Translated material
Mono defect
The Public Chamber asks the government to expand the list of needy settlements
The government clearly underestimates the number of problematic single-industry towns. By focusing only on supporting the strategically important motor city of Tolyatti or Pikalev, which has demonstrated the ability to violently protest, officials risk losing control of the situation in small settlements, whose residents can find work at one or two city-forming enterprises. Experts from the Public Chamber analyzed the government’s anti-crisis plan for restructuring the economy of single-industry cities and were convinced that only large settlements where there is a danger of more serious social protests can count on support. At the same time, a large number of Russian settlements that are in a deplorable situation, but do not have city status, were left out of the federal assistance program. “It is clear that when a conflict occurs in larger cities, it is more noticeable,” explained Sergei Vostretsov, head of the OP working group on the problems of single-industry towns and regional employment policy, in a conversation with a Vremya Novostey correspondent yesterday. He called on the authorities not to discount small settlements.Let us recall that last year, when the threat of large-scale social explosions in single-industry towns became obvious, Prime Minister Vladimir Putin had to literally “manually” resolve the situation in Pikalevo (Leningrad region), where, due to the shutdown of enterprises belonging to Basel-Cement, ", almost the entire population lost their source of livelihood. The Prime Minister personally handled the payment of wages and the resumption of work at the plants. In the same “manual mode” the fate of the Baikal Pulp and Paper Mill, which is the city-forming enterprise for the 16,000-population Baikalsk, was decided. With his decree in January, Mr. Putin allowed the plant, which had been shut down during the crisis, to resume operation, at least in test mode. After widely publicized mass protests in large industrial locations, including Togliatti, where the country's leading automobile enterprise is located, a decision was made to allocate 25 billion rubles from the federal budget. for the restructuring of single-industry towns.
It is clear that many municipalities were ready to apply for state support, trying to prove their dependence on enterprises affected by the crisis. But after officials of the Ministry of Regional Development screened out the most problematic settlements, the list of those who can count on financial support from the federal center included only 27 out of more than 300 officially recognized single-industry towns in the country. Among them were Pikalevo, Baikalsk, Tolyatti, Nizhny Tagil, Sokol, as well as a number of other settlements in the Kemerovo, Murmansk, Sverdlovsk, Rostov, Chelyabinsk and Nizhny Novgorod regions, Stavropol, Primorsky and Perm regions.
But even in this shortened list of applicants, not everyone was able to justify their requests for assistance from the center. As Sergei Vostretsov said yesterday, only three municipalities - Tolyatti, Nizhny Tagil and Vologda Sokol - managed to protect projects to diversify their economies. “But they have not yet received funds directly for the modernization of production,” Mr. Vostretsov noted in an interview with a Vremya Novostey correspondent. Representatives of the administrations of Tolyatti, Pikalev and Nizhny Tagil complained yesterday in the Public Chamber that “real” money from the center is so far only going to create temporary jobs within the framework of the Fund for Assistance to Housing and Communal Services Reform program and to subsidies for small businesses.
It is clear, however, that representatives of the administrations of those cities that the government drew attention to could not express dissatisfaction. They called the allocation of funds through the Housing and Communal Services Fund programs “a working mechanism for digesting the redundant workers,” noting that employees of large enterprises can successfully retrain into construction and repair teams. However, as the head of Pikalev’s administration, Sergei Weber, noted, it is only with these funds that “the cities continue to exist.” In addition, according to the deputy head of the Nizhny Tagil administration for strategic development and investment, Yuri Kuznetsov, the specificity of single-industry towns is such that paternalistic sentiments prevail among the population. Residents of single-industry settlements, he said, have been accustomed to stable work at a large enterprise for several generations. “They have a dulled sense of internal dynamics, they are not used to working according to the principle of “the legs feed the wolf,” noted Mr. Kuznetsov. However, local authorities, who often do not have their own funds even to develop projects to diversify traditional industries, can only wait for the allocation of money from the federal budget.
The president of the Union of Small Cities of Russia, Evgeniy Markov, said yesterday that local authorities cannot have a reason to be in a good mood. According to him, federal officials tend to hush up and downplay the problem of single-industry towns. According to Mr. Markov, in Russia the number of settlements whose life depends on one city-forming enterprise can reach one thousand. The number of Russians living in such cities, according to the director of the St. Petersburg branch of the State University - Higher School of Economics Alexander Khodachek, reaches 30 million people.
According to Mr. Khodachek, a situation where local authorities do not have sufficient powers to obtain the necessary information from the owner of an enterprise does not contribute to resolving the problems of settlements dependent on the city-forming business. Mr. Markov also believes that the federal center takes a somewhat contradictory position, orienting society to the fact that local authorities should distance themselves as much as possible from business activities, and on the other hand, demanding that municipal officials perform a coordinating function. “Can business today solve its own problems?” - Mr. Markov expressed doubt.
Experts and social activists insist that the federal government must acknowledge the many problem spots on the country's map. And remember that there are, for example, settlements that depend on the whims of the woodworking industry, such as Babaevo, Sazonovo, Chagoda in the Vologda region or the “twin” of Baikalsk, unfortunately, in Karelian Kondopoga. The scale of these zones deserves not just a solution to the problem within the framework of a federal program, but the status of a national project, according to the Public Chamber. “Otherwise we will lose territory and population,” Mr. Khodachek is sure. In a resolution addressed to the government, members of the OP insist on the need to create an accurate register of not only large settlements, but also small settlements, the majority of whose residents are employed at city-forming industrial enterprises.