Tales of Nizhny Tagil

Ural fairy tales. On January 28, in Yekaterinburg, thousands of workers entered the rally in support of Vladimir Putin. In the Ural plants, one after another, working committees are being created in support of the prime minister - presidential candidate. The nature of the proletariat’s love for the leader of “United Russia” studied The New Times “In the summer, I was surprised to learn that I was in the Popular Front, now-that I am a supporter of Putin, the worker of one of the Nizhny Tagil Uralvagonzavoda, Sergei smokes near the passing and reluctantly tells how the factory leadership is trying to promote the working movement in support of the Prime Minister. - This is the Kholmansky, like the head of the assembly workshop, is such a salary that he is ready even for Putin, at least x ... Yutin to tear a shirt, just to sit up "

* * The plot on the “workers of VS Protest VIPs” started during the “direct line” of Vladimir Putin on December 15, 2011, five days after the rally on Bolotnaya Square in Moscow: then the worker of UVZ Igor Kholmansky invited the premiere “with men to exit (against the protesters) and defend their stability”. . Sergei asks not to mention his surname: the leadership of the plant, which lives exclusively thanks to the state order, has introduced the moratorium on the working moratorium on communication with the press, meeting journalists with them, if they pass, it is only with the participation of the security service of the enterprise, who monitor, as if one of the workers did not blurt out excess and did not show dangerous non -power.

For many years, the political balance in Nizhny Tagil was maintained due to the competition between the Uralvagonzavod and the Nizhny Tagil Metallurgical Combine (Upper Scue) divided the city into the rally in Yekaterinburg, workers were collected on a voluntary and compulsory manner: they promised an additional run, in some, they simply seduced a free passage before Yekaterinburg and dinner after the action. “Most will go, well, just in order not to swear with the authorities,” Sergey argues. “Although Putin still will not be of Putin, they traditionally vote for the Communists at the factory.” The Dzerzhinsky district of Nizhny Tagil, or, as the inhabitants call it, the “lining”, where the Uralvagonzavod is located, is separated from the main city by industrial zones. About 10 km from the center to the “lining”, and the locals are joking that Tagil is divided into continental and island. Around the UVZ formed its microconcle, in which the workers of the factory with families live, its own central street is car-building, and even outwardly the “lining” differs: if the center of Tagila looks like a war has ended here, then the houses town are relatively clean, the facades of the houses are put in order and in stripes are painted green, pink, orange. The only thing that unites two parts of the city is a disgusting environmental state. According to Rosstat, Tagil takes 12th place in the list of the dirtiest Russian cities

* 1st place behind Norilsk, 2nd-near Cherepovets, 3rd-near Novokuznetsk. , and it immediately catches the eye-the snow in the city is painted in a lead black and gray color. True, this is the “merit” not “Uralvagonzavod”, but the second local industrial monster - the Nizhny Tagil Metallurgical Plant, the NTMK belonging to the Evraz Group. According to Yegor Bychkov, a public figure and former head of the Tagil branch of the city without drugs, in the city annually up to 1.5 thousand people dies precisely because of the environmental situation, and 90% is the NTMK guilt.

Largely thanks to the rivalry of large plants - UVZ and NTMK - the independent newspaper Valery Klimtsev “Tagil option” survives

The competition between the two factories, including political, for many years ensured a certain balance in the city. In the City Duma, the next convocation of which will be elected on March 4, a large faction from the UVZ and NTMK, the city hall tried to balanced between the interests of carbun workers and metallurgists. “In the interests of the city, it would be a third force,” is convinced by the journalist and director of the local independent newspaper “Tagil option” Valery Klimtsev. - In small and medium -sized businesses, about 40 thousand citizens have already been involved, which is comparable to the staff of both factories. Over time, I think they will compose this third force. ” A portrait of academician Andrei Sakharov hangs over the Klimtsev desktop. The weekly newspaper “Tagil option” has been released for 5 years, it has formed after a split in the team of the Tagil Worker’s pro -government publication, and, according to the journalist, the city authorities and the administrations of both industrial monsters are trying to exert pressure on the independent media, but thanks to the competition, the “option” exists between them is possible to survive. Klimtsev and Bychkov recall that the relative political balance in the city was violated four years ago, when Valentina Isaeva won the mayor of Nizhny Tagil. She has no chance of re -electing, as shown by sociologists, and to the new electoral cycle, the leadership of the UVZ, having learned old mistakes, came up fully armed. Other reasons for the sharp politicization of the Uralvagonzavod are also called. Firstly, his general director Oleg Sienko would not mind getting to the chair of the governor of the Sverdlovsk region. Secondly, in 2013-2014, a stake in Uralvagonzavod will be partially privatized, and, as the Ministry of Economic Development announces, the state of the state in it will decrease from 100% to 75%. “Before this fatty pie, Putin’s people begin to saw, it would be nice to pump up with money from the Putin government,” one of the local officials is ironic. To solve any of these problems, demonstrative loyalty will not interfere at all.

"

Before Putin’s people begin to saw this fatty pie, it would be nice to pump it out of Putin's government

"

Walking to power in December 2010, the famous Moscow political strategist and editor -in -chief of the GDP magazine Alexei Zharich, took the position of deputy general director for interaction with the media and state authorities of the UVZ. He attracted the less -famous regional PR managers Andrei Perl and Yuri Girenko to work on the image of the plant. The result was the movement “Behind the Clean City”, which appeared in February 2011. The movement was headed by the Executive Director of the UVZ Vladimir Roshchupkin, and it began to spin on contrasting the mayor-the protege of the Combone Combine. By September, according to the measurements of the Yekaterinburg political scientist Sergei Moshkin, it enjoyed the support of 60% of the townspeople. “Previously, the plants shared the single -mandate districts among themselves,” says Moshkin. “UVZ created a movement in order to go under its flags in the territory controlled by metallurgists and secure the majority in the city parliament.”

However, the leadership of the UVZ decided not to be limited to participation in local policy, and on August 31, Roshchupkin said that at the meeting of the factory’s labor collective, a unanimous decision was made to join the People’s Front of Vladimir Putin. As one of the workers told The New Times, of course, no general meeting was held, but at some point, a surprised worker really issued the certificates of ONF members and began to prepare for rallies in support of United Russia.

The first working rallies, as several interlocutors at UVZ told The New Times, were supposed to take place at the end of November, on the eve of the Duma elections, but then the plans were confused by the accident, which the governor of the region Alexander Misharin, and the factory leadership did not receive the go -ahead. The entry into the ONF without a trace for the plant, however, did not pass: according to the results of December 4, the veteran of the plant 70-year-old Valery Yakushev got a deputy mandate on the front-line quota. During the campaign, Yakushev proposed to ban foreign music on Russian radio stations, and one of the candidate’s promises was to make his own granddaughter his assistant on Okhotny.

This success was encouraged by the leadership of the UVZ, and during the "direct line" of Vladimir Putin, the head of the Kholmansky workshop made the premiere a tempting offer to come to Moscow and disperse the protesters. Further - more. On December 24, the first rally of workers in the support of Putin was held in Tagil, it also decided to form a working committee in his support. On December 29, on the plant’s website, the Committee appeared to the working class: “There are attempts to shake the country, rock the situation, change the course of stable development. In Moscow and other large cities, “advanced” loafers who appropriated the right to speak on behalf of the whole people go to rallies. ” The appeal was signed by deputy Yakushev, head of the Kholmansky workshop and the head of the Uralvagonzavod youth movement Andrei Lema.

"

Tank is a periodically pop -up symbol of Sverdlovsk policy. In 1992, on it, Tagil bandits traveled to deal with the bandits from Chechnya who appeared in the city

"

Click to increase
Although the leadership of UVZ named after Dzerzhinsky and claims that the labor collective of the plant unanimously supports Putin, the workers themselves are unhappy with the state of affairs at the enterprise

In search of the “cattle” of the Land, a smoothly shaved young man of about 35 years old in a neat suit and tie, not only a kind of class, but also with his whole appearance, something very similar to the head of the tanker Vasily Yakemenko. Although he himself loves to talk about his working past, he does not look like a hard worker at all. “When lists for elections to the City Duma were formed, the Land tried to get on the list of“ Just Russia ”, and now, when he was not allowed there, he talks about his love for the party and the government,” Egor Bychkov is ironic. - He is generally a strange candidate in order to represent the working class: he publishes glamorous magazines “Chocolate” and “Banzai”, he sits in the jury of the Miss Bikini contest. But during a conversation with The New Times correspondent, the Land called all critical attacks in his address and assured that the workers really support Putin in a single impulse. “When protests began in Moscow against the elections, we decided to stand up for Vladimir Putin,” says the leader of the factory youth. - Let's share Putin and United Russia. If Tagil has bad roads, people will be unhappy. But is Putin to blame for the fact that the city authorities could not master the budgets for road construction? When the plant was in a difficult situation, Putin flew to Tagil and helped us, now we must help him. Moreover, the workers are sincerely outraged: after the “direct line” with the prime minister, as we are just not called on the Internet: cattle and other offensive words. ”

At the confrontation between the proletariat and educated citizens who allegedly call the workers by the cattle, the committee in support of Putin built the entire PR campaign for the rally on January 28. “Who and why insulted the Labor Urals? Who shakes the situation? Dark forces pushing Russia into a “color revolution”, and we are working, we have no time to rally. Today, Russia cannot be saved without us, ”said in a video launched before a rally on the Internet. Here, however, there was a puncture: on January 23, the Yekaterinburg news agency Ura.ru reported that back in December the administration of the Sverdlovsk governor hired three dozen bloggers, the task of which was to write posts and comments on the Internet that offended workers. The project, as bloggers say,, with the approval of the head of the United Russia CEC, Andrei Vorobyov was launched by the Deputy Prime Minister of the region Alexei Bagaryakov. Bagaryakov-the personality in the region is also legendary in its own way: in the early 2000s he was in the local department of the ATP, in 2007 he elected the State Duma from the Communist Party and for some reason in the Altai Territory, and shortly before the work of the Duma of the previous convocation, he was moved to the EP and was appointed vice-governor. It was he who in the fall oversaw the United Russia campaign in the region and failed it with a bang: the party scored only 31.7%. Someone calls him a local gray cardinal and the main ideologist, comparing with Vladislav Surkov, someone, as an independent deputy of the Duma of Yekaterinburg, Leonid Volkov, Gopnik. In early January, the Deputy Prime Minister stopped financing bloggers and no one more on local sites of the cattle of workers, but the organizers of the rally in support of Vladimir Putin to the last allegedly inflated the conflict between the workers and “advanced loafers”.

Egor Bychkov, according to the Tagil sociologists, enjoys the great confidence in the townspeople, but he is not going to go to politics yet

The inciters of hatred according to the plan of the PRA Uralvagonzavod and the deputy prime minister Bagaryakov with a culmination of the confrontation of “proletarians against white collar” were to appear at the rally in support of Putin Tank. The combat vehicle was supposed to leave the workers from Tagil on January 23, perform a tour in the region and on January 28 to leave for the station square of Yekaterinburg. Tank is a periodically pop -up symbol of Sverdlovsk policy. In 1992, on the tank, the Tagil bandits traveled to deal with the bandits from Chechnya in the city, and in the mid-1990s one of the workers hung it at night and drove along Tagil, protesting against a half-year delay in salary. This time, the story could end badly: in Yekaterinburg, activists, having learned about a tankman, were preparing to go towards him and not to let the fighting vehicle into the city, blocking his road with his own cars. The situation was cooled by the new envoy in the Ural Federal District Evgeny Kuyvashev. The 40-year-old ex-mayor of Tyumen was appointed Dmitry Medvedev in September 2011, and he is also considered as a potential shifter of Misharin as a Sverdlovsk governor. Having rejected the idea with the tank, Kuyvashev, however, ardently supported the initiative to create workers' committees in support of Putin. “His deputies travel to all large enterprises of the district and tell workers about intellectuals-tens who swing the boat to Western grants,” one of the Tagil officials on the terms of anonymity told The New Times. - Directors are required to create working committees, they are frowning, but they remember the story of the owner of the "Mechela" Igor Zyuzin and do not want to be sent to them "doctors"

* In July 2008, at a meeting, at which a sharp increase in metals and coal prices was discussed, Vladimir Putin sharply criticized the Mechel holding and promised to send the doctor to its owner, who did not appear to the meeting, saying to the patients: the “swordsman” shares immediately collapsed. . The working committees in support of the prime minister have already been created at the Uraltransmash and the Nizhny Tagil Metallurgical Plant, the commissars from the plenipotentiary have already visited the Kachkanar GOK and the UMMC. The initiative was also picked up in the Siberian Federal District: on January 24, Vladimir Putin spoke at a rally in his support at the SDS-Mash plant, at the workshop with the prime minister and presidential candidate they drove up to 6 thousand miners. Whether Putin will appear at a rally in Yekaterinburg - at the time of signing the number it was still unknown. The New Times prime minister reported that Putin was in St. Petersburg on Friday, and on Monday, he was planned for events in the Leningrad Region. Yekaterinburg was not in the schedule, and usually in such situations the prime minister remains on weekends in his hometown. “He will come,” the deputy of the Yekaterinburg City Duma of the wolves is sure. - Residents of houses around the station square are already bypassed and warned that they do not lean out of the windows, as the first person is going. They want to remove something like the “triumph of will” Leni Rifenstal here. And in general, this is a symbolic place: Boris Yeltsin began all his victorious campaigns precisely in the Urals. ” We will evaluate the effectiveness of the Putin campaign in a month.