Picnic at the Manor

6 hrs. 36 min.

Language Russian

Author Dmitry Faminsky

Narrator Elena Lebedeva

Description

On the desk of an employee of the FSB office in the N-region, Vadim Petrov, departmental documents were placed in chronological order. Not long ago, when he had just taken them out of the safe, they were a shapeless heap. After a few hours of focused sorting by departmental classification, degree of importance, and other categories, the papers took the form of several stacks—each of which was destined for its own fate: to be laid on the desk of the supervisor, to be incorporated into cases of varying thickness and direction, or simply to be sent to the furnace.
Vadim took a sip of freshly brewed tea and wanted to set the glass on the nearest pile of papers, but caught himself in time—he saw what he was about to touch. This was a rather smudged case under the conditional name “Aphinogen,” handed down by the highest order for closure. The matter was weighty, and in the opinion of management, hopeless. Vadim flipped through its pages, once again reviewed photographs, summaries, requests, reports, and connection diagrams. How much time—both official and personal—he spent bringing himself closer to the answer, and yet everything turned out so banal and contained no crime at all. There were, of course, still some unfinished actions, but the leadership decided that they would not bring clarity to the essence of the proposed versions and, for that reason, would only waste the Office’s time and resources.