On 19 May, Vladimir Vaks, a former vice-rector of Tomsk State University of Architecture and Building (TSUAB), died. He was 75 years old and had spent the last year in pre-trial detention on embezzlement charges. And he is not the only United Russia member and TSUAB employee facing criminal prosecution.
Dramatis personae
Vladimir Vaks once headed the Tomsk city branch of United Russia, served as deputy mayor and chaired the city audit chamber. In recent years he held senior positions at TSUAB (vice-rector and director of the department of general administration and financial and economic policy of the university).
The university rector at the time was another prominent United Russia member — Viktor Vlasov, a deputy of the Legislative Duma of Tomsk Oblast and chairman of its committee on the economy, who was himself detained in February 2026.
A party-corruption university
The troubles for TSUAB’s leadership began a year ago. In May 2025, the FSB detained Vladimir Vaks and his son Ilya. They were accused of arranging, back in 2018, when Vaks senior was vice-rector, with his son to put a mutual acquaintance on the university payroll fictitiously. From December 2018 to September 2022, that person was paid more than 8.5 million rubles in salary and other payments, i.e. an average of over 236,000 rubles a month — Vaks himself, as the university’s first vice-rector, received the same amount in 2020.
Incidentally, according to data from the website GorodRabot.ru, even in 2026 the median salary for lecturers at Tomsk universities is just 45,000 rubles a month.
As a result, Vaks was sentenced to four years in a penal colony. The sentence did not take effect in time. In February 2026, while delivering his final statement at the court hearing, Vladimir Vaks asked the court to mitigate the punishment because of health problems, but the court left him in custody. The Federal Penitentiary Service (FSIN) transferred Vladimir Vaks to the town of Kolpashevo, 300 km north of Tomsk, where he was to be held pending appeal, but he did not live to see it.
Vladimir Vaks’s former superior and former oblast deputy, Viktor Vlasov, was detained on 28 February 2026. The day before, he was officially dismissed from the post of university rector without explanation, and even earlier, on 23 December, Vlasov resigned his mandate early as a deputy of the Legislative Duma of Tomsk Oblast. He had headed the university for more than 15 years.
There is no official information yet on the charges brought. All that is known is that Vlasov is charged under part 4 of Article 159 of the Criminal Code (“Fraud”). As early as autumn 2025, reports appeared in the public domain that Vlasov and Vaks had been awarding each other large bonuses: a series of documents was published showing, for example, that on 14 December 2018 Vlasov signed an order awarding Vaks a bonus “for work intensity” in the amount of 290,000 rubles, and 10 days later Vaks signed an order paying Vlasov a “stimulus” bonus for the nine-month results. The sum — one million rubles.