Until Moscow wakes up

Two in the morning, calls the phone on the bedside table. "Hello, you are worried about journalists from Moscow." A polite, stretching vowel voice on the other end is kindly interested in whether it is convenient for me to speak. I mock a roar in my throat, I finally wake up.

From me, located in Khabarovsk, they need a report - with a photo and video - about the crash of the trailer "Far East". Now it’s my turn to politely explain that Sakhalin from Khabarovsk is far away, and that I will have to spend a day on moving. I won’t have time to their deadline - “Morning in Moscow”.

"We make material about how the Chinese populate the Far East." Once again, I explain that this "hot", according to many metropolitan publications, the topic has long lost its relevance here. "That is, this is no longer in Novosibirsk?" In Novosibirsk - I don’t know, in Khabarovsk - no. I hold back a smile, I expect a question about tigers and bears on city streets.

Many of my acquaintances working in the Far East can tell such stories. Calls in the middle of the night and ignorance of the capital's colleagues of the scale of the region most often become the subject of harmless jokes.

On the other hand, the phrase “We are waiting for Moscow to wake up here to almost everyone: when we have 4 in the afternoon, the working day in the capital is just beginning. It is in Moscow that many documents need to be drawn up, coordinate business projects, Moscow coordinates the budget, “advertising campaigns”, brings top managers and decides how the region will continue to develop.

To the visit of Dmitry Medvedev, who came to the Far East two weeks ago, were prepared carefully: they kneads on the roads of the alleged route of the prime minister, washed pillars and barriers on the streets. His Twitter and Instagram Khabarovsk residents were thrown by complaints of bad officials and roads, and they see hope of improving the situation only in direct contact with the federal authorities, not hoping for local managers, many of whom sooner or later turn out to be participants in criminal cases. For the investigation of these cases, such officials sometimes - as, for example, the former governor of the Sakhalin Region - are also taken to the capital. From there, eminent managers come with global plans, but often with a lack of practical knowledge about the Far East.

It’s doubly insulting: a huge region cannot do anything, “until Moscow wakes up,” and she, having woken up, sometimes does not know who he was dealing with.

Evgenia Kulgina - freelance correspondent of Radio Liberty in the Khabarovsk Territory, laureate of the competition of young journalists "Challenge of the XXI century"