In his last case for the time being, Vitalij Naliwkin prevents a terrorist attack.

A suspicious black bag stands at a bus stop on the outskirts of Ussuriysk, a city in Russia's Far East.

The population is frightened, the police have no advice, waiting for the defusing squad.

Instead, Naliwkin, the chairman of the Ussuriysk Executive Committee, appears, as always in a suit, dynamic and accompanied by two masked and armed security men.

He takes matters into his own hands and shoots at the pocket from a bazooka that he has hoisted on his shoulder.

Besides.

Friedrich Schmidt

Political correspondent for Russia and the CIS in Moscow.

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The shot destroyed a sign advertising the United Russia party for the Duma election last September.

The second damages the bus stop, but the bag remains intact.

Naliwkin now wants to defuse the bomb "by hand" and opens the bag: carrots fall out, "25 kilograms of Chinese production," reports the spokeswoman.

"I do not understand that.

You were afraid of that ?! ”, Naliwkin snaps at his security guards.

Images from a surveillance camera reveal that it was the police officer who left the bag. During interrogation he confesses that he wanted to sell the carrots outside of Ussuriysk and is taken away. Naliwkin calms down the residents, instructs them on an online platform for bus travel (that must be so much advertising), has the blown advertising pole erect again, now with a poster of himself: You can see the chairman of the executive committee with the inscription “I am the power here ! ”And the invitation to vote for him in the election.

Nalivkin, of course, just as little as his alleged office with all jurisdiction. In the Youtube clips of the humorist group "BARAKuda" he has been embodied since 2019 by a lay actor who, as he told journalists, grew up in a children's home, spent a while in prison and later earned his living moving. He, and thus also the fictional Naliwkin, has a face marked by alcohol and a crooked nose from a badly healed fracture. The teeth of the executive chairman are just as bad as those of the actress from "Marina Wulf": In the clips, she caricatures the spokeswoman for the real Moscow Interior Ministry, Irina Wolk (in German: Wolf), who regularly reports to the Russians on investigative activities.Wulf's actress has a similar vita as her colleague and a face no less influenced by alcohol.

Laugh at absurdities

"BARAKuda" satirizes the style of local state television stations.

In their program, mayors and police officers are always the heroes.

In a bulky official language, their contributions promise progress where in reality there is misery.

Naliwkin solves everyday problems, as many Russians know, single-handedly, and always in an absurd way: When the Ussuriysk people complain about full dumpsters, he removes the containers and punishes the "organizers of the spontaneous heaps" - the citizens themselves, but they , while the garbage is now lying around without a container, thank their supposed savior.

When a pitiful ruin, which has actually stood in Ussuriysk for decades, is to be torn down and residents protest against the “loss of socio-cultural heritage”, Naliwkin destroys the construction workers' car with a shovel loader.

He is setting up a school in a shell without an external wall and by hanging pictures of books and a door over the bare concrete.

When the local policeman complains about a hole in the floor of the new classroom and an open fire as a heater, Naliwkin has his men take him away.

The children clap, the spokeswoman sums up: "Caring for the next generation is the absolute priority of every state."