Divorce Russian style
Anton Gerashchenko:
"In Moscow, there was a shootout at the entrance to the office of a large Russian marketplace - Wildberries. There are killed and wounded.
The head of the marketplace, Tatyana Bakalchuk, said that her husband Vladislav and his guards were trying to organize a "corporate raid" of the company's office.
Vladislav Bakalchuk claims he came for negotiations but was attacked at the entrance.
And while they are squabbling, dividing a multi-billion dollar business involving Ramzan Kadyrov in divorce proceedings, Russian Telegram channels report that two security guards were killed in the shootout and 3 to 7 people were wounded.
The Russian time machine is only able to "travel" to the past."
Wildberries is a very big company in Russia. Its business idea is equal to Amazon.
I read somewhere that FSB is siding with one spouse and the Tsetstsenian mafia the other spouse.
The shooting at the Wildberries office – Did the '90s ever leave?
This is a video in Russian language with English subs.
I have put the English transcript from the video here:
"Yesterday, a group of armed men that had Ramzan Kadyrov’s grunts in their midst fired shots at a downtown Moscow office building of Wildberries, Russia’s largest online retailer.
The scene looked straight out of an action movie and involved an entourage of Vladislav Bakalchuk, the company’s co-owner.
The shooting incident has left two people dead and several others, including the cops, injured.
We had a video about the company-related dispute, but today, it’d be safe to assume the Wildberries drama
fits the overarching context of Russian politics.
According to a government-pushed narrative, Russia’s recent history can be broken down into two different periods.
It started with the roaring 1990s, with their medieval-style reign of organized crime syndicates.
The mobsters would be charging a protection fee from every single business and stripping the rightful owners of their companies.
Business disputes would result in armed clashes.
In a bid to resolve them, the entrepreneurs wouldn’t turn to the police, but to another kingpin.
But once Putin snagged the presidency in 2000, whoosh, it ushered in an ear of stability and the rigorous rule of the law.
The protagonists of the previous epoch and their trademark habits vanished into thin air and would only belong in the movies.
Moreover, as time flowed by, those characters and their practices would be retroactively getting uglier.
Most Russians, including the government critics, bought into the narrative.
Whenever wild incidents, like the one we saw yesterday, hog the limelight, they spark speculation to the tune of, “Whoa, the 1990s must be back!”
But truth be told, there’s no reason to believe that era sank into historical oblivion.
True, you won’t see punches being thrown over a newsstand these days.
However, when it comes to large businesses and high-profile individuals, literally nothing has changed, as the same people armed with the same principles are still running the show.
Let’s take a closer look at the incident we’ve mentioned.
To the best of our knowledge, as the couple is navigating the divorce proceedings and dividing their assets,
both ex-partners have won over some influential backers.
Tatyana Bakalchuk is supported by Suleiman Kerimov.
A quick online search will yield a Wikipedia puff piece on Kerimov that portrays a grotesque image of a 1990s Russian oligarch, the one you’d often see depicted by a schlocky TV show.
This guy comes across as a blend of an entrepreneur, a mobster, and a sly business liaison.
Vladislav Bakalchuk, in turn, enlisted Chechnya’s Ramzan Kadyrov to help him snag his share of their family assets.
Although he spent most of the 1990s in his dad’s shadow, Ramzan fits the narrative arc to a tee.
The Chechnya mob was an intrinsic part of the savage capitalist reappropriation saga of the 1990s.
True, these days, the former grunts are now holding top-tier jobs with the law enforcement and security agencies, many of them recipients of the government accolades, and can offer political protection, too.
Yet, offering this protection remains their biggest business enterprise to this day.
The only thing that doesn’t fit the 1990s context is the nature of the business the two sides are fighting over.
The 1990s mobsters wouldn’t be staking an illegal claim for an IT outfit as they couldn’t wrap their heads around the money-making process there.
They’d rather set their sights on a coal mine or a factory.
But the plot twists, the character cast, and the M.O. all look straight out of the 1994 playbook.
And these practices have never changed.
That’s the way the business assets were being divvied up in the 1990s, the 2000s, and the 2010s alike.
If you know a thing or two about the life and times of Russia’s big money scene, yesterday’s shooting won’t come as a shocker to you. That’s a common occurrence.
The one thing that really stands out, though, is the public display of the 1990s-style savagery.
The divvying-up of the property tends to be a very low-key affair that only goes public once the former owners have fled to Dubai.
But when it comes to Wildberries, the current gangster drama is on full display in the media and right in front of people’s eyes.
Property Dispute!
It’s not the unofficial leaks but the protagonists themselves that have already shed light on a host of details of the tautly plotted story.
It wasn’t just a bizarre shooting in central Moscow.
Everybody recognized the backstory almost instantly as both side always take to both legacy and social media
to comment on a new plot twist.
We won’t be dwelling on this unheard-of transparency since we covered it in our previous video.
The takeaway here is that, although the Wildberries controversy is nothing out of the ordinary,
the media aspect thereof illustrates the way Russia has changed compared with the 1990s,
the myth of which era underpins the legitimacy of the current political system.
Let’s keep rolling.
There’s one glaring fact many seem to have clean forgotten about.
Russia’s incumbent president is the former Lieutenant Governor of St. Petersburg.
In the early-to-mid-1990s, he was in charge of the city’s foreign trade.
Even if you knew nothing about Putin’s lucrative ties to the Tambov crime syndicate, at the time the shadow rulers of the city, his job title would tell you the whole story.
Back in the day, the biggest profits were being made off the foreign trade transactions.
The mobsters would be swooping down on the sea ports, customs offices, and border patrol checkpoints.
A batch of something simple as PCs could propel one to a multi-million-dollar net worth.
And that’s when the foreign trade operations in Russia’s largest maritime trade city was helmed by that low-key guy.
He was in charge of the humanitarian aid supplies, the customs fees, the benefits, and the creation and operations of the so-called “cooperative enterprises,” an abundant source of dough.
Putin’s signature would unlock the access to millions of bucks.
It’s safe to say Vladimir Putin enjoyed a close relationship with the mobsters capitalizing off the foreign trade deals.
Otherwise, he would’ve wound up six feet below the ground some three decades ago.
The incumbent who is searing his way of thinking and his M.O. into everything everybody is supposed to do,
isn’t just starkly opposed to the depravity of the 1990s era. He embodies it.
His cronies come from the same background, too.
None of them would find the Wildberries dramatic property dispute particularly shocking.
All of their billion-dollar net worths, villas, private jets, and luxury yachts stem from the same kind of forced underhanded deals.
Documentary filmmaker Leonid Parfenov once dubbed the Putin era as
“the ‘90s with oil prices at $100 per barrel.” True that.
The following three decades haven’t debuted a single institution that would protect property rights.
The fledgling ones were all but dismantled.
If someone is locked in a dispute over their formerly shared property, there’s no civilized way to resolve it.
Clearly, unlike the disputes over a garage or a condo, when billions of dollars are at stake and the sides involve high-profile backers like Kerimov and Kadyrov, filing a lawsuit seems pointless. The one with a tougher backing will come out on top.
But practically speaking, both sides are likely to lose big time.
The high-profile backers in question may find it easier to strike a deal while stripping the owners of their property clean.
But if the country features individuals that are above the law and any court orders, it’s only natural for the litigants in the Wildberries case to reach out to them instead of taking it to court.
After all, court-ordered paperwork offers flimsy protection against the lead bullets.
Lawlessness Instituted!
Now, why did this story go that glaringly public?
Remember the rule? A need for public outreach in Russia stems from problems only.
Since we don’t have an open political system, public opinion is basically of no use.
If you’re a PMC leader-turned-videoblogger who starts howling, “Shoigu, Gerasimov, you bastards, where’s the bloody ammo?”, it doesn’t mean you’re powerful. It means you’re desperate.
You no longer can whisper into the big guy’s ear, so you’re yelling from afar.
The Wildberries story evidently has a similar plot.
The parties to the conflict are seeking public attention. But their addressee isn't the general public.
It’s the home-plate umpire, Vladimir Putin. Ramzan Kadyrov’s beeline to his ear must’ve been cut off.
Or maybe it wasn’t, but it’s just that the scale was tipped in his opponent’s favor.
These recent developments more or less fit Kadyrov’s M.O.
Whenever he doesn’t get what he wants, he ups the ante, comes across as a madman, and forces Putin to make his pick.
Either punish the Kadyrovites and perhaps Ramzan himself or side with him.
It hasn’t been the first time Kadyrov treated Putin the way Putin treats everybody else.
By committing a flagrant act of lawless thuggery, he bullies his big boss into compliance and the need to reaffirm his special status.
If the backstory we’ve all been told is anything to go by and Kerimov introduced Tatyana Bakalchuk to Putin so that she gets the go-ahead for Wildberries’ merger with Kerimov’s business, it all makes sense.
The big boss has made his pick. You can’t convince him to roll it back, but you can force him to reconsider.
Hence the decision to cause a public stir so that summoning the bigwigs behind the scene is no longer an option.
The reappropriation of Wildberries’ assets has become public knowledge.
This is Kadyrov at his best. Whenever the crap hits the fan, he doesn’t back out.
Far from it, he starts escalating it.
Once everybody began talking about Kadyrov’s health issues, he posted a video of his son Adam beating up Nikita Zhuravel.
When Adam’s violent act predictably sparked public outrage, his dad made the leaders of Russia’s Muslim regions start publicly bestowing a bunch of accolades upon his offspring.
Apparently, the initial footage of Vladislav Bakalchuk conversing with Kadyrov had no effect on the story.
That’s where Kadyrov decided to take it up a notch and initiate a deadly shooting in downtown Moscow.
It’ll either be prosecuted or downplayed, thus giving Kadyrov what he wants and avoiding a new escalatory step.
Although the shooting incident is uncharacteristic of the Russian system, it meshes well with Kadyrov’s own playbook.
Whenever an altercation like this happens, he tends to come out on top, proving time and again that Putin’s isn’t ready to lay waste to him.
Nobody knows the future denouement of this story, but along with the sweeping MoD purge, it’s the kind of case you want to keep an eye on.
These incidents show us the inner workings and go-to practices of the Russian government and help us discard the harmful illusions like the one of the roaring 1990s that gave way to Putin’s stability.
Notably, Vladislav Bakalchuk has just been arrested. But it means almost nothing under the circumstances.
Neither Vladislav nor his ex-wife Tatyana is the biggest actor in this saga.
If your business is being taken care of by the likes of Putin, Kadyrov, Kerimov, or any other oligarch or state security official, it’s already a recipe for disaster.
You’re just a passenger in this car that’s hurtling down either to your arrest or to your assassination.
None of their assurance will work. None of these top dogs are going to be committed to your cause, you punks.
The only problem they’re all eager to relieve you of is that of your lack of spare time and the stress of running your business.
No business to run, no stress to cope with.
The smartest guys figure this out before it’s too late.
They seek to pocket as much money as they can physically handle and board a one-way flight to Tel Aviv,
the sun-soaked Dubai, or the rain-soaked London.
It boils down to the destinations they can afford.
But the credulous folks who tend to trust the untrustables, hope to pally up with them, and refuse to flee
as soon as possible often end up in a wreck.
Losing their business will be the least of their ills.
See you tomorrow!"
