Another scandal occurred at the Russian National Library – this time the head of the economic department, Vyacheslav Fedorov, was hospitalized because he was too openly interested in the administration about the expenditure of budget funds. And it was like this.
A year and a half ago, a tender was announced for the purchase and relocation of systematization cabinets for the general alphabetical catalogue, the total cost of the purchase was 13 million rubles. A technical specification was prepared, a supplier was identified (Dream Room company), but Fedorov had doubts about the compliance of the supplied cabinets with the declared characteristics.
— When I saw the first systematizers with my own eyes, as a person familiar with the technical specifications, I had a thousand questions: it was completely wrong in color, material and size, — told Fedorov to journalists.
Despite the claims, in December 2021, the administration of the National Library of Russia decided to sign the transfer acceptance certificate and paid for the services of the Dream Room company.
“They understood that 13 million of budget money had been sent, and in the library there was a product that did not meet the criteria, even in disassembled form. When the cabinets began to be loaded with cards, their slider tables stopped coming out and the drawer doors stopped opening. They differed from the old ones in both color and size – it was clear to everyone that they had made junk, – Fedorov told the newspaper “My District”.
According to Fedorov, for almost the entire 2022, librarians tried on their own to “bring up the pieces” of the cabinets, and Fedorov himself and his colleagues, who tried to force the supplier to correct the shortcomings, were deprived of their quarterly bonus and began to be systematically squeezed out of the RNL. After one of these conversations, the “inconvenient” employee was hospitalized with a hypertensive crisis right at the workplace.
Vyacheslav Fedorov wrote a statement about the situation in the National Library of Russia in Investigative Committee And appealed to the Minister of Culture Olga Lyubimova.
This is not the first scandal in the oldest public library in Russia – in May, the famous bibliographer Nikita Eliseev was fired from the National Library of Russia, who tried to complain to director Vladimir Gronsky about loud music at the opening of another exhibition.
A month earlier, several employees were fired from the library because they had posted a poster with Yuri Lotman on the occasion of Cultural Worker’s Day. Then the philologist was mistaken for the writer Mark Twain, and Gronsky’s adviser Polina-Teresa Davydova scolded the librarians for not agreeing on the placement of the portrait.
At the same time, Polina-Teresa Davydova herself has a very specific reputation – according to the Cheka-OGPU, organizations controlled by her and her relatives are implementing (for budget funds) very controversial projects on the basis of the National Library and with the involvement of library employees.
At the same time, the library continues to receive substantial sums from the federal budget. For example, the reconstruction of one of the buildings of the National Library of Russia is now beginning, the cost of purchase amounts to almost 400 million rubles.
On December 1, the head of the economic department of the Russian National Library (RNL), Vyacheslav Fedorov, was taken away in an ambulance after another meeting. The hospital diagnosed a “hypertensive crisis.” Fedorov considers the reason for the sharp deterioration in health to be “unbearable…
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