And for you goats...

At a congress of municipal leaders, delegate Kozlov from the Smolensk region came on stage and told his dream. Each sentence was accompanied by laughter from the entire room. The dream took place in 2003 (laughter). In the dream, 5 or 6 people were dragging a frame from a truck (loud laughter). “And among them were you, Vladimir Vladimirovich” (general laughter, even laughter). And the next day they announced a law on the monetization of benefits (the laughter somehow hesitated). “Now I’ll dream about you too,” answered Vladimir Vladimirovich (again general merriment).

Hmmm... And for you, as they say, Kozlov... There is elderberry in the garden, and Putin in the dream. Pulling the frame from the truck. Where is he dragging her, Kozlov? It’s interesting how things ended in the 2003 dream. Apparently, the Smolensk delegate, having praised the president for his hard work in an allegorical form, wanted to push him to some other useful reform. And, in general, he pushed.

It is worth noting, however, that almost all the delegates to the municipal congress, by a surprising coincidence, were members of United Russia, and although not all municipal leaders have yet joined this party and not everyone shares its policies, nevertheless, there were no such dissenters in the hall . They say that face control before the congress was serious. So, in fact, it was not quite a congress, but rather a party meeting chaired by the Three Man.

However, the zeal of many speakers was quite sincere. The outcome of the debate, in which flattery was interspersed with complaints, was summed up by the chairman of the All-Russian Council on Local Self-Government (I think that’s what it’s called) and the prominent United Russia member Galchenko, who, to the furious roar of the crowd, asked the president to also take municipal reform under his care. This is what Putin agreed to do, promising to create an appropriate council under the president, and at the same time promising municipalities money from oil windfalls, which has already drowned in an endless sea of ​​applause.

It looked as if Vladimir Vladimirovich agreed to personally head each village council and personally deal with leaking taps, drunken tractor drivers, interruptions in heat and light, and all our other Russian municipal everyday life. Until now, he had been doing this sporadically, once a year, during direct lines, fulfilling individual requests from individual citizens to install telephones, lay pipes and decorate Christmas trees. Now the delegates saw that he would do this every day and thereby make their Sisyphean work easier, because municipalities had long ago completely lost the ability to correct something on their own. Completely subordinate to higher authorities and completely deprived of money, they remain what seems to be the only level of power that sees ordinary citizens not from the window of a car with a flashing light or on TV, but live.

But local authorities not only have no opportunity, but also no particular desire to personally invent and do something. And the Supreme Government did not make it difficult for the municipalities. And she promised them a master plan for the development of the territories. What this will mean specifically is still difficult to say, but in general terms it looks the same as it was under Soviet rule, when the State Planning Committee calculated in which city what number of paper clips was needed.

Just like an ordinary citizen who seeks to ask a question to the president, because no one of a rank lower than the president is able to solve his problems, so the local authorities, having neither the opportunity nor the desire to mind their own business, are waiting for someone to tell them from distant Moscow that How. And it doesn’t matter that in Moscow they have no idea what is happening in these small towns, how they live there and what is really needed there. The main thing is that there is someone who will decide and come up with everything for us, and we will happily carry out any decision, just so as not to think for ourselves.

The desire of all the bosses to swear allegiance to the president (general secretary, tsar), and at the same time shift responsibility for everything onto him - this is our long-standing, hereditary, primordial desire. I just happened to remember how, in the unforgettable years of stagnation, pre-election meetings were held where candidates from the “unbreakable bloc of communists and non-party people” were nominated. There were two candidates: one was some kind of turner-baker, and the other - “and ask Leonid Ilyich (Yuri Vladimirovich, Konstantin Ustinovich) to agree to run for people’s deputies from our district.” Almost all meetings ended with the adoption of such a resolution, although everyone knew perfectly well that he could not run from all districts in a row, and from their district in particular, and that all his life he had been elected from a very specific, well-known place. But that was the ritual.

So Vladimir Vladimirovich is now in the same role, and everyone asks to take him under personal control, under care or wing. But for Putin and his comrades there are two big problems here. Firstly, the Soviet Union collapsed in many ways because it built the same Vertical, where all issues were decided for everyone by a small group of comrades led by another leader. And in a huge country with a population of 250 million in 10 time zones, paralysis set in, when no one could or wanted to decide anything without a command from above, and there was complete nonsense coming from above. Now it will be the same.

And secondly, Vertical was conceived as a pleasant thing in all respects. You sit, you command, you pull the strings. But for some separate, pleasant threads. For the sake of receiving only those pleasures that you require. But it turned out that Putin is being offered to pull all the strings, to do not only pleasant work, but generally all the work in a row, most of which is completely uninteresting to him, such as municipal government. Well, why the hell does he need it? And it turns out that he was going to rule over them, but in the end they all sat on his neck.