Thread by @powerfultakes

SHOIGU IS ETERNAL

Presidents come and go, but Shoigu remains in place and keeps failing upwards, even as his tenure contributes to accelerating demoralization within the Russian Armed Forces that has now translated into an abortive coup.

How does he do it? https://t.co/VxtCMzu2AItwitter.com/i/web/status/1…

In retrospect, I think the puzzle was already answered in Russian nationalist writings about the rather "peculiar" nature of the Ministry of Emergency Situations (MChS) that Shoigu headed from 1991-2012.

The most comprehensive one is by Politdrug: sputnikipogrom.com/people/17051/s…

As well as by Galkovsky (a name that every Russian nationalist knows but he is unknown in the West) as early as 2005:

In the battle of sovereignties between the late USSR & RSFSR, the latter had the problem they had no men with guns who answered to them.galkovsky.livejournal.com/59049.html

The solution was to form the Russian Rescue Corps (RRC) in Dec 1990 on the basis of existing Soviet organizations of rescuers & alpinists. It answered to Yeltsin, with Shoigu appointed its head in April 1991 thanks to his dad's & main sponsor Oleg Shenin's influence with Yeltsin.

Even from the start, the RRC was a militarized structure (had its own transport, comms, weapons stocks, etc.). It wasn't an original idea, but came from a parallel struggle in Georgia, where "honest thief" and "father of Georgian democracy" Jaba Ioseliani set up the Mhedrioni.

Financed by the proceeds of Georgian organized crime in Moscow and with a fondness for sunglasses (which they even wore indoors), the Mherdioni gave Ioseliani the armed force to compete with other nationalist paramilitaries such as Gamsakhurdia's amidst the Soviet collapse.

The funniest aspect is that the Mherdioni ("knights"), who numbered more than the National Guard, were set up as a "rescue" organization in 1989, with all the relevant tools for it, such as artillery - to trigger avalanches, of course... and to win the Georgian Civil War, LOL.

The Yeltsinists took on board this "best practice". It paid off for them soon after, when Shoigu's RRC (now the GKChS) helped defeat the August 1991 Putsch by seizing a central Moscow building used by the main Soviet emergencies commission (created after the Armenian earthquake).

Its equipment was used to broadcast Yeltsin's message to Russia. For this, Shoigu got a raise from Lieutenant to Major-General, a "Defender of Free Russia" award, & the transfer of the RSFSR's vast, highly militarized civil defense assets from the MoD into the GKChS in Nov 1991.

In the 1993 Constitutional crisis, Shoigu promised Gaidar (and presumably fulfilled) to provide 1,000 rifles to Yeltsin's "supporters of democracy" in his standoff with the parliament.

In 1994, it became the MChS, and got control over Russia's firefighters in 2002.

There are more lurid allegations and conspiracy theories, ranging from MChS BTRs being used in the assault on the White House, to their death squads carrying out summary executions of its defenders.

(These all come from "Red/Brown" sources, liberals then being pro-Yeltsin).

Regardless of how deep that particular rabbit hole goes, it's not hard to see how and why Shoigu secured his infallible position as "rescue specialist" for the Yeltsin and then Putin regime.

(1) From the earliest days, he proved himself to be unflichingly loyal.

(2) The media likes "rescue" stories, the MChS in the 1990s painted a very appealing alternative to the hapless Army and corrupt police, and normies appreciated Shoigu's photogenic face. So he was also used as an "electoral locomotive" to pull pro-Kremlin parties ahead.

(3) Shoigu isn't very high IQ. His performance in the present war aside, he supposedly found Math and English "hard" at school, had some difficulty finishing a provincial technical collapse, and worked for 10 years as a construction foreman before he was "found" by Shenin.

But in regimes that prize loyalty over competence, that is feature, not bug.

The MChS was a militarized structures, with tens of thousands of armed men and apparently more "generals" than the actual uniformed military.

It even has a spetsnaz, HQ'ed in the 294th Center for Rescue Operations of Elevated Risk "Leader" Biographies of its leaders are sparse, its employeers take their oath of loyalty with a rifle. A 2012 KPRF-initiated Duma inquiry on the nature of this structure was quashed.

But that too is feature, not bug, in light of corruption's role as an elite control mechanism in Russia.

Not very smart, not personally very ambitious beyond pinning more medals on himself, and with more than 3 decades of loyal service as "rescue specialist" and "emergencies manager" to successive RuFed regimes, it's not ultimately that hard to see why Shoigu is "eternal".