“If You Can Handle It — You Can Handle It, If Not — We’ll Bury You.” How Alexander Khinshtein is Calming Kursk Oblast

On December 5, 2024, at 10:40 p.m., the Kremlin website posted the news: Alexander Khinshtein was appointed acting governor of Kursk Oblast. At 10:53 p.m., the official Telegram channel of the Kursk branch of state media VGTRK responded: “Khinshtein is a f***ing loser.” The post was deleted instantly. “Well, basically, everyone had that reaction,” recalls a local politician about that day. “Maybe they got carried away, but as the media, they did their duty, because they told the truth.”

So, in the winter of 2024, State Duma deputy, former journalist, and Rosgvardiya PR man Alexander Khinshtein found himself in one of the most difficult Russian regions to govern.

A few months earlier, on August 6, 2024, the Ukrainian army broke through into Kursk Oblast and occupied the border districts. By November, Russia had regained only half of the territory. The number of refugees from Kursk Oblast reached 150,000 people, and as a result of shelling, according to local authorities, about 100 people were killed and more than 350 injured. Since the summer, the region had been under a counterterrorism operation regime and a state of emergency.

Governor Alexey Smirnov was unable to cope with public discontent. Some took to the streets.

“We've been living in hell for three months, where can we turn, where can we find salvation? We ask you to end this damned war that has claimed so many innocent lives. We want our children to see a peaceful sky,” appealed to Putin, said refugees from the village of Olgovka, complaining that local authorities were not answering questions about “how to go on living.” According to a Kremlin insider interviewed by IStories, the protests greatly displeased the presidential administration. In early December, Smirnov left his post.

“Smirnov didn't know how to talk to residents,” says one regional politician. “The Kremlin needed someone who could create an information buzz.”

At a meeting with Khinshtein, Putin specifically highlighted his time as advisor to Rosgvardiya chief Viktor Zolotov. Khinshtein was appointed to be responsible for creating a “positive image” for the agency soon after Alexey Navalny discovered that the Rosgvardiya chief, a former Putin bodyguard, owned property worth nearly 700 million rubles. Putin noted — Kursk Oblast also required “crisis management.”

The region needed someone who could create a “pretty picture” and explain “how to go on living” — that is exactly why, according to a local politician, Khinshtein was sent to Kursk. But actually “doing something quickly and well after what happened is simply impossible,” he adds sadly.

Khinshtein's main task, according to another source familiar with the region, was to lower the temperature of public discontent and shift attention elsewhere. Another Kremlin insider says Khinshtein was sent to Kursk with this message: “If you can handle it — you can handle it, if not — we'll bury you.”

A pretty picture

Khinshtein started off with lighthearted news hooks. Just a couple of weeks after his appointment, his play NeRevisor premiered at the Yermolova Theater in Moscow. The plot: the governor's secretary (played by Khinshtein's wife, Olga Polyakova), upon learning about her boss's mistress, takes revenge by rewriting a message from Moscow so that the whole town believes the governor will be dismissed. The media described the production as a “grotesque political satire.”

“Of course, when working on the play, it never crossed my mind that it would become somewhat prophetic for me… I can only say one thing: I very much hope and expect that this play is not about me,” wrote Khinshtein himself on his Telegram channel.

Political analyst Mikhail Vinogradov predicted three possible lines of behavior for Khinshtein as governor: establish a dialogue with angry locals, showcase “improvements” in the region, or start looking for scapegoats and shift attention to the civil authorities. Khinshtein began to implement all three.

The first step was to address the information vacuum. Already on December 9, at 4:30 a.m., Khinshtein wrote, that he was spending the night in his office: “There's an endless amount of work. The region needs crisis management.” He thanked his predecessors for the “little couch” in the office and expressed readiness to move in and live at work. The next day, Khinshtein announced that he did not plan to move his family (wife and two underage children) to Kursk: “This is due to security concerns. I am a target for the enemy, and eliminating the acting governor is a goal.”

“Sirens, rockets, UAVs, everything is dug up… the heating is turned off, shit flows down the streets, everything is covered in ice and no one, no one wants to do anything… Who the hell wants to live in this? Well, working here — maybe, but living… it's better to live somewhere else,” responded locals in the comments under the news.

On his Telegram channel, Khinshtein reports around the clock about his work and personal achievements. From late winter through early September 2025, nearly 1,500 posts appeared, according to our calculations. On average, that's two or three posts a day, sometimes twice as many. Updates about AFU attacks are interspersed with nighttime selfie videos with comments like “Tonight I'll spend the night in the car again.”

“Under Smirnov, we had an information vacuum. And Khinshtein was picked for this job specifically to fill that vacuum. But now we're drowning in this information flow,” says a local politician.

Khinshtein also required all government officials to run social media accounts. Cabinet meetings are now open — broadcasts are posted on his VKontakte page. And when residents again took to the streets in January 2025, he personally came out to meet the crowd and criticized the work of local authorities: “I don't trust all the officials working here, or all the representatives of the state. For some of them, I've already sent materials to law enforcement.”

Khinshtein meets with locals in person: for example, at the end of January he fended off dissatisfied resettlers for five hours. There are videos of these meetings online: Khinshtein argues with a resident whose house was partially destroyed, insisting that 65,000 rubles is not “pennies”; at another meeting, in response to the question of when the war will end, Khinshtein suggests joining the army; explains to residents that there is no housing available in the region, so certificates for it are not being issued.

A local politician complains that Khinshtein immediately began taking credit for others' achievements: for example, claiming he secured more than 600 million rubles for subsidized medicines for Kursk Oblast, although the aid had been approved before his appointment.

“Here comes another batch of aid for resettlers. ‘We’ll distribute it, we’ll help, we’ll give out kits to everyone in need.’ But this aid, in the form it arrives, was coming just the same before him,” he says. “There isn’t really enough, but again, what does he have to do with it? The whole program was set up before he came to Kursk Oblast.”

According to another Kursk activist, it became clear: Khinshtein was sent to competently allocate the available resources. “Not to provide for everyone in need, not to pay attention to each and every person. No. But to give just enough so that there are no scandalous situations,” he says. And with this, Khinshtein succeeded — there really have been no major protests in the region since, though people remain dissatisfied, the source notes.

A purge of the old guard

At the same time as Khinshtein's arrival in Kursk Oblast, the former head of the local Development Corporation, Vladimir Lukin, and his former deputy Igor Grabin were detained — they were accused of abuse of power during the construction of pyramidal defensive structures known as “dragon's teeth.” In April of the following year, as part of a case involving the alleged embezzlement of 1 billion rubles during the construction of “teeth,” former oblast governor Alexey Smirnov and his former deputy Alexey Dedov were arrested. The day after their arrest, on Holy Thursday, Khinshtein brought a priest into his office, declaring, “A lot of sin has accumulated within these walls.”

According to Kommersant, during interrogations, those detained as organizers of the scheme also mentioned Roman Starovoyt, former governor of Kursk Oblast and Minister of Transport in 2023–2024. On the morning of July 7, 2025, Putin dismissed Starovoyt from office, and later that day it became known that he had shot himself with his service pistol. Khinshtein, who had previously often mentioned Starovoyt on his channel, did not write a word about his death.

Khinshtein's appointment helped “shift the blame” for the Ukrainian breakthrough, explains a source familiar with regional politics and close to the Kremlin. “To divert criticism from the army, from the border guards,” the source says. “The problem is solved: no one is blaming those who are actually at fault, but rather those who stole something or had to turn a blind eye. In other words, everyone seems to have forgotten who really screwed up.”

Sanctifying Khinshtein's office did not help. In February 2025, his deputy became Vladimir Bazarov, who previously held a similar post in Belgorod Oblast. As before, Bazarov was tasked with overseeing construction in the region. Khinshtein thanked the Belgorod governor for the valuable personnel, but by August Bazarov was detained in a case involving embezzlement during the construction of fortifications in Belgorod Oblast.

The fact that Khinshtein was unaware of Bazarov's “activities” shows that he does not control the situation in the region — that's done by the security services, says a United Russia member who knows him: “He understands perfectly well that there's a risk he could end up behind bars at any moment.”

Khinshtein began bringing in “his own” people. Officials from Samara (the region Khinshtein represented as a Duma deputy) moved to Kursk: Elena Atanova (former deputy mayor) and Svetlana Drozdova (advisor to Governor Dmitry Azarov). Both became Khinshtein's advisors. The head of the regional Rosgvardiya was appointed from Samara, General Evgeny Pankov. Later, Viktoria Penkova, who worked with Khinshtein in United Russia, joined: upon arriving in the region, at a meeting with residents she was surprised that they did not want to return to the destroyed Glushkovsky district, which was still under shelling.

In six months, Khinshtein went through five finance ministers. None of the ministers he appointed lasted more than three months. Locals also raised questions after the appointment of acting education minister Natalia Leonova — previously she ran the local circus and was secretary to Roman Starovoyt.

According to a local politician, none of the people appointed by Khinshtein are up to the task: “If you listen to what they say, you get the impression they have no idea where they are or what they're doing.”

“Cautious and rational people” kept their distance from Khinshtein in Samara, adds another official who knows him. According to him, there was even a saying in the region: “to change shoes like Khinshtein.”

Along with the Samara landing party, Khinshtein brought his style to Kursk — loud, public scandals. At one meeting, he sarcastically rebuked Kurchatov mayor Igor Korpunkov for refusing to accept 5 million rubles for playgrounds, citing a violation of the budget code: “Thank you for teaching us wisdom, we'll try to comply with budget legislation… But you still don't want the money, Igor Vladimirovich?”

The openness Khinshtein was supposed to bring to the region often turned out to be illusory. For example, in December 2024, during a meeting at the regional government, Khinshtein interrupted the report of acting deputy head of the Kursk government Mikhail Gorbunov on drones shot down during the week and criticized the official: in his view, such information should not be disclosed. Early the following year, acting minister of regional recovery and development Alexey Karnaushko left his post after being reprimanded by Khinshtein for announcing the amount of damage the region suffered from the AFU incursion — 750 billion rubles.

Some IStories sources refused to talk about Khinshtein because they “can't say anything good about him at all.”

“I think nobody likes him there, in Kursk… A governor should be very humane, especially given people's current lives. But he shuffles people, yells, doesn't let anyone work normally. What I hear from those he brought in and then fired — it's a real mess,” says a Kremlin insider interviewed by IStories.

Beautification against the backdrop of war

“So we should look at this every day? As it is, you'll never forget what we've been through,” — that's how locals reacted to Khinshtein's proposal to make the ruined Pyaterochka supermarket in Sudzha part of the “Liberation Museum” of Kursk Oblast — as a “reminder of the occupation.”

Now, the administration's public pages online are full of reports about festivals and fairs. “They found time to celebrate holidays. Hold fairs, build playgrounds, and so on… when thousands of people have been wandering around temporary accommodation centers and apartments for a year, including children… And officials are promoting themselves. Shameful,” people write under a post about a celebration for Physical Culture Day.

“We have a public space, Polugora. And before Family, Love and Fidelity Day, we decided to spruce up the place,” says a Kursk politician. “They rushed to finish everything, literally approved it all in a week. The day came, citizens arrived at the promised space, but the equipment and workers were still finishing up… and that's how it is with all of Khinshtein's projects: always in a big hurry.”

This is part of the election campaign, adds a Kremlin insider: Khinshtein needs to show results quickly. Apparently, under the same logic — to show results by election day at any cost — even schoolyards are now getting plaques about their beautification: “Initiative supported by Alexander Khinshtein.”

The culmination of the beautification was Kolobok. The installation of a bronze sculpture of the fairy tale character in Kursk's Children's Park was announced this summer. Kolobok was cast at the Russian Academy of Arts workshop by academy president Vasily Tsereteli and artist Evgeny Teterin (Khinshtein clarified that the funds came from non-budgetary sources).

“This Kolobok is crazy, scary to look at,” said local residents about the project, but Khinshtein insisted that Kolobok must be there. The park reconstruction was planned to be finished by early September, just in time for the elections. By the way, Kolobok is one of Putin's favorite fairy tale characters.

Recently, Khinshtein announced plans to build a “glamping park” with ski slopes in the region — about 30 million rubles were allocated from the federal budget for this. In the comments under this news, residents were again outraged: “First, please restore what people have lost. How much longer will people have to live in temporary accommodation centers? What ski slopes? People are in shock. Who needs these ski slopes?”

In August 2025, there were still 5,618 residents in 61 temporary accommodation centers (TAC) in Kursk Oblast. “Spending a year in a TAC is very hard. Family and friends aren't always ready to take you in for years. Everyone has their own family, their own life,” says an IStories source who left Sudzha after the occupation.

So far, according to Khinshtein, about 10,500 housing certificates have been distributed. They are only available to those whose homes were damaged or destroyed. Before the elections, on September 1, distribution began for another 1,400 certificates. So far, more than 30,000 applications have been submitted (these are the last officially published figures, from spring).

“There’s nothing to brag about, because if they keep issuing certificates at this pace, I don’t know how long it will take to provide for everyone in need,” a local politician told IStories.

“Every day we record new strikes, there are wounded and dead. Naming any deadlines is unrealistic,” Khinshtein said in June about the possibility of resettlers returning home to the border districts. News about these strikes on his channel, compared to other posts, is usually very brief.

Elections without competition

The issue of the election is not a problem for Khinshtein, all IStories sources agree. All three of Khinshtein's opponents were already candidates in last year's Kursk Oblast gubernatorial election and lost badly to previous governor Smirnov.

In this election, turnout is the main thing, because “people are tired and have other things on their minds,” says a source who works on elections in the regions. The Kursk election is a “technical issue,” he adds, and compared to some other governors, Khinshtein is “quite adequate.”

“They (the governors) are all different people, but they all have their flaws. Because the principles have changed, nobody wants people with their own opinions and serious competencies — others would be overshadowed. And nobody wants to be overshadowed,” says another Kremlin insider.

“I think, of course, he’ll be elected,” agrees a Kursk politician. But he does not rule out that “everything could turn out just like it did with Smirnov: ‘Well, maybe not as harshly. Some other reason will be found.’”