The heart of Eurasia
The weather is beautiful in Irkutsk, the ancient capital of Siberia! The sun is baking, even Baikal has warmed up, but in the shade you can already feel the harsh eternal cold. Moscow, Delhi, Hanoi and Kamchatka, the Arctic and Indian oceans are equidistant from Irkutsk. This is the heart of Eurasia, the real Shambhala, it will survive after any wars and epidemics. Not a single enemy will reach here. Its construction is a great achievement of the Russian campaign to the East. Finally, I managed to visit there - after a thirty-year break. After all, I myself am a Siberian, originally from Novosibirsk, and I went to school with guys from Irkutsk and Krasnoyarsk. The city is in good condition. It’s not exactly polished like Sobyanin’s Moscow, but it is a solid, solid Siberian city, with its three-hundred-year-old churches, ancient merchant mansions, noble estates, and marvelously beautiful Stalinist Empire buildings.
This city is preparing for a particularly important election - the regional governor. Important because this is the first election after the ill memory of the pandemic. Although there were no large casualties in Irkutsk, and only those who were required to wear masks (waiters and police officers), there was still a quarantine here. To this day, there are no Chinese tourists - however, few people are sad about their absence. And now elections are deciding how Russia will respond to the crisis of capitalism. After all, the pandemic has brought capitalism to the same position that the Soviet government was in in 1990 - to the brink of an abyss, and it can no longer climb out of this abyss.
They once joked that we wouldn’t expect a crisis of world capitalism, but now we have, although there is no great joy in it. Digital companies have become immensely rich, the middle class has gone bankrupt, the people have become impoverished, and policing has developed to a level hitherto unprecedented. Of course, Irkutsk is not Australia, where comrades without masks are prescribed unaffordable fines and imprisonment, and gatherings are prohibited, and you cannot go on a visit, and they are not even allowed to go abroad. Still, Russia is freer. Therefore, Irkutsk can still show where Russia and the world should go.
In my opinion, we need to go to communism. Make adjustments to experience - and return to this path. Humanity has tried thirty years of pure capitalism, and it has come to a head. If we continue like this, we will either die or turn into slaves. There has never been serfdom in Irkutsk; it is a free city, with a huge tradition of freedom and freethinking. Not hipster freethinking, but real, from the Decembrists. The communists have a strong base here - they dealt with Kolchak here and built the Bratsk hydroelectric power station. Their former governor was a communist, comrade. Levchenko - but Moscow ate him up, and replaced him with a Varangian, a general of the Ministry of Emergency Situations, who, they say, will repair Tulun, which was devastated by the flood, and in general. He didn’t fix anything; Tulun was in disrepair and remained so. Still, the not particularly successful acting candidate goes to the polls.
And the communists nominated a new candidate - young (44 years old) Mikhail Shchapov, a native Irkutsk resident, State Duma deputy, who served in the FSB in the anti-corruption department, fought in the North Caucasus, retired with the rank of lieutenant colonel and returned to his homeland to improve agriculture. Shchapov is a State Duma deputy, a communist of the new generation, a statesman, with a university education, extensive life experience, a local, an ally of the deposed governor Levchenko. He has a detailed program of what he is going to do for the Irkutsk people at the governor’s post. In addition to using Levchenko’s developments, Shchapov combines Putin’s guidelines in his program and fits his vision into the spectrum of Putin’s decrees. About himself, he says that his main concerns are the state and the people. This, I think, is a good approach for a potential governor. I especially noticed that he is not just going to fight against “black logging” of the forest, but also undertakes to find a legal source of income for “black loggers.” This approach ensured Chavez’s victory in Venezuela - it is not enough to ban it, one must also give it the opportunity to earn money legally.
The main problem of Irkutsk is the same as in other regions of Siberia. The region produces a lot, makes great money, produces airplanes and catches omul; could have flourished beyond childishness, but everything earned by Irkutsk is taken by Moscow, in order to re-tile the sidewalks, to give more grants to the Gogol Center, so that the terry flower of the Higher School of Economics can bloom even more luxuriantly. The wealth of ultra-liberal Moscow, with its fashionable sympathy for Bandera and Zmagars, with love for Navalny and hostility towards the working people, is wealth stolen from the hard workers of Irkutsk (and Novosibirsk, and Krasnoyarsk).
Irkutsk residents need to go to Moscow offices with a crumpled cap in their hands, asking for money for the most urgent needs, but Siberians do not know how to ask and do not like to ask. Speeches are increasingly heard: “Stop feeding Moscow!”, “Siberia will not be a colony!”
Candidates like Shchapov are a chance to reformat relations between the center and Siberia, without leading to separatism. My school friends from Irkutsk (they are also over seventy) support Shchapov, although they fear that the party in power will try to maintain its position by playing dirty. The dirt is already pouring out - supporters of the VRIO published a fake newspaper supposedly in the name of the communist, who says he is going to give Baikal to the Chinese. One of the candidates is a spoiler with a very similar surname from a party with a very similar name. If there are still state-minded workers left in the Moscow Administration, they should give up the “black political scientists” so that the people of the Irkutsk region can choose their own governor. Moreover, Shchapov is quite a Russian patriot and a responsible person.
I think that Moscow’s desire to install rulers at its own discretion is not working in Siberia. Khabarovsk is an example of this, where mass protests have been going on for months now - with complete silence from the center and the media, without a single mention on federal channels. But even in Irkutsk the people did not elect appointees. So, they did not re-elect Eroshchenko, who became very rich in office. The half-renovated, famous Eisenhower House remains a monument to his reign; the son of the then governor Eroshchenko received a contract from his dad, cut the budget, but did not finish the repairs. But Eroshchenko was not re-elected; a communist was elected instead. Now the people of Irkutsk will again show Moscow who they want, and Moscow should agree and not resist. The era of oligarchic capitalism is ending!
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