We return your portrait

In Omsk, they overdid it in pleasing the authorities, to the point of having the opposite effect: on the eve of the arrival of President Dmitry Medvedev in the city, they decided to remove the image of the prime minister from the United Russia poster, where they were depicted together with Prime Minister Vladimir Putin. Then, however, they returned, but it seems too late - as Kommersant writes, First Deputy Chairman of the Government of the Omsk Region Evgeny Vdovin, head of the governor’s secretariat Alexander Burlachenko and adviser to the governor Boris Selivenko were fired. Moreover, they all worked in the region’s leadership for 11 years. Formally, they were dismissed of their own free will, but experts associate their resignation with this scandalous and rather stupid story around the poster.

The funny thing is that at first there was only Putin on this poster: as the newspaper writes, it was installed in the city with the inscription “Omsk residents for a strong united Russia” immediately after Putin was elected president (apparently for the second time). When Medvedev replaced him in this post, the photo of the new president was added to the photo of the old one.

And even closer to the day of Medvedev’s arrival in Omsk (February 12), another scandal occurred, much less noticeable and, alas, much more common, since it was connected with the government’s reaction to the actions of the so-called non-systemic opposition. Mikhail Kasyanov was supposed to hold a seminar on local self-government issues in Omsk. The German Friedrich Naumann Foundation for Liberal Politics, with which Kasyanov's Foundation for Public Alternative organized this seminar, rented a hall in the Irtysh Hotel in advance, but - bad luck! — the hotel director said the day before the event that there was no electricity in the hall and it was impossible to hold the event. Kommersant cites the words of Konstantin Merzlikin, a member of the presidium of Kasyanov’s People’s Democratic Union, that such a simple trick was already resorted to in many cities of Russia and even in Kyiv, when Kasyanov was going to hold events there. The offended German foundation canceled the event, but Kasyanov still went to Omsk to present his book “Without Putin.” The Ibis Sibir Omsk hotel, where the presentation is planned, belongs to a Western company, and so far, as Kasyanov’s adviser Elena Dikun told the newspaper, everything is in order with the light there.