A unique moment in Parliament

The world is changing from below. People stop perceiving the meaning of words and take out on the next interlocutor the mood spoiled by the previous one. A universal diagnostic sign of a catastrophic state of the system is that it responds to any external influences in the same way in accordance with its internal state or does not respond at all, the impacts can be very sensitive and even dangerous for the survival of the system.

A person does not hear the meaning and willingly repeats something unnecessary to him, stupid and harmful. Relevance management makes the most educated intellectual an absolutely obedient slave. Social media is not the reason. Such dual-use network technologies such as blockchain, wikinomics, AI have always existed in the history of mankind and manifested themselves in special historical moments with mental turbulence. In Russia, which is prone to self-organization, outbursts of networked AI are most noticeable. Stepan Razin irresponsibly received power stronger than the royal one, thanks to the self-organization of the network subculture, as described in the terrible novel Bloody Feast by Andrei Zarin. What do Stepan Razin and German Gref have in common? Informal power without responsibility.

President, Chairman of the Board of Public Joint Stock Company “Sberbank of Russia” German Gref, the senators received as a triumphant. So Stepan Razin entered the cities besotted with revolutionary frenzy. This happened at the 543rd meeting of the Federation Council on April 12, where Gref overshadowed the deputy chairman of the government, Denis Manturov. They are opposite both in position and role in the state of the country. Gref’s theme is formulated as Sberbank’s contribution to the country’s innovative development. At the 544th meeting on April 26, the Federation Council adopted a resolution on Gref’s benefit without objection. Topic and conclusion are determined by the title of the report.

The resolution, in particular, reads: “In the context of the policy pursued by the Government of the Russian Federation aimed at developing the Russian economy, its structural transformation and ensuring the technological sovereignty of the state, the contribution of the public joint-stock company Sberbank of Russia to the innovative development of the country is essential.

Sber’s main areas of innovation are research and implementation of projects in the field of artificial intelligence, robotics, unmanned vehicles, neuroscience, information security, decentralized finance, business services, platform solutions for public authorities and large companies, as well as computing infrastructure, including quantum computers”.

End of quote.

The resolution lists Gref’s recommendations and proposals, which detail his ambitions to coordinate the activities of regions, ministries and departments. When discussing the draft resolution in the budget committee of the Federation Council, Senator Pavel Tarakanov tried to insert a paragraph about overpriced acquiring into the text.

The question is sick, the head of the Bank of Russia Elvira Nabiullina herself is concerned about it. There are even more questions for Sberbank of Russia than for the Bank of Russia. So as not to be pestered, Gref came up with a werewolf brand, cutting off the root “bank” along with Russia. It is to Gref that the just anger of parliamentarians applies with denunciations of those who make money on Russia and humiliate her. His basic settings did not go down in history along with the Gaidar Forum, where they sounded plentifully. The resonance is great, because it is relevant. Gref is a non-standard figure in power. He does not report on other people’s achievements, as everyone does, but invents his own. Nothing can be changed. Signs of graffism-Germanism are ubiquitous in parliamentary public content.

Outside of the plenary sessions in the Federation Council, there are a lot of discussions on the most important topics, where we have an insurmountable failure – the production of domestic printed circuit boards, protection against the illegal use of drones, professional orientation of orphans, personnel for tourism, digital industry, ecological tourism in protected areas, digitalization of legal proceedings, improvement financial situation of citizens and families with children. Well, and so on. Most issues have become chronic, like small aircraft, price disparity in agricultural production or the rights and judicial protection of victims of the Chernobyl disaster.

Of the recent features, two are technical interference in communication via videoconferencing, the unwillingness of deputies to come to parliament in person, and the unwillingness of representatives of ministries and departments to answer questions. There is no intention to solve the problem. There is a phenomenon in the world of waiting people, which Duma Chairman Vyacheslav Volodin spoke about with specific examples at the government hour in the Duma on April 19. Deputy Prime Minister Victoria Abramchenko spoke about the garbage reform.

The gradual process of replacing personnel with the Soviet school of managerial training is almost over. New professionals fell under the centrifugal selection. Powerful personnel strikes took place in 2022. Survivors in politics, science, education, persons with unlimited disabilities, disabled people of the zero group. Sometimes they lobby against the topic of discussion. But more often than not, they are clearly waiting to see where all this will lead.

On the topic of garbage, the country was driven into a planned dead end, and no one can cope with it. Industry and trade are pulled there too. One Manturov will not cope. The decision adopted by the Federation Council on his report, as usual, is emasculated to the point of what to recommend to whom and what law to adopt. Even if everything written in the decree is carried out, which is incredible, no one in the country will notice, except for the authors of the text. Here they would take and write down what Vyacheslav Volodin and Valentina Matvienko sometimes say to the transcript. The general meaning is simple: you need to prepare for a speech in parliament, and we will sternly ask you.

In the entire history of my work in parliament, only once did the Duma send a minister for a re-examination, and he never returned. He emerged as an adviser to the president. It was such a valuable shot.

Senators are dismissed for usually good questions, as happened with Dmitry Shatokhin, Sergey Lisovsky, Valery Ryazansky, Sergey Kalashnikov, Viktor Ozerov.

If the chambers of the Federal Assembly succeed, as in the case of the ecological disaster of Norilsk Nickel or the billions in fines for manure, there is political will behind this. If it exists, parliament is not needed. So it was in Pikalevo after the accident at the Sayano-Shushenskaya HPP. But after that, the country changed, and a fifth power appeared to the detriment of the fourth.

We need a personnel purge of all branches of government. The pyramid of power is upside down, the lower the position, the more power and less responsibility. No one wants to listen to anyone, and no one can.

On April 16, at the 544th meeting of the Federation Council, the main and only issue worthy of attention was the report of the Prosecutor General Igor Krasnov on the state of law and order in the Russian Federation and on the work done to strengthen them in 2022. The content of the report is perceived as contradictory.

“The crime situation in 2022, despite the predicted risks of its surge, remained generally stable. Moreover, the recorded crime rate has become minimal over the past ten years,” Igor Krasnov said. And he immediately added that there is still an increase in especially serious crimes, more than 9 percent, and a high level of repeated crime. Repeat offenders committed almost two-thirds of all registered crimes last year. The confession of the Prosecutor General sounds like a confession, in my opinion.

Contradictions are clearly growing between prosecutors on the one hand and municipalities and police departments on the other. Judging by the answers of the Prosecutor General to the questions of the senators, each side insists on its own. The Attorney General will not be forgiven if his annual report does not contain an uncompromising war on corruption. The public’s expectations are limited by the notions of the invincibility of corruption in Russia, although Russia looks quite worthy in terms of its level, and corruption in our country is bred mainly from abroad. According to Igor Krasnov, last year prosecutors filed nearly 4,500 lawsuits worth more than 300 billion rubles to the courts for damages caused by acts of corruption. Property worth ninety billion rubles has been turned into the treasury.

Such significant results were not recorded for the entire period of statistical observation. Reports of arrests for bribes of high-ranking federal officials and heads of local authorities have ceased to be extraordinary. They are now perceived in society as a natural result of the work carried out by all law enforcement agencies to cleanse the government from random people and outright pests.

I propose to pay special attention to the words of the Prosecutor General about random people and wreckers in power. The law enforcement agencies have their own research institutes, and either voiceless or random people and opportunists sit there, as elsewhere in science. Either we must recognize the fact of centrifugal selection in favor of genetic garbage and eliminate its causes, or we will have to accept and consider international practice in Russia as the norm. The success of prosecutors in the fight against corruption is associated with the growth of its base.

The country needs a two-loop economy and complete isolation of officials from personal contacts, except for specially trained people. Isolation applies primarily to foreigners, and especially the Chinese. All Russians have now rushed to China, at least with minimal power.

Prosecutor General Igor Krasnov will have enough materials to report to the Federation Council for another hundred years. The scope of the Prosecutor General’s report is amazing. The topics of observance of the rights of large families, workers, pensioners, miners were raised. Prosecutors check the sphere of education and health care. They catch violations in the construction of schools, targeted enrollment, housing and communal services, payroll, environmental pollution, transport, and the defense industry. They support the business with all their might. Business sometimes squeaks with indignation, but Krasnov’s report did not talk about this, so as not to spoil his mood, but his career.

In housing and communal services, they do not hesitate to charge a fee for services a couple of times. According to the acts of the prosecutor’s response last year, unlawful expenses totaling more than 750 million rubles were excluded from the tariffs of resource supply companies.

Igor Krasnov touched upon the issues of control over budget expenditures to support families and children benefiting from preferential support. From the moment the decision was made on payments to families with minor children, prosecutors began to receive dozens of complaints every day about refusals to provide them. Igor Krasnov instructed to conduct a targeted audit. The audit revealed a lot of violations. Thanks to the response measures taken, 140,000 illegal decisions to refuse to assign monthly allowances to parents were reviewed, which eventually received almost a billion underpaid rubles.

Prosecutors monitor the processes of bringing legal acts of all levels of state and municipal government in line with constitutional norms and federal legislation. During the year, on the prosecutor’s initiative, 400,000 such documents were amended in the regions and municipalities, and almost 24,000 new acts were adopted.

Krasnov did not forget the elections either. He reminded the senators that large-scale elections are coming this year, in which residents of new regions of the Russian Federation will take part for the first time. In this regard, prosecutors have been given specific instructions to ensure that voting is legal, transparent and safe.

A trifle, but nice. For senators, regional elections are rotating, many will have to look for another job. So in the Federation Council, words about elections act like an invigorating sip of coffee. How the elections are actually held is not discussed at Bolshaya Dmitrovka.

Judging by Pavel Astakhov’s novel The Producer, the polit-fiction genre was invented specifically for prosecutorial reports in the Federation Council. The procedure is described in detail. Igor Krasnov put the new genre on a technological basis. German Gref, on a basis that was not achieved by him, returned polit-fiction to a non-fiction format accessible to any viewer of the VmesteRF TV channel, freeing his speech in the Federation Council from specifics and everything reporting-mandatory. The result was a projection of a bright future directly from the AI ​​of German Gref. The VmesteRF television channel has turned ten years old, and the chairman of the chamber, Valentina Matvienko, is very happy about this. The journalists of the channel are highly professional. They show the achievements of the Federation Council at such a level of quality that neither Gref nor Krasnov can do it together. It turns out refined socialist realism without fiction-frills.

Lev MOSKOVKIN.