Celsius mockery

Alexander Ryklin

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Protests by thousands of residents of the freezing Primorye Territory gave rise to hopes in society that the regional governor, Evgeniy Nazdratenko, will soon leave the political scene. But, apparently, it is not destined to come true

(Photo: Ruslan Yamalov )

In early December, residents of the village of Rudny, 20 kilometers from the regional center of Kavalerovo, at a general meeting decided on an important issue: how many holes to dig for public toilets. There was no chance that heat would be supplied to the houses, and it was clear that the water pipes were about to freeze, and therefore it would be impossible to use the sewer system until spring.

At this meeting, the former director of the Kavalerovsky mining and processing plant, and now the head of the district administration, Valery Lomovtsev, appeared. She began her speech like this: “Now it’s difficult for everyone, but let’s control ourselves. Our ancestors once lived.” The boss was not allowed to finish. According to eyewitnesses, Lomovtsev was almost kicked from the podium.

Dead end
From Kavalerovo to Vladivostok it’s about five hundred kilometers. Previously, a regular plane flew along this route. Now the only transport is a car. Just over 30 thousand people live here. Half are in the regional center itself, half are in villages scattered across the nearby hills. The mining and processing plant, which employed 7 thousand people, was not even a city, but a regional enterprise. Now he is "lying". Nazdratenko blames a certain Moscow company for this, which got the plant as a result of “predatory privatization.” Local residents had never heard of any Muscovites. In Kavalerovo they say that their own bosses stole the equipment and sold it to China. So if someone wants to resume tin production here, they will have to invest a lot of money.

The plant did not die overnight - production declined gradually and by the year before last it had shrunk to just one artel. But even there they have not paid wages for almost six months. “You should have seen how life was in full swing here,” pensioner Sergei Mitrokhin recalls with bitterness, “we had salaries of 600 rubles - those Soviet ones. There was nowhere for an apple to fall in the courtyards - everything was filled with cars. In the stores - any kind of fish. If you want - hake, if you want - pollock. Now at least lie down and die. Okay, we feel sorry for the young ones." Residents of the area have not seen money (except for pensions) for a long time. State employees - for more than a year now. But there are no private sector employees in these places, just as there is no private enterprise. Or rather, it exists only in one simplest version - collecting cedar cones. Lomovtsev generally believes that all the troubles are because of these big shots.

Residents were warned in advance that there would be no heating this year. They say that there is no money in the regional and district budgets for the purchase of fuel oil. “We didn’t expect this,” local police officer from the village of Khrustalny Evgeniy Onufriev waves his hand resignedly, “we’ve been like this for several years now. People just tolerated it before and didn’t make such a fuss, but apparently their patience has run out. And thanks to the press too that they started talking about us."

And yet it has never been as bad as this winter in Kavalerovo. In previous years, it was possible to partially heat hospitals, schools and kindergartens. True, the temperature in them rarely rose above 15 degrees. This winter the boiler rooms did not start working. Moreover, in most heating mains and supply lines to houses there was water, which naturally turned into ice, and in many places the pipes were broken. And today, when fuel oil has already been delivered and utility workers are ready to supply heat, in order to bring it to the consumer, these routes have to be repaired - digging up pipes, warming them up, and repairing breaks. The fact that the heating mains were not drained and blown out in the fall is simply explained by local bosses - the workers did not have enough consciousness, everyone quit and went to the taiga for cones. For example, in the boiler house of the village of Khrustalny there was only one director left, the rest took over the payment. “So who will work for nothing?” Vasily Khromov, the tractor driver of the Rudny boiler house, is indignant, “I stayed only because of the tractor. You can still do some hack work on it, for example, transport firewood. Otherwise, I would also have gone to the taiga, behind the cones."

Today, cedar fishing is the only source of income for the vast majority of residents of the Kavalerovsky district. The nuts are sold to the Chinese. At the beginning of autumn, the price reached 40 rubles per kilogram. Now they give no more than 20. Barter is very common - one heating appliance for a bag of nuts, which is 7-8 bags of pine cones. An adult man gains this amount in two days. The income is decent, but a good harvest of nuts happens about once every four years.

Today in the Kavalerovsky district there is no heat in more than 50 houses. In total, about 90 thousand people live in unheated apartments in Primorye. This figure was stated by the Minister of Emergency Situations Sergei Shoigu. In early December, he was appointed head of an interdepartmental state commission tasked with finding out the causes of the crisis and taking the necessary measures. In addition to the Kavalerovsky district, heat is not supplied to the houses of Partizansk, Artyom and almost all settlements of the Khasansky district. The reason is the same everywhere - lack of fuel.


Sergei Shoigu, who arrived in Vladivostok to figure out why Primorye was sitting without heat and to correct the situation, did not publicly allow himself any harsh statements about the governor of the region, Yevgeny Nazdratenko. He understood perfectly well that if a conflict arose, the regional administration would put a spoke in the wheels of the Emergencies Ministry units involved in repairing heating mains, and then certainly thousands of people would have to live in frozen apartments until spring. (Photo: Ruslan Yamalov )

Conspiracy theory
Primorye Governor Evgeny Nazdratenko never tires of repeating that the noise raised in the media about the disruption of the heating season in the region is part of a campaign to discredit him. There is a logic to this, albeit perverted. After all, this same heating season is disrupted here year after year, and so far no one has made much noise. The current mass protests - hunger strikes by teachers, blocking of highways, rallies - are explained by the regional administration by the fact that there is some external force that inspires them. The goal is to denigrate Evgeniy Nazdratenko and bring down the wrath of the head of state. And then the presidential representative in the Far Eastern Federal District, Konstantin Pulikovsky, without mincing words, blamed the governor personally for the trouble that befell the residents of the region. In a word, there is a conspiracy. Nazdratenko shares his grievances mainly with local journalists - they will not ask unpleasant questions like: why during the entire crisis did the governor never bother to visit the disaster areas?

A singing teacher from the village of Khrustalny, Larisa Dzyuba, explains the current surge of social activity in the region differently: “This kind of life when it’s as cold in the house as it is outside, and there’s no money to buy a car of firewood or an electric fireplace, when children have forgotten the taste of sweets, and they eat fish only on weekends and suck all the bones, we won't tolerate it anymore. Enough is enough, we've suffered for so many years. We have no choice - either we'll all die here, or we'll get those in Vladivostok to stop treating us like we're dumb cattle."

The regional authorities cannot ignore such sentiments and are frantically trying to find the switchman. The first vice-governor of Primorye, Konstantin Tolstoshein, is even ready to repent - they say, it’s our sin, they looked after the local leaders poorly, and they did the wrong things. In connection with the disruption of the heating season, the regional prosecutor's office has already brought a number of lower-level officials to justice. “Most of them, of course, are swindlers, you have no doubt about that,” says the same district police officer Onufrienko, “but for some reason the prosecutor’s office is silent about the big bosses. You might think that they only steal from us locally.”

Vladivostok leaders are extremely irritated by any comparison of freezing Primorye with the neighboring Khabarovsk Territory, where heat seems to be supplied to houses regularly. “It’s just that today Nazdratenko needs to be drowned, so they make us the worst,” the Itogi correspondent heard this or a similar phrase from many employees of the regional administration.

I must say that they look pretty scared. An employee of the governor's press service, a couple of minutes after we were introduced to each other, cautiously asked: “What are they saying in your capital? Are they really going to film Nazdratenko?” One of the EMCHES members, who was present at this conversation, muttered through clenched teeth: “Rather than fight in hysterics - they will fire you, they won’t fire you - it would be better if they got down to business.”

The governor's entourage is trying to blame the troubles not only on the local authorities - the Kremlin also gets it. According to Tolstoshein, Primorye was unable to purchase fuel because the federal budget owed him almost 400 million rubles. True, Prime Minister Mikhail Kasyanov claims that the Center does not owe anything to Primorye, and the whole point is that the allocated money was used inappropriately.


Throughout the months of the crisis, neither the regional nor the Moscow authorities showed their noses in the freezing villages. The Kremlin sent Sergei Shoigu to Primorye only when mass protests began. The minister has deployed units of the Ministry of Emergency Situations in particularly disadvantaged areas, and one can hope that soon there will be no more unheated houses in the region. (Photo: Ruslan Yamalov )

Ambulance
“The most amazing thing,” Minister of Emergency Situations Sergei Shoigu noted in a conversation with an Itogi correspondent, “is that there was no inevitability in this catastrophe. Well, I would understand if there was no money in the treasury at all, or in order to to deliver fuel oil, it was necessary to lay a hundred-kilometer railway line. In my practice, this happened - the disruption of the northern delivery forced us to deliver fuel by plane. They burned more than they brought. But here there is nothing like that. Take the same Kavalerovsky district. The shoulder of fuel supply - 200 kilometers. This is nothing. And the money has long been allocated for its purchase. Why, one wonders, is not there? And there is no normal master's hand. And a head on the shoulders. Well, yes, the situation is not easy, the plant is standing still, salaries are not being paid. So the regional chief I had to sit here three days a week since the fall and resolve these issues. And the other three days - in Vladivostok, to find the necessary resources. Well, really, if they had contacted us a month ago, we would not have helped with people and equipment. Why was it necessary to bring the situation to a critical point?

Look what's going on in Artyom. You see, the two bosses did not agree. The city owed the boiler room money, and its manager told the head of administration that he would not sign an agreement for the next year. But this happened not yesterday, but several months ago. Couldn't the regional leadership have resolved this conflict ahead of time? As a result, ten houses still have no heat. And so everywhere."

During the two days that Sergei Shoigu was in the Primorsky Territory, he did not allow himself a single harsh remark about Governor Nazdratenko in public. People around the minister explain this simply: “Arguing with the regional authorities now is a waste of time; you won’t get anything done.” And the EMCHEs have a lot of things to do. Having assessed the situation in the Kavalerovsky district, Shoigu ordered the deployment of a regiment of the Ministry of Emergency Situations there, whose task is to ensure the supply of heat as soon as possible. Similar measures are being taken in Partizansk and Khasansky district. And the Ministry of Finance did not stand aside - over the past 10 days it transferred about 200 million rubles to the account of the coastal administration.

Rescuers from the Ministry of Emergency Situations will certainly cope with their task. It seems that the residents of the freezing Primorye also believed in this. They reproached Shoigu for only one thing: why he arrived so late, but many unflattering words were addressed to the local and regional authorities. That, however, did not stop Konstantin Tolstoshein, who accompanied Shoigu on a trip around the region, from starting an autograph signing in an unheated school in the village of Fabrichny. At some point, having signed another children’s diary, he turned to the journalists and said with a smile: “You see, and you say that we are not popular in the region.”

It seems that everyone in Russia understood that the Primorye administration was not capable of governing the region, and society expected much more decisive action from the Kremlin. Meanwhile, for a whole month, the central government calmly watched as tens of thousands of people sat without heat, and made no attempt to provide them with any help. The President did not even consider it necessary to speak clearly about the outrages happening in Primorye. He limited himself to general phrases in the sense that freezing people is somehow inhumane. But he could have done a lot - followed, for example, the advice of Boris Nemtsov and introduced a state of emergency in the Primorsky Territory.

However, apparently, the current Kremlin inhabitants are not distinguished by their determination, and they do not need the notorious vertical power structure, for the restoration of which they fought so zealously throughout the past year, to protect people from the autocracy of regional leaders.

For Primorye this means only one thing: next winter it will again be faced with old problems - the money allocated for fuel will either be stolen or used for other needs, and residents will again have to stoke their potbelly stoves.


In Vladivostok itself, heat somehow reaches houses. But, for example, in the school in the village of Rudny (pictured) they don’t even remember when the radiators were warm. (Photo: Ruslan Yamalov )