Buy land, God isn't making any more of it
(The Sopranos TV series)
In June 2025, all the residents of Dolzhansky District in Oryol Region, even the elderly in semi-abandoned villages, started talking about an unexpected piece of news: two "top officials" had been detained — district head Boris Makashov and the chairman of the Dolzhansky District Council of People's Deputies, Vladimir Marakhin. Both Makashov and Marakhin are natives of Oryol Region, both hold the title of "Honorary Citizen of Dolzhansky District," their biographies are very similar, they have been friends since Soviet times, and in the post-Soviet era they have worked hand in hand in the district government structures of Dolzhansky District. And both became defendants in a case concerning the embezzlement of land plots.
A meteoric rise
Vladimir Marakhin is almost twenty years older than his colleague in the municipal structures. For more than thirty years, going back to Soviet times, he served as a deputy of the Kudinovsky village and Dolzhansky District Councils of People's Deputies: from the "united and unbreakable bloc of communists and non-party members" to United Russia. In December 1992, the "Lugansky" state farm, a large enterprise by the district's standards, was divided into two operations: "Luganskoye" (headed by Vladimir Marakhin, who was elected to the post) and "Krivtsovo-Plotskoye." Subsequently, Marakhin bought out all the property of "Krivtsova-Plota" along with its debts, as well as the "Druzhba" agricultural firm of Dolzhansky District (six Dolzhansky enterprises). In the district he is considered the largest landowner: most of the Dolzhansky lands are owned by structures belonging to Vladimir Marakhin and his sons Aleksei and Sergei, or controlled by them.
Boris Makashov decided to go into government in 2011, and was nominated as a candidate for deputy of the Dolzhansky District Council from United Russia, but won the election with great difficulty: the LDPR nominee, ambulance driver at Dolzhansky District Hospital Alexander Manankov, trailed him by just four (!) votes. By that point Makashov had spent fifteen years as deputy head of the "Yunost" Agro-Industrial Corporation. A turning point in his career came at the start of 2015, when Makashov resigned his deputy powers and became acting head, and by the end of the year — the full-fledged head of the administration of Dolzhansky District.
At that time the leadership of municipal formations was "two-headed": there was a head of the district, who also chaired the District Council (in Dolzhansky District — his longtime friend Vladimir Marakhin), and there was the head of the municipal administration, formally subordinate to him. Six years later, in 2021, the governance scheme changed — Makashov became head of the district, and Marakhin remained head of the district council of deputies.
A career collapse
In August 2025, the Zavodskoy District Court of the city of Oryol removed Makashov from his post. Two months earlier, in June, the Oryol Investigative Committee reported the detention of the leadership of Dolzhansky District — district head Boris Makashov and district council chairman Vladimir Marakhin — in a case of fraud on an especially large scale (Part 4, Art. 159 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation) connected to land plots.
The criminal case centres on the illegal acquisition of ownership rights to two land plots in the district, which, with the assistance of Boris Makashov and Vladimir Marakhin, passed to OOO "Luganskoye," a company belonging to the Marakhin family. The Investigative Committee's release stated that between November and December 2022, the accused deceived employees of the Oryol Region Directorate of Rosreestr and embezzled state property (two land plots) worth over 5.53 million rubles.
The story began when the management of the "Yunost" Agro-Industrial Corporation, which operates on the territory of Dolzhansky District (yes, the very corporation whose management Makashov himself was once part of), learned that four shares were being carved out on the territory of the Gagarin agricultural cooperative. A study of the public cadastral map revealed that the plots had effectively "moved" from one rural settlement to another, while retaining their numbers. As it turned out, back in 2022 the Dolzhansky District administration had issued resolutions ostensibly to correct registry errors, but the resolutions look as if these plots were being entered into the cadastral register for the first time. As a result of these actions, in 2022 the two plots "moved" onto the territory of a plot, within the boundaries of the former "Alekseyevskoye" enterprise, that had been removed from the Rosreestr register and was in the free use of the head of the peasant farm enterprise, Aleksei Marakhin — Vladimir Marakhin's son.
Earlier that same year, the "Yunost" agro-industrial corporation had asked the district administration to allocate land plots in that territory. District head Boris Makashov responded to that request by claiming that there were supposedly no free plots within the boundaries of that territory, but just six months later he formalised the "move" of those plots.
High protection
After the district leadership's detention, the entire district host rose up in defence of the "sweet pair" in the best of traditions. Letters from workers complaining about lawlessness rained down on the president, his administration, the State Duma, the Federation Council, law enforcement agencies and the media.
"We strongly urge you to look into the current situation in Dolzhansky District and not allow innocent citizens, patriots of their small homeland, to be punished! Makashov's and Marakhin's approach is not to hush up problems, but to solve them within the scope of their competence!" wrote, for instance, Dolzhansky utility workers, road workers and agricultural workers.
But the most high-ranking defender turned out to be a member of the Presidential Council for Civil Society and Human Rights, Alexander Brod.
"Local deputies and residents trust Marakhin and see concrete results of his work," he told the three assembled journalists. "I sent an appeal to the prosecutor of Oryol Region and to the human rights commissioner. I spoke with the chairman of the regional council of people's deputies on this matter, and from him I also heard positive feedback about Marakhin's work. Let us hope that the situation will normalise. Such high-profile cases must be reviewed by supervisory bodies."
However, the activity of the presidential human rights advocate, as well as of the lawyers, died down fairly quickly: over the past six months, not a single piece of material about this case has appeared on the internet or in the media. It appears that the investigation is ongoing, and sooner or later information about the results of the investigation will be made public.