FROM LENIN MUSEUM TO CRIMEAN HERITAGE DEPARTMENT

The Department of the Crimean Cultural Heritage has a new boss. The job has been given to the wife of a local high official. Tuesday, Crimean minister of culture Vitalina Dzos introduced Tatiana Skorchenko to the employees of the Department. Her husband Anatoly is a vice-premier of the peninsula. The appointment smacks of nepotism which, as many fear, could become common. The orange revolutionaries don’t have reliable individuals in the Crimea and have to count only on their own people to fill out vacant positions in the Crimean bureaucracy. One of them is Mrs. Skorchenko, a former Young Communist secretary turned nationalist. In Soviet times she had worked at the Museum of Lenin in Kiev. Later, in the 90s, Tatiana had had a stint at the Interregional Academy of Management. This institution is famous for law suits launched against it on accusations of stirring interethnic hatred and anti-Semitism.