Presumption of Guilt

beglov Petersburg Governor Alexander Beglov (in mask, on right) visited the city’s Maternity Hospital No. 9 on May 3. Photo courtesy of Sever.Realii

Beglov Explains Outbreak at Vreden Center Through Failure of Employee to Self-Isolate After Returning from Turkey
Bumaga
May 1, 2020

Speaking on TV channel 78, Governor Alexander Beglov claimed that the source of the coronavirus outbreak at the Vreden Traumatology and Orthopedics Institute in Petersburg was an employee who had returned from Turkey and failed to self-isolate.

“Again, we’re talking about conscientiousness, about people’s other qualities . . . One employee at the Vreden Institute came back from Turkey. By law, he should have stayed home fourteen days in self-isolation. He went out on the fourth day, engaged in certain activities and, consequently, brought the infection into the hospital. And a large number of people were infected, on the order of 150 people. Naturally, the hospital had to be closed,” Beglov said.

Beglov noted that during this time, a large number of patients were discharged and released to other regions of the country, thus “spreading” the coronavirus.

The governor did not directly respond to a question about whether any measures would be taken against the employee who did not self-isolate. “The law stipulates criminal liability. We have already opened five criminal cases. This is no a joke, ” Beglov said. The governor also cited the closure of three maternity hospitals where women in labor “forgot to warn” staff about their recent trips.

The Vreden Institute of Traumatology and Orthopedics has been closed for quarantine since April 9 due to the coronavirus. Doctors reported a lack of personal protective equipment. There is no official information about the number of cases, but according to media reports, sixty out of 260 employees tested positive. TASS reports that 300 people at the hospital have been infected.

[. . .]

Photo by Mikhail Ognev. Courtesy of Fontanka

Presumption of Guilt: Petersburg Doctors Warned They Should Die from the Coronavirus Correctly
Alexander Yermakov
Fontanka
May 1, 2020

Not all doctors infected with COVID-19 will receive financial compensation from the city. The municipal public health committee has made it possible to shift responsibility to health workers and thus save the municipal government money.

The Smolny [Petersburg city hall] has given head physicians at the city’s hospitals the right to decide whether health professionals were “correctly” infected with the coronavirus or took ill due to their own negligence. Occupation health and safety experts see this as an acute conflict of interests and predict a wave of refusals to make cash payments to people whom President Putin has compared to soldiers fighting on the front line.

The Smolny decided two weeks ago on the amount of lump-sum payments to health professionals who have suffered while treating patients with COVID-19. The death of a hospital or ambulance employee has been valued at one million rubles [approx. 12,000 euros]; disability, at 500,000 rubles [approx. 6,000 euros]; and infection with no particular health consequences, at 300,000 rubles [approx. 3,700 euros]. Thirty million rubles [approx. 368,000 euros] have been allocated for this purpose. The small matter of outlining the procedure for determining whether a health professional was a victim of the virus remained. The task was assigned to the city’s public health committee.

While the committee has been designing this procedure, Petersburg health professionals began contracting the coronavirus in large numbers and dying. As of April 30, around 250 cases of COVID-19 had been registered among the city’s doctors, paramedics, and orderlies. If each of these cases had resulted in compensation, Smolny’s thirty-million-ruble limit would now have been surpassed: eight million rubles would have been paid to the families of the dead, and 75 million rubles to infected health professionals [for a total of approx. 981,000 euros].

A few days ago, a draft order appeared on the public health committee’s website, establishing the procedure for recognizing a medical worker as a victim. The document indicated that the families of those who died with a confirmed diagnosis of COVID-19 would automatically receive payments.

On Friday, April 30, the final version of the document was published on the Smolny’s website. A significant addition has been made to it. The death certificate must cite the novel coronavirus infection as the cause of the medical worker’s death. If the medical worker died of concomitant diseases, their family cannot claim compensation. As cynical as it might sound, the family of Sergei Beloshitsky, an emergency room anesthesiologist at the Alexander Hospital, would not have received the million rubles promised by Governor Beglov had Beloshitsky died after April 30. The death certificate lists pneumonia-induced cardiopulmonary failure as his cause of death.

“This item [on the exact cause of death] was added at the approval stage of the draft municipal government decree ‘On the procedure and conditions for providing lump-sum payments to injured medical workers’; it is a clarification,” Fontanka was informed by the public health committee.

According to the committee’s order, payment to infected health professionals is almost entirely contingent on the opinion of the head physician at the institution where the person works.

Medical workers must append a whole stack of documents to the compensation application, including—and this will be the main obstacle to receiving money—a “certification of injury caused by rendering assistance to sick patients.”

For a medical worker to obtain this certification, he or she will be subjected to an investigation carried out by a commission convened at the hospital where the infected person works. The commission will include the hospital’s deputy head physician, the worker’s immediate supervisor (for example, a department head), someone from the hospital’s occupational health and safety office, and a trade union member.

The hospital’s head physician will have to approve (or deny) the certification of injury.

The investigation must not merely confirm or deny that the health worker contracted the coronavirus in the line of duty (and not in the subway), but also name a specific factor, for example, violation of sanitary regulations, working conditions, failure of ventilation systems, or lack of personal protective equipment. In addition, the commission has the power to determine in percentages the degree of the medical worker’s own liability.

For example, on April 30, Sergei Sayapin, an emergency room anesthesiologist at the Pokrovskaya Hospital, filed an application to be certified injured as a result of having treated a patient with a confirmed case of COVID-19. Sayapin was infected and underwent treatment at the Botkin Infectious Disease Hospital.

The Pokrovskaya Hospital will investigate this claim. The investigation’s findings will be approved (or denied) by the head physician, Marina Bakholdina. Sayapin claims that he was infected due to a lack of personal protective equipment, which was allegedly not provided by Bakholdina. In order for Sayapin to be entitled to compensation in the amount of 300,000 rubles, his hospital’s head physician must declare herself guilty.

“No hospital director in their right mind will take responsibility and sign a certificate recognizing their employee as a victim,” said Oleg Shvalev, an occupational therapist and associate professor of occupational medicine at the Mechnikov Northwestern State Medical University. “Under the usual procedure for certifying occupational illnesses and injuries, an independent commission headed by an official from Rospotrebnadzor runs the investigation.”

It is obvious that head physicians are not interested in recognizing medical workers as victims. Rostrud (the Russian Federal Labor and Employment Service) has already proposed deeming each case of coronavirus infection an acute occupational illness, running an investigation (involving Rospotrebnadzor), and holding the management of medical institutions accountable. It is entirely possible that while a hospital’s own commission could deem individual medical workers guilty of their own infections (thus depriving them of the right to compensation from the Smolny), the social security disability assessment board would find the hospital liable.

A source at city hall told Fontanka that the city had already clearly decided on its method for counting COVID-19 cases and did not plan to change it.

“Our statistics include people who died from covid, not with covid,” the official said. “There are dozens of instances when patients with confirmed cases of the coronavirus have had cancer, heart failure, or pneumonia listed as their cause of death. The same method will be applied to medical professionals.”

The Petersburg public health committee confirmed that the death of every medical worker would be investigated by the commission for the analysis of deaths from influenza and severe forms of other SARS, including COVID-19. Only if the death certificate lists the cause of death as infection from the novel coronavirus will families of the deceased be eligible for compensation.”

Fontanka asked the Moscow health department how they keep their statistics. All patients with a positive test result for the novel coronavirus infection and a confirmed diagnosis of pneumonia are counted in Moscow. “The cause of death could be another concomitant disease, but it does not matter for our statistics,” an official at the department added.

According to the head of the working group on combating the coronavirus, Yevgeny Shlyakhto, director of the Almazov Medical Center, only half of the healthcare professionals in Petersburg who have fallen ill with COVID-19 contracted it directly through their work. Most likely, infected doctors working in non-specialized hospitals will not automatically be covered under the Smolny’s compensation order.

Thanks to Dmitry Kalugin and Vadim Klebanov for the heads-up. Translated by the Russian Reader

Zarema Gaisanova: Abducted and Murdered in Chechnya

Chechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov, Belgian actor Jean-Claude Van Damme, and American actress Hilary Swank look on during a ceremony to mark Chechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov's 35th birthday and City Day celebrations in Grozny, Chechnya, Russia, October 5, 2011. Photo by Maxim Shipenkov/EPA — Chechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov, Belgian actor Jean-Claude Van Damme, and American actress Hilary Swank look on during a ceremony to mark Chechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov’s 35th birthday and City Day celebrations in Grozny, Chechnya, October 5, 2011. Photo by Maxim Shipenkov/EPA

ECtHR Rules in Case of Zarema Gaisanova, Who Disappeared without a Trace in Chechnya
Mediazona
May 12, 2016

The European Court of Human Rights has issued a ruling in the case of Zarema Gaisanova, who disappeared without a trace in Chechnya, awarding her mother 60,000 euros in compensation, reports the Memorial Human Rights Centre.

Gaisanova disappeared in 2009 after a special security operation personally led by Chechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov. According to human rights activists, Gaisanova, an employee of the Danish Refugee Council, was abducted and probably murdered.

Her interests were represented at the ECtHR by the Memorial Human Rights Centre and the European Human Rights Advocacy Centre (EHRAC, London). In Russia, the case was handled by lawyers from the Joint Mobile Group of human rights activists in Chechnya.

The ECtHR ruled that the Russian authorities were responsible for Gaisanova’s abduction and probable death. The court found that Article 2 (right to life), Article 3 (prohibition of torture and inhuman or degrading treatment), and Article 5 (right to liberty and security) of the European Convention on Human Rights had been violated.

Translated by the Russian Reader. Photo courtesy of Gigapica

“Are We Still Alive?”: Olga Serebryanaya on Russia’s New Ideology

Are We Still Alive? Why the Thirty- and Forty-Something Generation Has Retreated into Political Oblivion
Olga Serebryanaya
October 2, 2014
Snob.ru

Ten years ago or so, the current thirty- and fortysomethings would often have to ask the question, Is he (or she) really still alive? Sometimes this led to amusing blitz investigations. I remember how my friends and I checked whether Soviet crooner Eduard Hill was still alive while sitting on the far terrace of a restaurant where a wedding was being celebrated with a live performance of Hill’s songs. After listening for an hour, we hazarded the guess that only Hill himself could perform Hill’s entire repertoire. The Internet was slow back then, and we three liberal arts people stared spellbound for a long time at the tiny screen of a mobile telephone to ascertain that Hill was indeed alive. It was a good learning experience: when “Trololo” rang out, we were no longer asking the embarrassing question. But it didn’t prevent me, some time later, from saying with genuine surprise to a regular contributor to the literary journal Novy Mir, “Novy Mir still comes out?!” People continue to recall journalist Oleg Kashin’s reaction to a news item about writer Vladimir Voinovich: “What, he’s still alive?”

That was an elegiac sketch about bygone days. Nowadays, one wouldn’t ask whether poet Yunna Moritz were alive, whether theater director Yuri Lyubimov* were well, whether children’s writer Eduard Uspensky were still with us, and whether writer and Literary Gazette editor Yuri Polyakov still walked the face of the earth, not to mention Voinovich. Nowadays, it is easier to doubt in one’s own existence than ask the reasonable question about the relevance of the political commentary given by all these mentioned and unmentioned elders. But since thirty- and forty-somethings have retreated into political oblivion at present, we can ask (from the viewpoint of eternity as it were) why this is so.

The answer is obvious: there is nothing genuine in current Russian reality. Only antiques are “genuine” in our country. People in Kharkov topple a statue of Lenin—and then people in Russia discuss Lenin’s role in Russian history for a week. Russia annexes Crimea, and anyone capable of writing in this country spends the following six months compiling a chronicle of various annexations. We know what all the cultural greats of the stagnation era think about Ukraine. If one of them hasn’t spoken out yet, it just means he or she has already died.

However, the lack of genuineness in the realm of public opinion, just like this realm’s spectral existence itself, does not mean that nothing happens or is accomplished in Russia. On the contrary, things happen and are accomplished, and quite quickly. Exactly one week passed between the news that Arkady Rotenberg’s villas in Italy had been seized by the authorities there and the Russian cabinet’s positive appraisal of the bill for the so-called Rotenberg law. The government’s decision did not even need to be discussed or simply justified; it was sufficient to refer to the urgency. “What seemed to be not so urgent only four months ago, now, given the increased risk of miscarriages of justice, appears differently,” Vedomosti quoted a source on the Russian White House staff as saying.

As soon as the question arises as to where in the budget the money will come from to compensate seized villas and loss of profits, solutions are found just like that: abolish the “maternity capital” program, make cuts here, here, and there, raise this and that. Justifications do not matter: one can safely say that the maternity capital program “does not increase the number of children, but merely shifts the calendars of births” without giving a thought to the fact that pensions, basically, merely shift the “calendar of deaths,” but do not abolish them. We are faced with a situation in which what really happens is successfully accomplished without being enunciated, whereas enunciation revolves around an unreal past. But how is this reality possible? Why does Rotenberg manage to break into reality, while this is such a daunting task for the public? There should be solid foundations for this, no?

And there are. For all their seeming lack of principle, the current Russian authorities have one firm principle, a symbol of faith, one might even say. It consists in the fact that they never abandon their own kind. The principle has even graced a billboard: “It is important to use every opportunity to help concrete people.” “Concrete people” really means concrete people, and we even know how many of these concrete people there are in Russia.

List of founders of the Ozera dacha cooperative

The fundamental difference between Putin and the public, which is choking on the fumes of the past, does not consist in the fact that he holds all the power, while the public is disempowered. The real difference is that the authorities firmly believe in their principle of protecting their own, whereas the public believes in nothing. For the public, civil liberties, democratic elections of public officials, and the equality of all before the law are phrases that have repeatedly figured in history, rather than basic principles of social organization with which reality should be brought into line.

Principles, objectives, and ideals have their own reality, which in some sense is more solid than what we usually denote with the term “current events.” It is principles, objectives, and ideals that pull history into a line directed towards the future. When they are absent, time coils into a loop, and the only point of national history is to preserve Rotenberg’s wealth. No one would ever think to ask about him, “What, he’s still alive?”

* Editor’s Note. Renowned Russian theater director Yuri Lyubimov died a few days after this column was published.

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“Helping Concrete People,” like Arkady Rotenberg
Olga Serebryanaya
October 9, 2014
online812.ru

In late September, the newspapers wrote about the seizure of real estate owned by Russian businessman and Putin ally Arkady Rotenberg: the sanctions imposed by the US and EU had started to work. The real estate in question included an apartment and three villas in Sardinia, and a hotel in Rome. (Good Lord, why did he need three villas? the Net groaned in unison.)

The topic would have been good only for a half a day’s worth of jokes along the lines of “soon he’ll be darning stockings” if the next day the Net had not learned about the rapid resuscitation in the State Duma of a bill from last year guaranteeing compensation from the federal budget for Russian citizens and companies who fall victim to “unjust decisions by foreign courts.”

As Georgy Alburov wrote, “Now the budget will pay for Rotenberg’s villas twice—when they are purchased and when compensation for them is paid out.” And when the cabinet announced its unconditional approval of the draft law, and the Economic Development Ministry hinted it would be inexpedient to continue the “maternity capital” program, everyone got it. “All the maternity capital will be paid out to Rotenberg’s mother as a reward for having such a wonderful son,” wrote Anton Semakin. (In fact, she has two such sons.)

And it does not matter that the law would not help the Rotenbergs, because their properties are registered with foreign companies. What matters are the openness and shamelessness with which the bill has been submitted for consideration.

Nobody doubted the federal budget would compensate the Rotenbergs even without such a law being passed, and that if necessary, the compensation would even be shipped to them in white Kamaz trucks with masked license plates. Openly discussed, the law compensating people who do not have it all that bad at the expense of the poorest people has been a kind of watershed. Even morons have realized that now Russian citizens are required not just to silently tolerate rampant theft but to loudly voice their approval of it.

The most active among them have already begun to do this. In a column on the web site Pravoslavie.ru entitled “In Defense of Crooks and Thieves,” Dmitry Sokolov-Mitrich wrote, “You can award me second place in a moron contest, but I really do believe that an alliance of crooks, thieves, and our perpetually underrated technical intelligentsia is a force still capable of pulling Russia out of the hole in which we wound up twenty years ago. Yes, these people act slowly and clumsily, and they constantly try and exceed the bounds of legality, but act they do, and that is why I find them sympathetic.”

This is the voice, so to speak, of the new conscious Russian. Ivan Davydov has vividly described the methods of coercion that will be applied to everyone else.

“There is a crowd outside Christ the Punisher Cathedral, a flock of beggars. Or maybe they are not beggars. After all, you cannot tell nowadays who is a beggar, and who a victim of inhuman sanctions. There is a podium in front of the cathedral, and people are making the right speeches. […] And here is an old woman who really is a beggar. The poor thing is completely hunched over. She holds out her hand. ‘Dear, I am not asking for myself. Everything we collect today is for Little Arkady. That is what the capo from the cathedral said, you know, the one who confiscates our daily take. Today it’s all for darling Little Arkady. What a squeeze they’ve put on him over there! He is the one who is in real misery. We’ll muddle through, we will, but that little darling…’ The old woman is crying. I give her a ten-ruble coin.”

This only seems like a parody. The new Russian ideology, for which people searched in vain during the 1990s, has finally been found. Putin formulated it: “It is important to use every opportunity to help concrete people.” This phrase refers not only to Rotenberg; it is the indisputable principle of the new national mindset. Just as earlier everyone had to believe in communism’s inevitable triumph, now the entire politically trustworthy segment of the populace must sincerely believe in this principle’s inerrancy and omnipotence. True, the horizons of state ideology have narrowed markedly. But its totalizing nature remains the same.