The service of the muses does not tolerate poverty

Workers of village libraries, clubs and museums became victims of local government reform

In the new year, a “cultural” crisis occurred in the villages of the Khabarovsk Territory. Hundreds of workers in village libraries, clubs and museums actually lost their jobs. On the eve of the New Year holidays, says Ekaterina Yakusheva, director of the House of Culture of the village of Sita, Lazovsky district, Khabarovsk Territory, all employees were given work books with an interesting entry: “based on the order of the head of the Lazo district, Evgeniy Govor, on the reorganization of the cultural department, the legal successors of the liquidated division of the district administration are settlements."

In the new year, cultural workers continue to go to work, but, as the chairman of the district trade union committee Valentina Orekhova assures, they all feel “between heaven and earth.” The heads of the village administrations bluntly told the village librarians and club leaders that there was simply no money to support them. As the head of the Sita rural settlement, Leonid Sarahman, told a Vremya Novostei correspondent, the village authorities' budgets are so meager that there is barely enough money for the most urgent expenses - landscaping and paying wages to administration employees.

The “servants of the village muses” themselves call themselves the first victims of the law on local self-government. It provides for the redistribution of many powers in favor of grassroots authorities. Federal Law No. 131 implies the transfer of costs for utilities, heat and power, water supply, urban planning, and so on. As Tatyana Movchan, deputy of the Legislative Duma of the Khabarovsk Territory, explained to Vremya Novostei, the redistribution of functions from districts to local settlements is happening gradually. It was decided to leave such costly items as housing and communal services and capital construction under the jurisdiction of district and regional authorities for now, but culture, in the parliamentarian’s opinion, is the easiest area that heads of rural administrations can and should handle.

As Ms. Movchan assured, the regional budget for 2006 provides for the creation of so-called equalization funds, from which financial assistance will be allocated for the needs of rural settlements where there are insufficient funds to ensure the recently transferred powers. However, this system has not yet worked. Meanwhile, layoffs of cultural workers have already begun in the regions. As Valentina Orekhova reported, in the regional center of Pereyaslavka the number of librarians has been halved, and the remaining ones have been transferred to lower grades. A protest is brewing among the rural intelligentsia - they are uniting in a legal battle with government agencies.

The Khabarovsk Territory, along with Yakutia and the Amur Region, are the first Far Eastern regions that began implementing the law on local self-government in January 2006. Other territories in the region will begin to live under the new law no earlier than in a year. According to the Chairman of the Legislative Duma of the Khabarovsk Territory, Yuri Onoprienko, “delay in the entry into force of Law 131 means uncertainty of the authorities and can lead to its discredit.” The redistribution of powers between different levels of government is a painful and complex issue. By law, municipalities have only two tax levers with which to replenish the local budget - land tax and property tax on individuals. In most settlements, especially depressed and hard-to-reach ones, these income items are simply meager. And without financial assistance from higher-level budgets, most villages simply cannot survive. However, most districts of the region, including Lazovsky, are subsidized, which means that many villages in the near future, due to chronic lack of money, may lose their last centers of culture.

Ilya SERGEEV, Khabarovsk region