In his first reaction to the tragedy in Perm, President Dmitry Medvedev clearly specified the guilty and the innocent: "Ordinances were issued but they did not react to them... They have neither brains, nor conscience... And on top of all that they went into hiding... A failure to observe ordinances must involve stricter punishment. It's no use blaming fire-fighters for everything." Such an assessment can only be explained by a lack of practical experience.
When such an awful and absurd tragedy takes place, the public is not satisfied with the usual bureaucratic back-sliding tricks. Moreover, it is extremely irritated by them. If the president does not know anything about a standard inspection of clubs and other similar places, people who do not even have their own business instinctively feel what is true and what is not.
In the meantime, such an inspection consists of two compulsory elements: money in an envelope and...a notice with a demand to remove faults. This is so because the employees of the vertical of power with the presidential seat at the top are not so stupid as to shoulder responsibility for a potential disaster. When inspectors take envelopes they won't ignore violations, as they did in the romantic 1990s, but will allow you to continue working regardless of violations instead of shutting you down instantly. As distinct from the 1990s, when it was possible simply to pay off government employees, now the relations between the vertical of power and business are determined by repression and the presumption of the government's rectitude. However, depending on how thick an envelope is, repression may be real or not. This is the difference between government power in today's strict era and during the days of Boris Yeltsin's toothless liberalism.
Prime Minister Vladimir Putin reacted to the tragedy as a true professional. Having arrived in Perm, he showed government officials and the public that he knows everything inside out - how the Technical Inventory Bureau (TIB) issues permits, how fire-fighters make ordnances and who is the usual beneficiary of profitable nightspots like the Lame Horse. Putin acted in the traditional Russian role of inspector.
The inspector has two main features. The first one is that he will not miss anything or be fooled by bureaucratic crap. He knows what things are like in reality and reads everyone like a book. His arrival is like a thunderstorm. The second feature is his early departure. Lightning-struck officials will be petrified for some time. The inspector will leave in a blaze of glory and life will take its usual course.
If Putin had not played the role of the inspector, he could have easily abstained from going to Perm and demonstrating his knowledge of the local officials. He said himself that such a tragedy could happen anywhere. This means that its systemic causes are not in Perm or any other city where it could happen but somewhere else. Where are they?
If it had not been for the inspector role but a search for the systemic causes of the tragedy, Putin could have stayed home and merely ask his secret services for the photos of dachas in the Moscow suburbs belonging to the top officials of those departments at whose subordinates he lashed out in Perm. These photos give one much food for thought...
There is no point in announcing total inspections of night clubs because they will be conducted by the same people who had inspected them before and issued impractical ordinances for the five previous years. They can shut down clubs, but new clubs will open and they will inspect them again. There is no point in this at all.
And in general, what do clubs have to do with this? After a fire in a mall in Ukhta four years ago, which cost 25 lives, the authorities announced tough inspections of other shopping centres. This time it was a club, not a mall, but can this be regarded as success? Does this show that inspections were effective?
One can ponder over a philosophical question: how long can a system of control and regulation that is almost wholly based on bribery exist altogether? Five years, ten, fifteen? And how many people will perish in fires during this time?
I think that having made a speech before the television cameras, Putin was bound to think about this and not because he did not know before how his vertical works but because a long string of accidents brings into one's mind the sad year of 1986, when numerous disasters became a prelude to the Soviet Union's subsequent collapse. There is nothing mystical about this. What happened was that a mistake had been programmed into the system in the very beginning and did not seem critical at the time. However, it not only became critical, but also fatal at some point in the system's development and an attempt to remove it was almost tantamount to the destruction of the system.
As Putin said himself, "we are going round in circles."
Incidentally, the words "lack of order" and "negligence," which have been often used recently, also sounded in 1986. These words were designed to emphasise that it was not the system but something faulty outside it that was to blame for disasters. This was also called "the human factor." It would be more appropriate to call it "the inhuman factor" because neither the managers and owners of the club, who wanted to arrange a wonderful party, nor TIB and Emergencies Ministry officials, who exchanged envelopes for ordinances as everyone else does and then sat in the VIP zone, from which there was no escape, nor builders of the vertical, who replaced strangers with their own people, wanted anyone to die. Human losses were simply a side effect caused by "the inhuman factor."
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"A long string of accidents brings into one's mind the sad year of 1986 when numerous disasters became a prelude to the Soviet Union's subsequent collapse."
Kirill Rogov