Penza, 8 October 2014. PenzaNews. The myth of lack of political competitors and alleged impossibility to replace the Penza region governor Vasily Bochkarev, who has been in power since 1998, was created artificially and is carefully nurtured, said an anonymous informed source who commented the article “Kuzmich forever!?” published in “Ulitsa Moskovskaya” newspaper in an interview with PenzaNews agency.

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“As we know, no one’s irreplacable. It is hard to believe that the Kremlin is counting only on a single person who has been a pensioner for 5 years. As for the competitors, perhaps they are really absent in Penza — the political field has long been cleared. But no one says that there aren’t any competitors from outside the region. For every region there is always a back-up person, ready to replace the existing one at any moment. But this requires political will,” the agency interlocutor said.

According to him, the statement made in “Ulitsa Moskovskaya” that “Kuzmich [Bochkarev] has no competitors yet, and there will not be any until 2020,” should be taken not at face value, but rather with a grain of salt.

“They call Bochkarev ‘the unbeatable fighter,’ who managed to work under ‘mature Yeltsin, early Putin, young Medvedev and more under mature Putin.’ It is true. But it is whether he will be allowed to work any longer is where there are questions. I think that the Russian presidential administration has long had to pay attention to the personnel policy in the region, and to the governor’s initiatives,” the source said.

He explained that, first and foremost, he is talking about the appointments and dismissals that he finds illogical.

“Minister of health Stryuchkov was appointed three times [by governor Vasily Bochkarev] and dismissed twice. Kopeshkina was dismissed as the minister of education in 2012, and brought back again in 2013. Baev was appointed deputy chairman twice, though the last time was short and lasted about a week. Communist Kostin, who is supposed to oppose to private ownership, as Marx and Engels instructed, works as minister of investment development and business. Bespalov, who tried to get to the Legislative Assembly as a Communist Party candidate in 2012, is currently the deputy chairman in charge of innovations, but in some peculiar way — he even wants to sue one of the innovators. Voronkov, a man of education, a history teacher, has recently been placed as a head of the regional media department, in charge of information policy. Chernov [former mayor of Penza] was publicly told to get lost [by Vasily Bochkarev], and that was only because he had the courage to say that the governor intimidated them all. So why then he took him in the office? What is the purpose of the show?” the agency interlocutor wondered, while expressing confidence that this list of officials can be continued even more.

“As for Bochkarev’s initiatives, all of them have long been known even abroad: producing bricks out of straw, ranching bison and ostriches, creating the moral police, making government officials drive scooters, and even forbid them smoking and using cellular phones, and constantly keeping them fit, making them lose weight. And how can one keep fit under so much stress? Wondering whether to expect the abuse or leg-pulling as the governor has recently threatened to do to certain United Russia representatives. If the former can still be seen as an ordinary insult, the latter can be considered to be a physical threat. But all this is covered up by the myth of Bochkarev being irreplaceable in the absence of competitors. However, this is just a myth, and it is cherished and nurtured artificially, even by those who are afraid of losing their positions and thus a stable source of income,” he concluded.