A waitress waits for admission into one of the offices of the Federation Council (upper house of Russian parliament).
Photo: Vasily Shaposhnikov
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Rumors Ever Closer to the Truth
You’ll say it’s the same old rumor mongering. It takes no special talent. Take a walk through the corridors of power, chat a few people up. There’s a load of juicy details to be had about our politicians and oligarchs. But I flatter myself to think that I can hold a candle to the real power gossipers.
For two years in a row, I have refused to write calculate my accuracy. Practice from five years of rumor collecting has shown that they start to come true after they are gathered up and put down on paper. But this year, the editor-in-chief is insisting. “The readers and I want to know how close your columns come to reality,” he said. There was nothing I could do.
Choosing rumor No. 1 is not an easy task and, after giving it some thought, I decided not to chose a rumor but a topic that has appeared and reappeared in my “They Say” column. For those who can’t guess, it is the expansion of the presidents’ fellow natives of St. Petersburg in the federal government.
Last January, I noticed that they were not all-powerful. Take, for example, the intrigue that recently befell Mikhail Kasyanov. When he was prime minister, he strangled the air transport reform that had come out of St. Petersburg, even though the system is in terrible shape (there’s no use trying to hide it). And the whisperers gave him his due: he was on the rise and wanted to show a thing or two to the president’s St. Petersburg cronies.
In the course of the year, I had to take those words back. I confess. I overestimated the former prime minister’s pull. Just a month after that was published, Mikhail was sent packing and his opponents in air reform, Viktor Ivanov and Sergey Ivanov, are flying high. Sergey is still overseeing the country’s defenses, and his equally influential colleague with the same last name is still picking the new hires in the Kremlin. Moreover, FSB General Viktor Ivanov has seriously expanded his influence in just those fields where Kasyanov tried to squeeze him out. Besides being on the board of directors of Almaz-Antey military aircraft maker, where he had thought up the flight reform in the first place, and he became chairman of the board of Aeroflot. So what was I talking about?
By the way, as we pointed out correctly at the beginning of the year, the changes at Aeroflot were in no way beneficial to Muscovites. St. Petersburg FSB agents didn’t just crowd out Aleksandr Zubarov’s guys, they pushed them right out the door. Zubarov made a loud exit from the company in the summer.
The smoothest expansion by people from St. Petersburg took place in the Property Ministry (now called Rosimushchestvo), whose fate we followed all year. In January, we said that Minister Farit Gazizullin’s chair was rather shaky there. Two months later, he fended off an attack by those (from you-know-where) who were trying to saddle him with a double, in the form of former head of the St. Petersburg municipal property committee Valery Nazarov. We suggested then that Viktor Ivanov had set his personal friend up in the Kremlin administration while he waited for an opening in the Property Ministry. And we weren’t wrong on that one.
In less than two months, Nazarov moved to the adjacent complex of Property Ministry buildings. Now there are practically no Muscovites left there. Rumor has it that 80 percent of the staff left, and were replaced with people from St. Petersburg. They say even the secretaries are registered as residents of St. Petersburg. But most of all, the old people there like to talk about how, after the massive personnel changes, the personnel department was quickly reformed with specialists ordered in from a St. Petersburg enterprise.
YUKOS and its boss were another hot topic of the year. Just try to find a better rumor mill. It occupied 20 percent of all gossip, most of which was to some degree true. But it is painful for me to admit that the rumor in March that Mikhail Khodorkovsky would be released from jail in the summer did not pan out. My sincerest apologies to Mikhail Borisovich for giving him false hope.
All right. So a gossip is not as exact a science as weather forecasting, which never fails, as we know. But let’s look at the statistics any way. My column appeared 13 times over the year, with more than 100 honestly garnered rumors, funny stories from the lives of oligarchs and officials and the very most unlikely explanations for all that goes on around us. Of 52 rumors we reported, 33 of them turned out to be true. That is an accuracy rate of 63.4 percent. The last time I calculated was in 2001, when I had a score of 62.8 percent (up from 62.7 percent the year before). I hope to continue this trend and report to the reader only the very most believable rumors. Happy New Year! Happy new rumors!
Elena Kiseleva
All the Article in Russian as of Dec. 20, 2004
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