Former Vostochny head and comrades sentenced to jail
Several former top managers of the lead contractor building Russia’s new spaceport Vostochny have now been sentenced to prison for embezzlement.
Yury Khrizman, former head of Dalspetsstroy, and Vladimir Ashikhmin, the company’s former chief accountant, were found guilty of abuse of office and embezzlement, a court official told Interfax. Khrizman was sentenced to 12 years in jail and Ashikhmin received seven years in jail.
“The other people implicated in the case, Viktor Chudov, former chairman of the Khabarovsk Territory’s duma, and Mikhail Khrizman [the son of Yury Khrizman], also got jail terms. Viktor Chudov received six years in a penal colony and Mikhail Khrizman was sentenced to 5.5 years in jail,” the court official said. The court also ordered the convicts to pay 5.16 billion rubles in damage as part of the Roscosmos lawsuit, he said.
Not for an instant do I believe this case cleans out the corruption in Russia’s aerospace industry. All this does it to tell all present managers that if you are going to steal, don’t steal so much that you cause a delay in the project itself. The reason these guys are going to prison is that they got greedy and stole too much, thus causing the completion of Vostochny to be significantly late, with many of its workers not getting paid.
On Christmas Eve 1968 three Americans became the first humans to visit another world. What they did to celebrate was unexpected and profound, and will be remembered throughout all human history. Genesis: the Story of Apollo 8, Robert Zimmerman's classic history of humanity's first journey to another world, tells that story, and it is now available as both an ebook and an audiobook, both with a foreword by Valerie Anders and a new introduction by Robert Zimmerman.
The ebook is available everywhere for $5.99 (before discount) at amazon, or direct from my ebook publisher, ebookit. If you buy it from ebookit you don't support the big tech companies and the author gets a bigger cut much sooner.
The audiobook is also available at all these vendors, and is also free with a 30-day trial membership to Audible.
"Not simply about one mission, [Genesis] is also the history of America's quest for the moon... Zimmerman has done a masterful job of tying disparate events together into a solid account of one of America's greatest human triumphs."--San Antonio Express-News
Several former top managers of the lead contractor building Russia’s new spaceport Vostochny have now been sentenced to prison for embezzlement.
Yury Khrizman, former head of Dalspetsstroy, and Vladimir Ashikhmin, the company’s former chief accountant, were found guilty of abuse of office and embezzlement, a court official told Interfax. Khrizman was sentenced to 12 years in jail and Ashikhmin received seven years in jail.
“The other people implicated in the case, Viktor Chudov, former chairman of the Khabarovsk Territory’s duma, and Mikhail Khrizman [the son of Yury Khrizman], also got jail terms. Viktor Chudov received six years in a penal colony and Mikhail Khrizman was sentenced to 5.5 years in jail,” the court official said. The court also ordered the convicts to pay 5.16 billion rubles in damage as part of the Roscosmos lawsuit, he said.
Not for an instant do I believe this case cleans out the corruption in Russia’s aerospace industry. All this does it to tell all present managers that if you are going to steal, don’t steal so much that you cause a delay in the project itself. The reason these guys are going to prison is that they got greedy and stole too much, thus causing the completion of Vostochny to be significantly late, with many of its workers not getting paid.
On Christmas Eve 1968 three Americans became the first humans to visit another world. What they did to celebrate was unexpected and profound, and will be remembered throughout all human history. Genesis: the Story of Apollo 8, Robert Zimmerman's classic history of humanity's first journey to another world, tells that story, and it is now available as both an ebook and an audiobook, both with a foreword by Valerie Anders and a new introduction by Robert Zimmerman.
The ebook is available everywhere for $5.99 (before discount) at amazon, or direct from my ebook publisher, ebookit. If you buy it from ebookit you don't support the big tech companies and the author gets a bigger cut much sooner.
The audiobook is also available at all these vendors, and is also free with a 30-day trial membership to Audible.
"Not simply about one mission, [Genesis] is also the history of America's quest for the moon... Zimmerman has done a masterful job of tying disparate events together into a solid account of one of America's greatest human triumphs."--San Antonio Express-News
Jordan Peterson on the Gulag Archipelago
(excerpt from: “Stalin, Death, Repression and the Gulags.”)
https://youtu.be/GfEYKSxXC5o
(7:30)
“They pretend to pay us, and we pretend to work.”
I watched Iannucci’s comedy “The Death of Stalin” yesterday.
It is full of vile language about sexual abuse and such, but for those who can take it, I recommend it. It portraits striking caricatures of the infamous individuals (like Beria, Chrusjtjov, Molotov) at the top of the Kremlin during the few days between the death of Stalin and his funeral. Like all good European (British this time) movies, it is far from a Hollywood block buster style movie. It is more theatrical and aims at a more narrow audience that has some basic historic orientation about what Soviet was in the 1950s (so I doubt many millennials would appreciate it). But I think it is very well produced and acted and it works very well as a comedy about the terror.
Consensus decision is always required because any minority sentiment will be noted and shot. Fractions are not allowed. That makes it difficult for them. With the head of the hen cut off, the rest of the body doesn’t quite know what to do. It used to just pick another grain of sand and swallow it pretending that it is edible, but now what without the head? Not the American way of doing business or getting things done. And when the communist sign was finally taken down 30 years ago, all Russians weren’t immediately adopting a completely new philosophy. There’s another head on that hen now. Many of the other Russians birds have flown away. Maybe the space program, the pride of the Soviet Union, is still especially “conservative” in its mentality: One doesn’t make money by creating a better product, but by cheating while sucking up to the boss.