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A Russia forgotten by Moscow
As the booming capital undergoes its massive makeover, remote areas wither with decrepit infrastructure, crimping national economic growth
By Alex Rodriguez
Tribune correspondent
9:46 AM CDT, April 13, 2008
KAMENKA, Russia
The van moves only a few feet every 15 seconds. Gear teeth sound as if they're being ground into bumps. With every lurch forward, passengers inside tighten their grips on seat cushions, an armrest, a spare tire, anything bolted down and within reach.
The Russian-made UAZ 412 lists left and right like an ocean-bound dinghy as its traverses the frozen Mezen River, rumbling over shards of ice and foot-deep slush warmed by the morning sun.
Here, just 48 miles below the Arctic Circle, the anxious souls who routinely make this harrowing, 45-minute crossing are hardly the thrill-seeking type. They are everyday Russians, making the trip to Kamenka the only way they can—across a river without a bridge but covered with ice thick enough to cross by vehicle.
Having no bridge has meant bankruptcy for the town's major employer, a sawmill. Virtually no one in town works.
Today's Russia shouldn't be viewed solely through the prism of Moscow money. As Dmitry Medvedev prepares to assume the presidency May 7 from his longtime mentor, Vladimir Putin, he faces several herculean challenges weighing the country down, one of the biggest being revamping and replacing dilapidated, Soviet-era infrastructure.
That a town like Kamenka —with an able, willing workforce and a viable mill—is so cut off from the rest of the world seems incomprehensible in today's Russia, where consistently high oil prices have allowed the Kremlin to amass a $157 billion rainy-day fund and pay off almost all of its foreign debt from the Soviet era.
But while Moscow continues its massive makeover, sections of the country still struggle with bad roads, poor electrical service and dilapidated housing. More than two-thirds of Russians lack access to land-line telephone service. Since Jan. 1, natural-gas explosions at apartment buildings in 13 cities have killed at least 23 people and injured 47 more. Causes have ranged from gas line leaks to the use of gas stoves to heat apartments in winter.
An economic handicap
Poor infrastructure has made many parts of Russia unproductive and burdensome. And while foreign investors are increasingly looking to Russia, the level of foreign investment could be much greater if infrastructure far from Moscow underwent a makeover of its own.
"It's clear that Russia's infrastructure troubles will handicap the country's economy for the foreseeable future," said Vladimir Salnikov, an analyst with the Moscow-based Center for Macroeconomic Analysis and Short-term Forecasting. "Infrastructure development needs to become an engine of the economy. If nothing is done, bad infrastructure will continue to hold back growth."
The abysmal state of Russia's road network creates losses to the nation's economy estimated at 3 percent of its annual gross domestic product. That is more than the country spends on defense every year, according to the Kremlin.
The problem of bad roads, or no roads at all, is especially acute in Siberia and the Russian Far East, where it isn't uncommon to find villages connected to the rest of Russia solely by expensive helicopter trips.
Forced to fend for themselves, some villages conjure up curious ways of adapting.
The village of Borodinka, 37 miles east of the Ural Mountains, is connected to the nearest town, Chirok, not by road but by narrow-gauge railway. Until this year, local officials had balked at building the village a road, so residents had to turn to the handcar, the railroad maintenance conveyance best known as an iconic image of the American Wild West.
The locomotive that used to ferry villagers to Chirok and beyond broke down years ago, after the village's logging enterprise shut down. With their village facing extinction, they made their own handcars out of motor-scooter engines, slats of wood and narrow-gauge train wheels.
"It's impossible for an ambulance to get here when someone is sick, so we hook a trailer to a handcar and take the person into town that way," said Borodinka's mayor, Emilia Domrocheva. "Sometimes it's too late, and the person dies on the way."
Earlier this year, authorities began construction on a road to Borodinka that, when finished, should eliminate the need to use the railway.
Seasonal adjustments
Russians in Kamenka also have had to adapt. Between May and October, ferries take townspeople across the Mezen. In April and November, when the river is in midthaw or midfreeze, an $11, five-minute trip in an AN-2 biplane is the way in or out. By December the ice is thick enough for Kamenka's UAZ vans, though villagers pour water onto the ice to reinforce it.
What villagers cannot adapt to is the mill's shutdown. In 2007 it processed just 1,300 cubic yards of wood, down from 417,000 in 1956. Its cavernous workroom stands dark and silent, its power saws rusted and caked with last year's sawdust.
A decent bridge and road would get the mill back on its feet. Right now it has to ship timber and processed wood along the river, which limits its operations to six weeks each summer because of the Mezen's changing conditions.
"It's as if we're in the Great Depression that the U.S. suffered in the 1930s," said Kamenka's mayor, Sergei Mikheyev.
In Arkhangelsk, the province's capital and home to 356,000 Russians, ramshackle wood cabins more than a century old dot the city, their frames badly warped by the swampy, shifting ground. One of every 10 residents have no running water and must line up at neighborhood standpipes with buckets in hand, said Oleg Golovin, Arkhangelsk deputy mayor.
"People in Moscow don't know how people in the regions live," Golovin said. "They've got all the money but they don't know how to allocate this money."
Across Russia, a weak, aging electric grid holds the country back. But the system needs more than an overhaul, it needs to expand. It is an upgrade that the Kremlin says it needs to reach its goal of doubling the country's GDP within a decade.
In his state of the nation address last year, Putin laid out an ambitious array of objectives: 26 new nuclear power plants in the next 12 years; new hydropower stations in Siberia and the Far East; a boost in electricity production by two-thirds by 2020.
"In essence, our project amounts to a second electrification of the country," he said.
Outages stir protests
Power outages in the southern Russian city of Makhachkala last winter were severe enough to prompt thousands to take to the streets and protest authorities' handling of the crisis.
The outages occurred in the dead of winter, when subzero cold chilled the city. They spanned three months and left thousands without lights, heat or water virtually every day, for most of the day. Aging, overloaded electricity infrastructure was blamed for the crisis, though a dispute between utility companies over unpaid debt contributed to the cutbacks in power.
"We had to put on layers of clothes—coats, sweaters, socks, extra pants, everything we could find," said Angela Magomedova, 27, a waitress at a Makhachkala cafe who lives with her father, sister and two brothers in a downtown apartment.
"We went through 10 candles a night, and kept filling buckets, cooking pots, our bathroom sink with water whenever there was enough water pressure. It was like in the Middle Ages."
ajrodriguez@tribune.com
Copyright © 2008, Chicago Tribune
Provost
Nothing in the world can take the place of persistence. Talent will not; nothing is more common than unsuccessful men with talent. Genius will not; unrewarded genius is almost a proverb. Education will not; the world is full of educated derelicts. Persistence and determination alone are omnipotent. The slogan 'Press On' has solved and always will solve the problems of the human race.
Calvin Coolidge, President of the United States 1924-1929
