LITMIR.BIZ

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their positions in the banks, the largest ones, connected with the state budget, and, therefore, with massive, not really transparent and hardly controllable financial flows.

      The other bank named in the study of the Center for Development of the Higher School of Economics, was, of course, Vnesheconombank, whose board member was Peter Fradkov, the son of the then head of the SVR (Foreign Intelligence Service). The sons of Sergei Ivanov, Sergei Kirienko, Valentina Matvienko were also involved in the banking business43.

      By 2016, the children of senior officials have tightened up their grip on the financial and investment business, buying up Gazprom’s shares, managing the financial flows from foreign investors. Remarkably enough that the banks they lead are sometimes unprofitable, which doesn’t prevent the Kremlin leaders from getting commendations and awards from the state.44

      The Kremlin youth organizations turned out to be useless as means of social mobility. At the same time, a split among young people was prevented. What the authorities and society have really managed to achieve is to unite the youth in conditions of deepening wealth disparity and, more broadly, social differentiation.

      Success is achieved through socio-cultural unity. The former Komsomol mumbo-jumbo, which nevertheless gave a brilliant economic result with the sole purpose of formation an absolutely unprincipled and ambitious caste. Nowadays the thugs are not making carriers in underworld, but prefer to join security forces, since the authorities are asserting the law of might. But also the so-called majeurs (silverspooners), children who grew up in the nineties, were brought up in the families in the thugs’ mode. In fact, it was the same with the children of the Soviet nomenclature, but now this unanimity of golden youth with the children of the urban periphery has become deeper and more reliable.

      Today the Russian elite children have a new goal of integrating into the world elite, which means the legalization abroad of what is acquired by the hard work of milking the Russian budget. But this goes concurrently with their promotion in state and parastatal corporations. All the talk about the “nationalization of the elites” (perfectly oxymoronic definition) has remained all talk, no walk. At the same time, the progressive public does not understand that the establishment of nomenclature dynasties is no reason for a serious concern. Quite the opposite, a reason to rejoice.

      This is an obvious sign of stability, consolidation and consensus of new elites who escaped great terror, when generation of winners were eliminated together with families – a huge number of victims of vertically organized terror. So far, this is a significant difference of the current political regime, not only from the Soviet model, but from the entire Russian tradition.

      It is another matter that dynasties are traced only in a dozen or two members of neocracy. But the fate of billions of estates, huge corporations, as well as the prospects for small business, are still unclear. The perpetual redistribution is more likely to go on.

      Chapter II. How do I love thee…

      “Go reign, Sir”

      In a short period, we have witnessing the government betted first on the children of the urban periphery and almost at the same time on hipsters. Consumerism, utilitarianism and pragmatic patriotism (pursuit of success with the country) seemed to have won. This crowd has been guided by aficionados of Miro, French wines, cocaine, haute couture and haute cuisine, femmes fatales, tender boys and macho men. It would be wrong to see the superiority of the ones who loved Aivazovsky and Shishkin, prefer vodka, or at best, whisky, shish-kebab and dumb blondes. Of course there are plenty of this type in power, but in terms of domestic policy everything is not so simple and crude. The upper hand is taken by more pragmatic, modest and efficient managers, rather than the bohemians like Surkov, who, although still in the stable, by now has lost his former luster. The hipsters are out of favor. And in general the pedocracy is over. Young people have fallen out of the field of view of politicians, they are not necessary for them, or, to be precise, not needed on such a massive scale. The work with them lasted until 2016 with sufficient results. In the fall – to study the reaction on isolated cases – began the purification of universities from unpatriotic teachers.45 It’s an old technology, described by the turncoat writer Yuri Trifonov. Sympathetically in his “Students”, awarded the Stalin Prize, and with condemnation in the “House on the Embankment”, revered by the progressive public. At the time of loyal consumerism and pragmatic patriotism, the Ministry of Truth had almost no collaboration with the Ministry of Love. As it’s been already shown, the situation gradually changed: the punitive component, institutional and extra-institutional, began to play an increasingly important role.

      The Shishkin and vodka party demanded the renewal of the elite. Its demands were formulated by nationalists, close to the siloviki and the military-industrial complex in the summer of 200746, towards the end of Putin’s second presidential term. At that time they were not paid due attention, but after seven or eight years, the then almost opposition figures began to voice an almost official position of the current government.

      It all began with a sad date – the seventieth anniversary of what is commonly called the Great Terror or the “thirty-seventh”. That is, the same period in the Soviet state building, when repression reached the political elite. The first call was made in May. It was an anonymous publication, distributed on the Internet:

      “You can, if you wish, admire these executions and assert that “all were shot correctly”, and now we need a” change of the elite and the new 37th”. The problem is different, so that such a “37th” could happen – and not in the form of massacres and shootings, but at least in dismissals of embezzling officials from their posts, getting read of incompetent bureaucrats and others – there should not be a climate of discontent and grumbling, but on the contrary, the atmosphere of national success. Only success gives the state the right to justice and even to a greater injustice.”47

      Everything was formulated clearly, concisely, unequivocally in the issue of the newspaper Zavtra (Tomorrow) on August 14, 2007. The whole second page:

      “The Elites – to the exit!”:

      “With their stuff [personal effects] will they go or without, personally I have no doubts that by and large everyone is waiting for this command and ready for it.”

      “The purge of the cadres”:

      “If the change of ideology in the macroeconomics takes place, then the purge of the cadres at all levels of government will be inevitable. You can’t expect neither Russia’s well-being growth, nor the scientific and technical breakthrough, while the weather in the state will depend on officials of the Yeltsin breed.”

      “Through the cloudy glass”:

      “The new year 1937 can do without blood and violence, unless you call violence a massive dismisssal from the lucrative positions in TV, the press and the culture.”

      “… And the legendary one”:

      “Very soon Russia will lose the national army and turn into a loose defenseless territorial entity with no future. The one who refuses to see this is either a thoughtless fool, or a participant in this crime. This dead elite must be ruthlessly mopped up. Their positions must be taken over by the officers who have made their career not through trafficking in dollar bribes into the personnel hiring offices, but grown up on the battlefield, baptized with fire and blood.”

      “The Lessons of Peter and Stalin”:

      “Without the year 1937, 1945 would not have been possible. Each time, instead of the old, rotten and inadequate strata, the Russian rulers brought in the new people.”

      “Techniques of change”:

      “The

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