"Firing people seems to be the best way out of any difficult situation in contemporary Russia. Transportation collapse at peak holiday travel season due to unforeseeable meteorology? Fire the deputy director of Aeroflot Airlines. Internationally controversial death of a lawyer in highly questionable police custody? No problem! Just fire 20 prison officials. Catastrophic fire at a provincial nightclub that leaves 148 people dead? Fire the nightclub's management, and, while you're at it, force the entire region's government to resign for good measure.
Russians love firing people, because it's fast, cheap, and easy. If you fire people, you don't have to, say, examine the way fire codes are implemented and clean out a cadre of corrupt fire safety inspectors. You don't have to overhaul the entire Interior Ministry to punish the inspectors who first defrauded the Russian treasury of $230 million and then put lawyer Sergei Magnitsky in jail for investigating it. And you certainly don't, in the case of the Domodedovo bombing, have to pursue a delicately balanced counterterrorism strategy in the North Caucasus."
"Firing, of course, may be a sign of political evolution, if an ambivalent one. Back when Putin was president, there was little public-penance firing to speak of. In the aftermath of a terror attack, like Beslan or the hostage crisis at Dubrovka, Putin would turn to his rattled nation, and reassure them with tough talk and aggressively scatological metaphors."
"This is a Russian tradition because there is no tradition of political responsibility," says Gleb Pavlovsky, who runs a think tank linked to the Kremlin. "The idea of political responsibility is now seen as political terror, as Stalinism." The fear of repeating the purges of the late 1930s has swung so far the other way that now "there's a tendency to look for that one specific person who didn't put the metal detector in the right place, and maybe his boss, and fire them. And the problem with insisting on personal responsibility is you end up with the head of the government surrounded by the same people that can sometimes change places, but they're never going to bring any systemic change in their ministries."
http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/20...
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