, basically, is the whole fiasco.

A crooked little house in the village of Bibikovo.

Cows, porcini mushrooms — but no gas.

probably electricity too

Could it really be? Dear God, we’ve found

at last an honest Putin associate

a former colleague who didn’t steal billions and

Deputy Nabiyev has already raised his finger and

is threatening me: “You hear me, Navalny, don’t you dare

slander Vladimir Vladimirovich and

our United Russia party.” Sorry, I’m already

ready, ready to apologize

but then I thought: what if this isn’t the only

dacha of our pensioner

because besides that wonderful village and

Bibikovo, there are other nice places in Russia

too. And yes, my friends, it turns out that one

small, modest little dacha

pensioner Golubev doesn’t mention in

his interview. Apparently porcini mushrooms don’t grow there

but we’ll show it to you anyway. Here it is,

the dacha where the porcini don’t grow. Here

she is, a beauty. And of course, we’re on Rublyovka (Moscow’s ultra-elite suburb)

right now, looking at

the main house: 3,000 square meters

in the main section, and along a curved gallery

you can walk to the bathhouse complex

on the right. The total area of this

building is 3,800 square meters

You can see two floors and an attic

above ground, but there’s also a full

underground floor of the same size

Let’s look a little farther across the property

that’s a 418-square-meter garage, enough for about 20

cars

next to it, some kind of greenhouse and a tennis court

and that pit covered with snow

is an outdoor pool. To the right of it is a

two-story guest house

And by the way, take a look at the fence—impressive

really quite

something. Do you know who fenced themselves off like that? We don’t know

but we suspect. That huge building—you can

see it in the center of the property—is an indoor

ice arena for hockey. Behind it

is a helipad. Unfortunately, residents of the Moscow region

can’t get in there. This entire

territory is completely closed off to

ordinary people and belongs to the FSO,

that is, Putin’s protective service, just like in

the good old St. Petersburg days. Putin and

Golubev are neighbors again. Golubev’s plot

covers 5 hectares (about 12.4 acres). And by the way, in this footage

you can clearly see the cleared entrance to

Golubev’s underground area

It’s a car tunnel leading to the house and

to the river. And take note: Golubev

illegally seized all of this—both the land and the

houses—with a total value of more than 3 billion

rubles (about tens of millions of U.S. dollars), and they belong to Golubev

Vyacheslav Valeryevich, the 23-year-old son

of Gazprom’s deputy chairman

He supposedly bought and built all of this when he

was nineteen. We’re pulling away now, once

again admiring the scale of this state official’s

estate, and in general

the vast expanses of Rublyovka, and while we’re at it

we send greetings to Alisher Usmanov

who lives right here. He, one of

the richest men in Russia and the world, has a house

that’s smaller and more modest than pensioner

Golubev’s

We began examining the life of our

pensioner by doubting that

the wooden house near Torzhok was all that he

had—and we were right to doubt it. But I want

to tell you that it doesn’t stop with a 3-billion-ruble house

The Golubev family also has

we also found a 200-square-meter apartment

in the very same building as

the head of Gazprom

Miller. It’s in Moscow’s Presnya district, right behind

the government building, where this house is located

a 260-square-meter apartment in Khamovniki

and he also transferred to his daughter a plot

in southwestern Moscow measuring one and a half

hectares (about 3.7 acres). And then there’s

the St. Petersburg jewel, probably the most

closed-off and elite residential building in Russia, where

almost the entire membership of that

famous Ozero cooperative (the dacha association linked to Putin’s inner circle) moved

in: Kovalchuk, Shamalov, Fursenko, and

their fellow travelers

Timchenko and Rotenberg. There are no random people

in that building on Kamenny Island in

St. Petersburg, and there cannot be

Golubev’s wife, Tatyana, has there

a four-story apartment with an area of 460

square meters. A place like that costs 60

million rubles. Not a bad retirement life,

you’d agree. But there’s also an obvious

question: where did he get the money for

all of this? Even over 15 years at Gazprom

Golubev could not possibly have earned anything close to

that much. We take the company’s financial statements

look at media reports, calculate everything as favorably as possible

for Golubev

and we find that over the entire period his income

could have amounted to 2.5 billion

rubles. That’s an enormous sum

but even that wouldn’t be enough for this mega-construction project

and 5 hectares (about 12.4 acres) of land on Rublyovka. So how was

everything else purchased? The explanation isn’t far to seek

Back in 2011

a newspaper wrote about Golubev’s wife

She was a former physics teacher, but as soon as

her husband got a job at Gazprom, she immediately

straightened her shoulders and felt drawn to

business, after which she became a supplier

of large-diameter pipes for Gazprom contractors

and made very good money from it. Besides that,

we have already managed to find another

enterprising member of this family, about whom

nothing was previously known. This is

Yevgeny Yuryevich Khitin. He appears in

the transactions for the purchase of those same 5 hectares

on Rublyovka that we’ve already seen

and he was also registered for quite a long time in

the same apartment as Golubev and his wife

We’ll venture to assume that he is the son

of Golubev’s wife from her first marriage, that is

the stepson of Gazprom’s deputy chairman, and he too

works at Gazprom, hooray, as deputy

director of Gazprom Komplektatsiya

this company handles centralized

procurement of basically everything for Gazprom, and in

2004, when he was only 27, he

became a shareholder

in a holding company that was the largest manufacturer and

supplier of various turbines and

gas-compressor units for

Gazprom. Later, the shares of this company were

bought up by

Gazprombank. So that’s the formula we have

for a comfortable retirement

serve alongside Putin,

work alongside Putin, live with

Putin in the same building—that’s enough, that’s all it takes.

You drunks and freeloaders have to work, while

for these real hard workers

Putin brings everything: a 500-square-meter apartment

(about 5,400 sq ft), houses of 3,000 square meters

(about 32,300 sq ft), a hectare or two of land

where every little porcini mushroom will look like a champagne

cork. And this simple formula

is shocking in its universality. Just look for yourselves:

Chemezov, head of Rostec, served

with him, Putin appointed him, his wife gets contracts,

an apartment worth 5 billion rubles. Sechin—they worked

together, Putin appointed him: apartment, yacht, houses.

Miller—the same story, worked with Putin in

the St. Petersburg mayor’s office, then Gazprom, apartments, villas, a

private jet. The Rotenbergs used to go with Putin to

judo, and dug up a chunk of Gazprom for themselves.

The richest family in the world. Another pensioner,

Yakunin, served with him, ended up heading Russian Railways (RZD),

handed contracts to his children, houses in London,

retirement in Germany. I could go on like this for a long time,

and every time you hear, or think to yourselves,

“Well, but he’s the head of

Gazprom, RussNeft, Rostec—these are

obviously major figures, executives,

rich people.” No, it’s obvious: these are random

incompetent people, crooks,

who at some point simply

found themselves on the same stairwell landing as Putin

or on neighboring dacha plots. That’s it.

That’s where their achievements end, and

after that begins what you yourselves

can plainly see: state companies looted clean,

failed performance indicators,

nonexistent successes, forecasts that never come true,

shameful wages and working conditions

that drive workers to desperation,

even to murders right there at the factories, literally out of

poverty. But for the people responsible

for all this, dreams did come true, because after all

it’s all “Dreams come true” (Gazprom’s slogan),

just only for you. Oh, and by the way, one last thing:

deputy Nabiev is running for election again,

you drunks, and he’ll become a deputy again in his

Volgograd Region and remain a deputy

for as long as none of you

take part in Smart Voting

Roskomnadzor

is banning this link, but we have one

they still can’t block yet. In

September, many Russian regions

will hold elections.

Register now, and by election day

we’ll send you instructions on

whom to vote for in order to inflict

maximum damage on United Russia, Putin, and

all these brazen people living high on the hog.

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