The new political elite wants to eat. In St. Petersburg there are a lot of tidbits for that. St. Petersburg is celebrating its 300th anniversary. This is noticeable in everything - in the policemen standing every ten meters along the road from the airport and turned back to the road, and to the forest - ...

The new political elite wants to eat. In St. Petersburg there are a lot of tidbits for that

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Petersburg celebrates its 300th anniversary. This is noticeable in everything - in the policemen standing every ten meters along the road from the airport and turned back to the road, and to the forest - in front: suddenly an attacker jumps out of the forest. Sometimes there are dogs in front of police officers, busily sniffing something out. The center is cordoned off by a solemn, but still accommodating police, and under St. Isaac's Cathedral, even at five o'clock in the morning, you can count one drunk, four policemen and a tow truck with a bored driver.

On the main streets in the mornings, restaurants turn white with sad pieces of paper: “We open from 15 o’clock.” Anyway, instead of visitors - cops and cars with flashing lights.

The city is not exactly restored, but scraped off. A lot of money has been spent on pavements and buildings, but too much of this money has leaked through the cracks in St. Petersburg's pavements straight into Swiss bank accounts.

There is such a bike going around the city: in a certain place they laid tiles; under the tile they put a pillow of sand and gravel, forty centimeters high, that is, they had to put it. But they didn’t put it, because technology is technology, but construction exists in order to steal from it.

The prosecutor's office became interested in tiles and began to dig; and it was impossible to buy it off, because the prosecutor's office was digging for political reasons, hoping to dig out the interests of the governor under gravel and sand. And when people had already testified and it became clear that the prosecutor's office would dig not only in documents, but also in the earth in the most literal sense of the word - that is, remove the tile and count how many centimeters of sand and gravel there are, then the tile, away from sin , removed, sand and gravel poured, as much as necessary, and leveled again.

The astonished prosecutor's office had only to take testimony from the equally astonished residents of the houses, who told how they had recently laid a pavement, and then they arrived at night, tore it up and laid it again in an emergency order.

Because the interests of the governor, you see, were really involved.

In general, tiles are such a feature of the St. Petersburg urban landscape. They put it everywhere. Asphalt is not laid in the same way as tiles are laid. This is said to be because the tile factory is controlled by the governor's wife.

The 300th anniversary of St. Petersburg made it possible for everyone to earn money: both Moscow residents of St. Petersburg and the governor's entourage. The governor, a strong business executive, has tiles, facades, pavements. His ideological opponents have the Konstantinovsky Palace. The Office of the President has spent $290 million on renovations and wants another $40 million. All the money is voluntary donations from large companies. We remember such voluntariness since the days of the communist subbotniks. Russia has not seen projects of this magnitude since the reconstruction of the Kremlin, which ended, as we remember, with the Mabetex scandal and the arrest of Pavel Borodin. This is understandable: Borodin has already repaired the Kremlin, and the new manager of the president needs to repair something else.

The festivities in St. Petersburg are like a lifetime commemoration for the governor. Everyone knows: Yakovlev must go. This became clear when his opponents received a majority in the Legislative Assembly, and the banker Rydnik, close to Yakovlev, having already been elected, flew out of the deputies for violating the rules of agitation. This became quite obvious when, on the eve of the celebrations, the namesake of the governor, Konstantin Yakovlev, Kostya Mogila, was killed in Moscow. It was a purely political assassination. Purely specifically political murder, I would say.

The peculiarity of St. Petersburg is not that there are often shots. And the fact that its criminal elite is both a political and business elite. Kostya Mogila not only controlled St. Petersburg TV channels, around which fuss had already begun, he was not only mentioned together with the governor in a number of criminal cases - he was the grand master of St. Petersburg political games, and those who killed him played no worse than him.

Everyone knows that the governor will soon become a political corpse, and this knowledge is in everything. In small, hastily executed criminal cases against St. Petersburg officials and vice-governors. In the appointment of Matvienko. It seems that the governor's family is hastily packing their suitcases, striving to pack as much good as possible into these suitcases: the Europa hotel, given for a pittance to the structures of the same Rydnik, land plots, all other trifles. “Take it, we'll take it back,” the governor's opponents think, watching the process. “Lie, do not take away. You yourself are full of compromising evidence.”

The governor must go. Not because the president once swore to avenge Sobchak. Not because the governor is a thief, and Moscow does not like thieves. But simply because St. Petersburg is a big piece, and a piece familiar to the new elite, and the new elite wants to eat.