The Peculiar Arithmetic of the Drawing Room: A Lady's Struggle with the Exchequer

It is a truth universally acknowledged that those who dwell in the shimmering light of public adoration often find the dull accounts of the treasury to be a most tedious burden. Such is the case with the esteemed Mistress Elena Letuchaya, a lady of the television screen, who has recently found herself in a most precarious entanglement with the Federal Tax Service.

It has come to the attention of the gossips—and indeed the press—that this particular lady owes the Crown's coffers some 1.7 million rubles. One imagines her sitting in a salon, perhaps adjusting a most exquisite hat, while the grim reality of her business accounts remains as neglected as a dusty volume of poetry in a damp attic. The lady herself, maintaining a silence as profound as a cathedral at midnight, has offered no comment upon this financial impropriety.

Alas, she is not alone in this dance of debts. The gentlemen of the society are equally prone to such lapses. We recall the case of Mr. Andrey Malakhov, whose enterprise, 'Izovela'—which oversees a sanctuary in the frozen reaches of the Murmansk region—neglected to provide the state with some 3.6 million rubles. It seems that possessing a sanatorium does not necessarily grant one the serenity to balance one's ledgers.

Contrast this, if you will, with the experience of Mistress Oksana Samoylova, a lady of the digital journals, who has recently scrubbed her name clean of a multi-million ruble debt, paying the sum of four million and five thousand rubles with a promptness that would put a Swiss banker to shame.

As for Mistress Letuchaya, this is not her first encounter with the tax-gatherer's ledger. In the month of April, it was whispered that she owed some 1.1 million rubles—a sum she settled with due haste. One cannot help but wonder if the art of paying taxes is, for some, a recurring drama, performed with all the flourish of a stage play but none of the rehearsal.