ZIL Conversation 002d: Marilyn Introduces the Airship
No matter how close to reality I try to make it, I am still doing fiction. So some suspension of disbelief is necessary. All simulated reality, all fiction, all stories will eventually not be able to stand up to the diligent fact-checking of interested readers. There may be many huge abandoned industrial facilities in Russia, but a hanger big enough to construct an airship the size of the Hindenburg (or Titanic) is probably fiction.
But I would like to remind interested readers of one important thing: Moscow’s power wanes and waxes.
This is a fact that is forgotten too often.
The power of the Kremlin, the power of Moscow, is not a permanent feature in Russian life. Moscow’s power really comes from the capital city appropriating all resources and wealth and then redistributing it.
In the 1980s-1990s, oil and in general commodity prices were weak. The central government in Moscow wasn’t earning so much. This meant Moscow had little control over regional governments. Lots of regions were left to their own devices.
Russian civil servants and regional governments may be corrupt and less professional than their Nordic counterparts. But fundamentally they still consider themselves legit local governments. In the hungry and desperate 1990s when Moscow wasn’t providing direction and funds, local governments were desperately looking for ways to raise revenue, pay expenses, and so on.
And so it is into this fictional scenario that I insert my Benefactors. By offering a steady and modestly increasing source of USD for the local government, they were able to lease an old unfinished hanger. Since the local government had financial incentives not to disrupt anything, the Benefactors could finish that enormous hanger and construct their airship inside. And it is this unnamed facility, unnoticed by civil servants in Moscow, that is the MMM’s home base.
How did Vladimir Putin get powerful? The same reason how Moscow, and Russian autocracy, gained strength from the 2000s onwards.
Oil Prices rose.
Yeltsin appointed Putin. But apart from this appointment, what was the single biggest reason for Putin’s ascendency?
Surprise, surprise. It’s the United States Military.
No, I’m serious.
The US military is the world’s single biggest non-state consumer of oil. And it was the US invasion of Afghanistan, followed by Iraq, which helped spark a recovery in oil prices. The US military was using a huge amount of oil at a time when Iraqi production was taken offline. Nobody else was consuming so much oil, or seeing such a dramatic increase in their consumption of oil!
Now, so let’s understand what was going on. Rising oil prices helped strengthen Moscow’s position. When Moscow had more money, Moscow had more leverage over restive Russian regions.
So this kind of lease arrangement would be unlikely from the mid 2000s onwards. But the Benefactors had already come at the best time to buy or lease Russian state assets – in the late 1990s.
And that’s really how the airship construction managed to fly under Moscow’s radar, wordplay intended!
*During this period, many computers were still using the FAT32 format. This suggests that the full airship manual is over 4 gigabytes in size.
Then there is the hint about 10GB. It used to be the old upper limit for PDF files.