Officially “the works were financed by sponsor donations.” The companies EAS, Slavneft, Transneft, Rosneft, Moscow’s Bank, Eurofinance and Severnaya Verf took part in the palace’s restoration. The payments were made to a fund called Konstantinovsky palace and park ensemble in Strelna, whose chairman was Vladimir Kozhin, the president’s manager. However the real picture is such that it puts in doubt Putin’s declaration that “the restoration was organized 99% on private companies’ money”. According to the Kommersant on 05.12.04. “A scandal grows around Putin’s residency”: A scandal appeared, the Kommersant writes, around the palace in Strelna (Konstantinovsky Palace) restored on the eve of Saint Petersburg’s 300th anniversary. The Northwestern department of the federal agency on special construction filed a suit on one of the structures of the President’s Administration with the demand to pay for the executed works. /…/ This suit may be followed by others – about 30 million dollars were not paid to the companies working in the palace.”
Let us return to this department that demands money. The Department on special construction (USTT) is included in the RF defense ministry, these are military constructers. They have built 14 of the 20 cottages of the town where were supposed to live the heads of States who came for the festivities; they have reequipped the former building of Leningrad’s artistic school into the five-stars hotel The Baltic Star and have also restored the Konyushenny building of the palace. The total cost of the works executed by the military constructers amounted to over 2,5 billion dollars. By the middle of April the State’s liabilities made 213, 8 million rubles plus 25,8 million that were the interests for an unjustified use of the money. Notice that the suit was not filed on “the Konstantinovsky ensemble in Strelna” but on the president’s administration. Vladimir Kozhin said through his press secretary Viktor Khrekov that “he is not ready to comment the suit of the constructers but has the intention to deeply clarify all the claims and clarify how was spent the money that entered the fund.”
The site Grani.ru commented the Kommersant’s article in the following way: “The restoration of the palace in Strelna was supposedly financed not by the State (the taxpayers) but by private companies. However one is allowed to doubt the voluntary character of these donations. The mechanism at work here is apparently the same as in the times of Nikolas I when a petty merchant saw that the gendarme has an old sword and had to immediately offer him a new one. So the difference between the fiscal and the private is rather relative here. Other things are more essential. Let’s say that in the first half of the XIX century (in the end of the 1830s the Winter Palace had to be reconstructed after a violent fire) few people were asking themselves why should a poor country spend huge sums on the construction of luxurious royal palaces. In the beginning of the XXI century such a question appears to be actual. However in today’s’ Russia still nobody asks it. History is powerless against the national tradition.”
The National-Bolsheviks, the young and therefore brave generation asked this question and gave an answer to it: “You seem to imagine you are a tsar,” president Putin? Otherwise why would you need five yachts and fourteen residences, including the Kremlin?
The fact that V. V. Putin has imagined he is a tsar is eloquently demonstrated, besides by the luxury that surrounds him, by the atmosphere of servility reigning in the country under the regime of total autocracy. It is demonstrated by the president’s two inaugurations. I watched the first in 2000 and the second in 2004, on the TV screen of course. Both inaugurations were vulgar sights. Sights from an operetta. I pitied the poor soldiers and officers of the Kremlin’s garrison, dressed up in outrageous hats with high “hussar” shakos and short boots, like a crowd scene from Kalman’s Mariza. I felt burning shame for my country, humiliated by this outrageous show in the Kremlin, for the amusement of foreign diplomats. I remember my ears and cheeks were burning. The soldiers were visibly ashamed too; many of them drew their shoulders in. Apart from the Austro-Hungarian operettas of Kalman both inaugurations recalled Nikita Mikhalkov’s “The Barber of Siberia” by their kitsch esthetics. In the conclusion of the second 2004 inauguration the president received the parade of Kremlin’s regiment. A bellied colonel marched, shaking his fat; the orchestra blew in plastic trumpets (they were made out of plastic so that it would be easier for the orchestra to move during the ballet). The mounted division dropped horse shit on the paving stones. Oh, exultant triteness! These sights make clear that the president emulates tsarism. What can you expect from a KGB colonel from the reserve? He refused the communist worldview and ideology following the spirit of his time and the conjuncture (it became disadvantageous to be a communist), following the epidemic of desertion that fell upon the functionaries then. What could he rely on then? After all there was only one truly Russian, mass consumed ideology beside the communist one, the ideology common before 1917 – the Russian absolutism. It is the one Russia’s president is persistently imitating. He imitates the tsars in their worst manifestations.
THE PASSAGE FROM THE ELECTION TO THE APPOINTMENT OF GOVERNORS
“ The deprivation of the citizens of Russia of their electoral rights: passage from the election to the appointment of governors. This is a State coup, the destruction of the federative state,” the nazbols accuse Putin in their leaflet.
The National-Bolsheviks entered the reception room of the president’s administration with their peaceful petition calling for president Putin to resign on December 14th 2004 and on December 3rd, 11 days before the nazbols’ action, the State Duma adopted a law introduced by the president about the new order of electing the governors. The law was voted by 358 deputies (with the necessary minimum of 226 votes), 62 were against and two abstained.
According to the new law the governor’s elections were replaced by the confirmation of the regions’ heads by the local legislative assemblies according to the president’s presentation. The RF president Putin introduced the law bill into the state Duma himself at the end of September. It is a part of an anti-terrorism package, about which Putin told right after the hostage taking in Beslan and the two airplanes crashes in August. From now on the candidacy of a head of region is introduced by the president 35 days before the expiration of the actual governor’s mandate and during 14 days the regional parliament must take a decision. In case the regional parliament rejects a candidacy twice the president has the right to introduce the candidacy again and in case it is rejected he has the right to dissolve the regional parliament and appoint a provisional governor. (The governors elected directly by the people before this law comes into force can call for a vote of confidence before the president.) President Putin promised not to overstep the constitution. However if the elected provincial princes had the right to occupy their post during two mandates at most, the appointed ones will govern until they are called off. Actually, “the president’s loss of confidence” is sufficient to call them off.