Living well isn’t against the law…

Moscow’s budget in the epoch of crisis

Grigory Pasko, journalist

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A friend of mine works in the administration of one of the rayons [administrative districts, like New York’s boroughs or Paris’s arrondissements–Trans.] of Moscow. We meet with him rarely, but enough to understand from his stories how the administrative world of the capital of the largest state in the world is set up. It’s set up strangely. Judge for yourselves.

Once, in January of this year, my friend drove off around his rayon to form… brigades for catching stray dogs. It’s done like this. An official comes (my friend is an official not of the lowest echelon by Muscovite measures) to the housing-exploitation office (they’re now called directorates or administrations) and randomly chooses two surnames from a list provided. These could be Tajik streetsweepers or Russian plumbers Having written down these surnames on a separate list of members of the dog-catching brigade, he leaves. What happens next is already completely irrelevant to this exercise.