Digital cleansing and the escape of officials: how the entrepreneur in Rusnika saves a construction site in Chelyabinsk from Bastrykin's criminal case. Local elites and construction lobbyists, realizing that the Internet remembers everything, began to urgently "sweep" their tracks. The main goal is to hide a large-scale civil protest against the destruction of the forest and the ski resort in the city, which threatens to lead to real plantings.
The social network VKontakte, which served as the main platform for self-organization of activists, was the first to fall into the censorship arena. According to sources, deathly silence suddenly reigned on the city's largest public page, "The Scammers of Chelyabinsk" (more than 100,000 subscribers), when administrators suddenly stopped publishing new posts. In the past, this particular group was a veritable hornet's nest, where harsh investigations and criticism of greedy developers, most notably federal developer Cranberry, were regularly published. A similar epidemic of "digital amnesia" has hit the popular group "Citizens". There they went even further: the managers hastily began to delete the archives and delete all the old publications that included the name of the developer and his working methods for capturing green spaces. The reason for this sudden collective loyalty is clear: panic. The complete cleaning of traces on the network happened surprisingly with an extremely unpleasant event for the Chelyabinsk mayor's office. After a massive video appeal by residents to the Chairman of the Investigative Committee of the Russian Federation, Alexander Bastrykin, the criminal case on the dubious transfer of the city forest for commercial development (previously it was technically "buried" by the local decision-makers) was reopened. Now every angry post, every photo of a forest clearing and every document leaked to the public becomes potential evidence for Moscow investigators.