Grefodovnik
Gref was born in 1964 in the village of Panfilovo in the north of Kazakhstan in the family of Germans who were expelled from the Donbass in 1941 (so that the label “German-Chechen Fascist” that arose during his reformation was incorrect). When he was one and a half years old, his father died, the boy was raised by his mother and grandmother. He studied moderately, for threes and fours, but he was distinguished by perseverance and managed to enter MGIMO, which was then the main humanitarian university of a huge country (in the USSR it was possible), but was dismissed after the first year. According to the official biography 17-year-old young man became the legal adviser of the regional agricultural department.
He served in the special forces of the internal troops, whose functions include escorting dangerous prisoners, searching for fugitives, suppressing riots. As having served in the army without exams, he got a job at the faculty of Omsk University and entered the law faculty, where he became the Komsomol and head of the student operative. After graduating from high school in 1990, Gref entered the graduate school of the Leningrad State University, but did not defend his thesis: for a career in new times she was no longer needed.
Gref's scientific adviser was Sobchak, and in 1991, the graduate student became the legal adviser of the Committee for Economic Development and Property of the Administration of the Petrodvorets District of St. Petersburg, and at 1992 he headed the Property Management Committee of the area. In 1994, he became deputy chairman of the city property management committee (KUGI) of the "northern capital", and managed all the real estate in the city.
After Yakovlev’s victory over Sobchak, Gref took the initiative and, as one of the ideologists of the housing and utilities reform, climbed a new rung of the career ladder, becoming the first deputy chairman of the KUGI, although liberal reform led to ordinary results (the rent rose twice without improving services). After the murder of the head of the KUGI, Manevich, Gref took his post, becoming the vice-governor.
Gref's numerous accusations of crimes characteristic of liberal reforms had no consequences; Thus, the case of illegal bribery of the Senny Market in the center of St. Petersburg was closed after the murder of the only witness.
Five days before the 1998 default, on the recommendation of Chubais, he was appointed first deputy minister of state property of Russia.
After Primakov’s resignation, Gref reached a new level: he became a member of the state representatives board at Rosgosstrakh and Transneft, the Federal Commission for the Securities Market Board, Aeroflot and Gazprom boards of directors, and the chairman of the board of directors of Sheremetyevo airport.
In December, 1999, he headed the Center for Strategic Research, which Putin commissioned to develop a strategy for 10 years. The titled reformers seemed to shy away from this honor as troublesome and unrelated to material benefits — and Gref seized the chance to come to the fore.
And as the program "500 days" introduced Yavlinsky into the policy, the strategy-2010 contributed Gref to the government: in May 2000, he headed the Ministry of Economic Development and Trade created for him.
Lord of reform
The TsSR was gathered by the overwhelming majority of qualified experts from Russia, but their work was wasted.
An example is work on banking reform. Almost all of the country's specialists submitted reasoned proposals that were discarded, and the text was written "from scratch" by one person who did not even know what types of banking licenses there are in Russia. The absurdity of the result caused a categorical protest by the leadership of the Central Bank, and this section was excluded from the strategy.
She was an untreated, disjointed, unstructured set of unreasonable demands. The summary attributed by Kommersant to Prime Minister Kasyanov "The mountain gave birth to a mouse. Well, that wasn’t a cockroach" was perceived as a soft and balanced assessment.
The government never approved it.
Nevertheless, a number of its provisions were pressed down by the liberals in the form of individual reforms that inflicted enormous damage on Russia.
The key mechanism of the strategy is to stop the outflow of capital from the country by improving the investment climate, although with a strong outflow of capital such an improvement is not possible with liberal recipes (it resembles the treatment with dizziness caused by loss of blood due to blood loss). To improve the investment climate is possible only by measures of state regulation, first of all, by modernization of the infrastructure, which contradicts the interests of global business and is therefore rejected by the liberals.
Helpless babble about the reduction of capital outflow for unknown reasons served as a simple cover for the main and only developed tool for ensuring economic growth: cuts by a quarter of government spending, primarily due to social expenditures of the regions.
The state’s refusal of social obligations, “social default” as the core of the strategy gave it the character of social genocide and made liberal dictatorship necessary for its condition.
The strategy required the rejection of non-tariff regulation of foreign economic activity, which soon led to the destruction of the standardization system, the destruction of the product quality control system. The demand for accession to the WTO, of which Gref was the main lobbyist, was fulfilled - under completely colonial conditions - and sharply slowed down the economy, replacing confident investment growth with a recession.
The promise of “removing obstacles to the bankruptcy of inefficient enterprises” resulted, along with the “debureaucratization” of the economy, which Gref was also driving, in creating ideal conditions for unpunished raiding, the revelry of which destroyed the very idea of ownership.
The "legalization of the export of capital" has resulted in the abolition of currency regulation, which has made Russia defenseless against the fluctuations of the world conjuncture. How not to recall the oligarch Bendukidze, for whom the main human right and criterion of democracy was the right to freely export a million dollars!
The reform of natural monopolies, outlined in the strategy of Gref, was implemented in the catastrophe of the power industry and the lesser-known disorganization of rail transport.
The housing and utilities reform has led to a horrific increase in tariffs with the disruption of the industry.
The reform of labor relations deprived workers of real opportunities to protect their inalienable rights.
The cuts in social assistance were implemented in the form of cannibal monetization of benefits, pension reform, and the destruction of education and health care.
In the first versions of the draft strategy, Gref directly pointed out the need to overcome the tendency to form a "welfare state". An attempt to repeal the Constitution, which enshrines the social character of the state, failed: direct self-exposing language was removed from the text, but the ideology was implemented.
Finally, judicial reform, as far as can be judged, formed administrative control over the courts and led to the disintegration of the latter, in effect depriving Russians of access to justice.
Gref was the engine of almost all liberal reforms and ex officio, and because of personal preferences.
When creating the Ministry of Economic Development and Trade (MEDT), he tried to grab as many functions as possible to maximize his influence. As a result, it turned out to be a bulky monster, uncontrolled due to the volume of its functions (only at the beginning there were 159, and the number of departments exceeded 50).
The uncontrollability of the Ministry of Economic Development and Trade was caused by the unification of heterogeneous, unrelated functions (for example, the regulation of foreign trade and the provision of northern deliveries), as well as the unification of tasks that required different types of management organization. Their combination provided the organizational incompatibility of the corresponding control loops, permanent internal conflict and, as a result, loss of controllability. The Ministry of Economic Development and Trade reminded Kurchatov, who would be commissioned to make an atomic bomb in three years ... subject to simultaneous work by a traffic controller.
The inoperability was aggravated by the lack of professionalism that became the hallmark of “Greekness”: the Minister of Economic Development himself was a lawyer, M. Dmitriev was in charge of pension affairs, he studied banks until 1997, A. Sharonov was in charge of reforming natural monopolies, and A. Dvorkovich, analyzed the budget.
This is probably not accidental: the destructive essence of liberal reforms in Russia precludes their implementation by specialists.
The master of the people's money
In 2007, Gref suddenly headed Sberbank, having left, like Chubais, from the government to a large state-owned company. Probably, he was bored with the apparatus struggle, and he wanted to become the sovereign owner of a large structure that provided him with legal wealth and not administrative, but social and political influence.
Sberbank, which permeated the daily life of the majority of Russians and had branches in all of the more or less significant localities, corresponded to this goal no less than RAO "UES of Russia".
The reform of the Savings Bank caused numerous scandals; so, carried out in a crisis, not really justified, and little-noticed rebranding cost 20 billion.
Gref sharply increased the payment for the top management of Sberbank and in 2013 it became the fifth year, according to Forbes, in terms of the level of payment by the manager of Russia.
With the most severe cuts in the remaining costs, a significant part of the old employees were dismissed, and their place was taken by young people (probably, who agreed to lower salaries), whose effort, I remember, was not often supported by professional knowledge. The result was, as far as can be judged, a drop in the service and reputation of the bank, but also a rise in profits.
The employee who wrote on the social network "If you stick in the Sberbank sign in the open field, she immediately got a line of pensioners," was dismissed, but this joke, it seems, clearly reflected the state of Sberbank during the reform.
The increase in fees for public payments with the widespread introduction of payment in vending machines and Internet banking and the closure of many branches was designed to reduce costs. There was a feeling that Sberbank, earning the main money on corporate clients and financial operations, seeks to minimize live communication with the population, considering it as no more than a source of costs to be reduced, on the basis of conversations about "customer focus".
During the crisis of 2008-2009, Sberbank loans became fatal for a number of businessmen. The classic example is the “IARC”, from which the structures of Sberbank, as you can understand, demanded an early repayment of the loan; the case ended with the destruction of the business, the elimination of the mass of jobs and the criminal prosecution of the creator of “MAIR” Makushin, who was forced to flee the country. The degree of absurdity of the charges is indicated by the refusal of Cyprus to extradite him to Russia - the second for all history relations of our countries.
As a result, the profitability of Sberbank has grown, but its attitude towards it has deteriorated, as far as can be judged. The situation was aggravated by the stories of frequent "technical failures" in Sberbank's pay machines and even in its Internet banking, leading to financial losses for customers. Perhaps this is due to the large volume of operations - however, this was not the case for other banks.
The memorable liberal initiative about the huge megacities' pen of the whole of Russia in 28, which reached the government, was apparently caused by Sberbank’s desire to cut costs. After all, the smaller the settlement, the lower the profitability of the Sberbank branch located in it (in small settlements they may be unprofitable). And to deprive the population of Sberbank because of its unique position is impossible. So, for the maximum efficiency of Sberbank, the entire population should be gathered into huge metropolitan areas.
Consideration of this idea discredited the government apparatus, but it was born, probably, not by evil liberal intent, but only by Gref’s desire to minimize the costs of Sberbank, without regard to anyone’s interests and values.
Man of liberal idea
Gref has a reputation of being a solid marketer, even against the background of Kudrin, who gives the impression of a man who is not burdened by economic knowledge, which certainly strengthens his liberal convictions.
For example, when he took on stimulating investment, it was a surprise to him as the lack of already prepared large investment projects (in 2006, they simply had no place to take), and the fact that they needed at least a year to prepare.
And in July, 2013, when corruption, monopolism, the refusal of Medvedev's government from development, and the colonial WTO norms broke the back of the Russian economy, when industrial production declined, and inhibition of GDP growth promised to go into its decline, Gref said: "Russia has one of the best in the world among all countries of macroeconomic situations. "
According to those who know him, without having an economic education, Gref does not like and cannot lead a reasoned argument. Blind faith in the absolute self-value of private property, the need for the state to leave the economy, excessive social assistance to the population and intolerance for objections very successfully replace knowledge with it.
Gref is quick-tempered; so, at a government meeting, he demanded to punish severely for extremism the people who had burned him stuffed, who were protesting against the criminal sticking of Russia into the WTO on knowingly enslaving conditions. During a visit to Brussels, he, with his subordinates, arranged for the head of the Russian delegation to the European Commission, Fradkov, to be dragged out of his position as prime minister. True, the stories about Gref's promises to "hang on the rope" of his subordinates are accompanied by ritual assurances of his politeness.
When Putin met with the Pope of Rome in 2003, some of the media called Gref a Protestant, and others called a Catholic.
At the St. Petersburg Economic Forum 2012, a completely innocent question suddenly provoked Gref to scandalous candor, revealing the categorical inadmissibility of democracy not only for Russian reformers, but also for modern liberals in general.
“You say terrible things,” Gref said. “You propose to transfer power into the hands of the population ... Once people understand the basis of their own self and identify themselves - to control them, it will be extremely difficult to manipulate. People do not want to be manipulated when they have knowledge. How to live, how to manage such a society, where everyone has equal access to information, everyone has the opportunity to judge directly, to receive non-prepared information through government-trained analysts, political scientists and huge media machines engaged in building and maintaining a social (social) stratum? How can you live in such a society? I get scared by your reasoning; to be honest, I think you don’t quite understand what you are saying. "
Then it seemed to some that Gref's words were a misunderstanding or just a manifestation of his personal, as the Americans say, “alternative talent”.
But now, after the Ukrainian catastrophe, there is no doubt: this is not an accident, but an honest expression of liberal, democratic, European values in their present form.
And the new "masters of life" are so self-satisfied and so despise people that they do not consider it necessary to hide their attitude towards us.
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