Liberals vs. Security Hardliners. The Rublyovka Dachas of a Minister and a General

Hi, this is Navalny. The security hardliners and the liberals.

This is the main explanation of how

Putin's system of power has worked, the one that for many years

various political analysts and

Kremlin insiders have been pushing on us: supposedly there are two

opposing groups with different ideas,

and Putin stands above them and is constantly

trying to strike a balance. One group is the

siloviki (security-service hardliners). They are more crude and dim-witted, but

more patriotic in their outlook. They are against

any reforms and in favor of Russia

confronting the West. The other group is

the liberals. They are sophisticated and cunning,

they speak more politely

and know how to behave at the dinner table. They want

reforms and friendship with the West. But

today's video is about how all of this is

nonsense.

There are no Kremlin towers or factions, there are no

siloviki,

no liberals. It's all a performance for the public.

There is one fairly monolithic group

called the crooks and thieves from

Putin's government, people who

use Russia and its people

for their personal enrichment. And the easiest way to prove

this is by looking at the dearest and most

sacred thing a Putin official has.

Think about what that is. It's not his mother, and it's not

the motherland. What does any Putin

loyalist do as soon as he gets access to budget

money? That's right: let's head to Rublyovka (Moscow's elite suburban district)

to see how a hardliner builds himself a palace

and how a liberal does it. For

comparison, we need classic

characters, and we've easily found them for you.

Here he is, right here before you, the leader

of the systemic liberals. Many years ago he

climbed into the very heart of Putin's

system,

dug himself in there, and with all his might proposes

only the very best and most liberal things.

He is putting Russia on the rails of

efficiency and development. He is not afraid of

unpopular reforms and actively pushes for

raising the retirement age: Anton

Siluanov, Minister of Finance of the Russian

Federation. And his complete opposite is

the

nasty, repellent silovik. He is covered in

medals and decorations,

and only appears in public in uniform. He

says such fantastical things that you

start to doubt whether he even has

a brain, or has read even a single book in his life:

the gallant General Ruslan Tsalikov,

First Deputy Minister of Defense.

After Putin, Shoigu, and the Chief of the General Staff,

he is the fourth most important military

leader in Russia. He has been in public service for

30 years already, most of them

spent under the direct

leadership of Shoigu. He is Shoigu's right-hand man and

closest associate. In 1994,

when the Emergencies Ministry was only just

being formed as a ministry and was headed by

Shoigu, Tsalikov was already there. And from then on,

wherever Shoigu worked,

whether as governor or at the Defense Ministry, Tsalikov

was always and everywhere his first deputy.

Now let's check whether

our heroes fit the bill. Do they say what

a true hardliner and a true

liberal are supposed to say? Oh yes: here is Siluanov vehemently

condemning Abyzov's arrest, and here he is demanding

that the American investor be released from pre-trial detention

— Calvey. And look, here he is practically

pouncing on the siloviki like an enraged lion,

saying that because of them the

investment climate is deteriorating. Sometimes he even says

that the number of officials needs to be radically

cut.

Very liberal. He stands up for

the self-employed, saying they shouldn't be

overly controlled — they're already having a hard enough time. Well,

right, first he introduced the tax and then

felt sorry for them. A true Putin liberal. And

what about our general? He is simply

magnificent. He oversees

Yunarmiya (the state-backed youth military movement). You can't learn to love the motherland from a textbook.

He opens a museum in Patriot Park,

and more than that, he is building a new Patriot Park

in Crimea. There, you see, the motherland

must be loved — the little tummy, the earth, the grass,

all of it. Shoigu and Tsalikov oversee

the construction of a technopolis — in fact,

a closed city — called Era near Anapa. There

they are supposedly going to develop ultra-secret

innovative

weapons. For example, they write about

the

AI Robot: a drone with, attention,

artificial intelligence and machine

vision. It can independently avoid

obstacles and land at a designated point. By the

way, a drone like that was already badly

outdated when we bought one in 2016, and it

could do all of that. So, and Tsalikov also

fights on the ideological front. He

defends mass consciousness with the help of

psychological defense, talking about

information threats from abroad that

must be urgently combated. Ruslan Khadzhi-

smelovich doesn't understand what's going on.

The perfect Putin man. So what is happening

out there on Rublyovka? We are in the most

elite part of a place called

Razdory.

You couldn't make it up. And it is precisely there

that a fierce battle has unfolded between

our heroes, the hardliner and the liberal.

Each of them is building a dacha. Let's

look at the map. First, pay attention

to this developed plot of land,

exactly 1 hectare (10,000 square meters) in area. As can be seen from the

registry extract, it belongs to Anton Germanovich

Siluanov.

And now let's look at the adjoining

There is already a developed plot here.

A gigantic house, almost 2,000 square meters (about 21,500 square feet),

but there turned out to be a problem with the records.

From the official extracts from Rosreestr (Russia’s state real estate registry), we

can see that two days after Siluanov,

the neighboring plot was purchased by

a private individual. Wow—Rosreestr doesn’t

record things like that; it’s a registry,

there should be a name there. How can that

be? Who could be so important and

so secret that their name

was officially removed from the owners’ register?

Don’t worry,

we’re about to solve this mystery together.

Let’s look at the exact size of this private individual’s plot:

10,140 square meters (about 2.5 acres). Now

let’s see which official

declared a plot of exactly the same

size.

Ruslan Tsalikov. But that’s not all.

Don’t rush—we’ve seen enough investigations

and officials’ residences on Rublyovka (an elite suburb west of Moscow)

so many times that

we know exactly what to do next.

A plot the size of a hectare (about 2.5 acres) is a bit small for one of Putin’s

ministers. A Putin minister

deserves much more than that, obviously.

So we immediately turn our attention to

the huge stretches of forest behind these two

dachas and find out that they’ve been leased out.

This one belongs to the liberal Siluanov, and this one

—22,000 square meters (about 5.4 acres)—to our

man Tsalikov. Only here, he too

is concealed and listed not even as

a private individual, but as the Russian

Federation.

That’s the level of absurdity we’re dealing with.

According to this extract,

the Russian Federation leased the plot to

the Russian Federation.

But by now, we already understand what’s going on.

So we go check Tsalikov’s

declaration.

And there it is: the same 22,000

square meters under lease. I think you, dear viewers, are probably

very tired by now

of looking at these soulless satellite

images and registry extracts.

And of course I won’t deprive you of the main

pleasure: seeing the construction site and

our heroes’ estates from the air. Here they are:

the Rublyovka rivals. On the left is the hectare

of the liberal Siluanov, and on the right

the security hawk Tsalikov. The forest stretching to the horizon

behind them is the very land

they lease.

Look—Tsalikov has even torn down the fence.

Construction is still nowhere near finished on both plots; at Siluanov’s place,

there’s no end in sight, while Tsalikov may already be able

to move in by summer. Let’s start with Siluanov.

It’s already clear enough: there’s the main house, with three

levels, and its area should be around

1,500 square meters (about 16,100 square feet). And behind it they’re building

another structure, roughly twice as large

judging by the foundation. For now

it’s not entirely clear what it is. Maybe

a guest house, maybe a pool building—we’ll

know soon enough, because construction is in full swing and you can

clearly make out the excavator and the workers

crawling over the roof. Hello, self-employed workers—

don’t forget to register and pay your

taxes. Now to the neighbor.

His house is fully built, and its area is 1,868

square meters (about 20,100 square feet). Even by Rublyovka standards,

that’s still quite impressive. The guest house

or bathhouse is finished too.

There’s also a gazebo from which the neighboring plot

of Siluanov can literally

be reached by hand. Tsalikov will probably

relax there, grill shashlik (skewered meat),

and periodically shout insults and

anti-liberal curses in the direction of

the finance minister. All that’s left here, basically,

is to level the lawn, haul away the trash, and

clear out this pile of either

highly intelligent military drones or

cash. Beautiful, isn’t it? They’re so different,

and yet still together—our security hawk and our

liberal.

They live in perfect harmony, fence to fence.

And it’s not just the fence that unites them. The main thing

our friends have in common is that neither

one nor the other

could have officially earned enough for all this.

Let’s start with Siluanov. Even though he

declares a gigantic salary that seems to come from nowhere,

40 million rubles a year (roughly hundreds of thousands of U.S. dollars), even

that wouldn’t be enough for this plot and

this construction. A hectare of land in this area

on Rublyovka costs about 650 million

rubles. A 1,500-square-meter house

built from scratch is another 300 million. The second

house, whose purpose we still

don’t understand, will be at least

two stories judging by the foundation. Let’s assume 2,000

square meters (about 21,500 square feet). This is a rough estimate, but

let’s say that’s another 300 million rubles.

Altogether, that’s more than 1 billion rubles.

Now add up Siluanov’s official

income—basically every bit of it—and

you get 300 million rubles over seven

years.

So the obvious conclusion is this: even his savings,

if he had spent all that time neither eating nor drinking

and spending nothing at all, would only have been enough

for one house. And to save the required

billion rubles for this construction project, Siluanov

would have needed 30 years. With Tsalikov,

the situation is even worse—simply outrageous.

A hectare on Rublyovka like his neighbor’s: 650 million.

650 million rubles.

A 2,000-square-meter house—let’s count it the same as

Siluanov’s: 300 million.

That brings the total to around

1 billion. Now compare that with his official

income. We take everything—absolutely everything—that

can be found in the public domain:

declarations for 10 years, starting from 2009, and you know...

It came to 74 million rubles.

That was all the money he earned over 10 years.

It would have been enough to cover only one ninth of it.

Just the land alone, without the house—I’ll even

mark it on the map специально—right here on

this much is what Salnikov officially earned

over 10 years, but in reality he bought this much.

A gigantic house, plus two more neighboring

hectares (about 4.9 acres) leased—in both of these cases

we can throw out the story about millionaire wives,

because Siluanov

according to his disclosure, doesn’t have a wife at all.

Tsalikov’s wife earns 15,000 rubles a month

a month, and the siloviki (security-service hardliners) and the liberals are

just two names for the same thing. It’s all

made up to confuse us.

Inside Putin’s government there is

only one type of person: those who

every second think only about themselves and

their own enrichment. Where did Siluanov get the money for

the construction? Well, here you go: doctors

go on strike because they are paid

14,000 rubles a month,

and the police are sent after them because they need to be

forced into silence. That’s where the doctors’ money

went—into these people’s dachas (country houses). And here,

for example, sailors of the Black Sea Fleet

are suing to get paid

their travel allowance for the special operation in Syria.

But the court tells them: no, even though you were in

Syria, we are not going to pay you what was promised.

So they cheated the sailors, took their money,

and built up all of Rublyovka (an elite wealthy district near Moscow) with their dachas.

Rublyovka.

Our task is not to put up with this and not

to stay silent,

but to fight all of this—both

Putin’s siloviki and Putin’s

liberals. The simplest step that

everyone can take is to participate in Smart Voting.

Look, United Russia

is losing even small local

elections across the country, and we need

it to lose the big ones too, which

will take place on September 8 this year.

Register right now for Smart

Voting, and on the eve of the election we

will send you the name of the person you should

vote for so that both Siluanov and Tsalikov

are as upset as possible. Subscribe

to our channel.

They tell the truth here.