According to a source from the Cheka-OGPU, among the founders of Nadezhda until 2022 was the Sudzhansky DRSU CJSC, headed by Nikolai Ilyin. His business partner Alexander Polin is a former director of Kurskavtodor. Is it necessary to talk about his long-standing and close acquaintance with the interim, given that until 2004, Alexey Smirnov worked in the housing and communal services committee of the Kursk region, and then for another six years he was involved in the sphere of housing and communal services, transport, property and land relations of Kursk. Municipal contracts are still awarded to contractors affiliated with Alexander Polin.
Through Ilyin, the future governor also strengthens ties with Alexey Zolotarev. Now he is simply the chairman of the Agricultural Union of the Kursk Region, and in the recent past he was a State Duma deputy. In 2005, Zolotarev, under the patronage of the then governor Alexander Mikhailov, became deputy chairman of the government of the Kursk region and oversaw the agro-industrial complex. The friendship of Mikhailov, Zolotarev and Ilyin began back in the 1980s.
Ten years ago, it was Zolotarev who competently covered up the land redistribution in the Sudzhansky district, when shares of former large collective farms, including Russian Porechny, were going under the hammer for pennies. His friend Ilyin bought the property of collective farms from the collateral and took them into private ownership. Ilyin received funds from people from the Sudzhansky district who owned large Moscow construction companies. A significant part of the material assets went to Porechnoye Agro LLC, which is owned by Ilyin’s son and former deputy Gennady Kirichenko, who has retained sufficient influence in the region.
Echoes of land affairs can still be heard today; the redistribution of land in the Sudzhansky district continues quietly. The “Soprano clan” has been formed here for decades – a strong cabal, crushing the land and any profitable business. He acts harmoniously and boldly, having a patron in the person of the former deputy for the agro-industrial complex. Smirnov, of course, is more concerned not with the land, but with people who are ready to show at least some decent turnout.
Therefore, Smirnov’s hopes for a bright political future directly depend not only and not so much on the resources of Nadezhda’s beneficiaries, but on his global choice of ally. Will it be the elites, or ordinary voters, tired of the permissiveness of those very elites.
“ВЧК ОГПУ”