Protests against Putin sweep Russia as factories go broke
Pastor Dale Morgan
Protests against Putin sweep Russia as factories go broke*
From Vladivostok to St Petersburg, Russians are taking to the streets
in anger over job losses, unpaid wages and controls on imported cars
* Luke Harding in Khabarovsk
* The Observer, Sunday 7 June 2009
Politicial demo against Vladimir Putin, Moscow
Russian police detaining a demonstrator at an unauthorised protest
against Prime Minister Vladimir Putin in Moscow. Photograph: ALEXANDER
NEMENOV/AFP/Getty Images
Russia's prime minister, Vladimir Putin, is facing the most sustained
and serious grassroots protests against his leadership for almost a
decade, with demonstrations that began in the far east now spreading
rapidly across provincial Russia.
Over the past five months car drivers in the towns of Vladivostok and
Khabarovsk, on Russia's Pacific coast, have staged a series of largely
unreported rallies, following a Kremlin decision in December to raise
import duties on secondhand Japanese cars. The sale and servicing of
Japanese vehicles is a major business, and Putin's diktat has unleashed
a wave of protests. Instead of persuading locals to buy box-like Ladas,
it has stoked resentment against Moscow, some nine time zones and 3,800
miles (6,100km) away.
"They are a bunch of arseholes," Roma Butov said unapologetically,
standing in the afternoon sunshine next to a row of unsold Nissans.
Asked what he thought of Russia's leaders, he said: "Putin is bad.
[President Dmitry] Medvedev is bad. We don't like them in the far east."
Butov, 33, and his brother Stas, 25, are car-dealers in Khabarovsk, not
far from the Chinese border. Their dusty compound at the edge of town is
filled with secondhand models from Japan, including saloons, off-roaders
and a bright red fire engine. Here everyone drives a Japanese vehicle.
Putin's new import law was designed to boost Russia's struggling car
industry, which has been severely battered by the global economic
crisis. It doesn't appear to have worked. In the meantime, factories in
other parts of Russia have gone bust, leading to rising unemployment,
plummeting living standards and a 9.5% slump in Russia's GDP in the
first quarter of this year.
An uprising that began in Vladivostok is now spreading to European
Russia. Last Tuesday some 500 people in the small town of Pikalyovo
blocked the federal highway to St Petersburg, 170 miles (270km) away,
after their local cement factory shut down, leaving 2,500 people out of
work. Two other plants in the town have also closed. The protesters have
demanded their unpaid salaries, and have barracked the mayor, telling
him they have no money to buy food. They have refused to pay utility
bills, prompting the authorities to turn off their hot water.
Demonstrators then took to the streets, shouting: "Work, work."
Putin visited Pikalyovo on Thursday and administered an unprecedented
dressing-down to the oligarch Oleg Deripaska, throwing a pen at him and
telling him to sign a contract to resume production at his BaselCement
factory in the town. He also announced the government would provide
£850,000 to meet the unpaid wages of local workers. "You have made
thousands of people hostages to your ambitions, your lack of
professionalism - or maybe simply your trivial greed," a fuming Putin
told Deripaska and other local factory owners. But Deripaska had had
little choice but to shut his factory, since Russia's construction
industry has now virtually collapsed.
Across Russia's unhappy provinces, Putin is facing the most significant
civic unrest since he became president in 2000. Over the past decade
ordinary Russians have been content to put up with less freedom in
return for greater prosperity. Now, however, the social contract of the
Putin era is unravelling, and disgruntled Russians are taking to the
streets, as they did in the 1990s, rediscovering their taste for protest.
The events of last week in Pikalyovo also set a dangerous precedent for
Russia's other 500 to 700 mono-towns - all dependent on a single
industry for their survival. When their factories go bust, residents
have no money to buy food. Seemingly, the only answer is to demonstrate
- raising the spectre of a wave of instability and social unrest across
the world's biggest country.
Most embarrassingly for the Kremlin, the latest demonstrations took
place just down the road from the St Petersburg Economic Forum, an
annual global event designed to showcase Russia's economic might and its
re-emergence as a global power. But after almost a decade of high oil
prices - until last summer - Russia has done little to invest in
infrastructure, or to help its backward, poverty-stricken regions.
The uprisings began last December when thousands gathered in
Vladivostok, demonstrating against the new law on car imports. To crush
the protest, and sceptical as to whether the local militia would do the
job, the Kremlin flew in special riot police from Moscow. The police
arrested dozens of demonstrators and even beat up a Japanese
photographer. In Khabarovsk, around 2,000 drivers staged their own noisy
protest, driving in convoy with flashing lights to the railway station.
Protesters dragged a Russian-made Zhiguli car to their meeting,
decorating it with the slogan: "A present from Putin". They signed it,
then dumped it outside the offices of United Russia, Putin's party.
Among locals, resentment against Moscow is building. "There is no
democracy in Russia. They promise a lot. But they don't listen," Butov
said. He added: "Medvedev isn't my president. He's never in the far
east." The Kremlin's intransigence could provoke a major backlash, he
predicted: "In the next few years there could be a war between the east
and west of Russia."
The protests have carried on, with demonstrators regularly taking to the
streets in Vladivostok, including last month. Russians in the far east
all own right-hand-drive vehicles, which are cheaper to import than the
left-hand-drive models used and manufactured in European Russia.
Until recently, the Kremlin had been relatively successful at concealing
the scale of the protests, imposing a virtual media blackout. But the
demonstrations have become more difficult to ignore. In April Kommersant
newspaper reported that angry motorists had called for Medvedev and
Putin to be blasted into space, while others waved a banner with the
playful slogan: "Putler kaputt!", apparently comparing Putin, Russia's
prime minister since last year, to Hitler. The authorities were not
amused and launched an investigation.
"Russians are a very forbearing people," Yuri Efimenko, a historian and
social activist in Khabarovsk said, sitting in a cafe close to the
town's Amur river, which forms part of the border between Russia and
China. "There isn't love towards the Kremlin, but there used to be
respect. Now that's gone," he said. He added: "People have become more
sceptical towards central power."
According to Efimenko, there is little danger Russia will have a
revolution. Instead of wanting to overthrow the Kremlin, most Russians
want Putin to turn up personally and solve their problems - an age-old
model in which Putin plays the role of benevolent tsar. Analysts believe
there is little possibility of an Orange Revolution in Russia, or much
appetite for western-style reform.
The big winner from the protests are the siloviki - the hardline
military-intelligence faction, who advocate more state control of
business, and want to get rid of the Kremlin's remaining liberals. The
big loser is Medvedev, the hapless president, who may be turfed out of
the presidency when his term expires in 2012.
In the meantime, Putin has been promoting Russia's indigenous car
industry. Last week he took to the wheel of his Soviet-era Volga Gaz-21
car, giving Russia's patriarch a lift. He also gave a £505m loan to help
AvtoVAZ, a struggling Russian car factory on the Volga.
The Butov brothers, however, have a unanimous view of Russian-made cars.
"They are crap," Roma said. He recalled how last month Khabarovsk
officials gave a free Lada to a war veteran, to celebrate the annual
Victory Day on 9 May. "The veteran drove it for a mile. Then it broke
down. He came to me and asked if he could swap it for a Japanese model."