[Marxism] Putin confronted by rising protest movement

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxx>]

NY Times, June 5, 2009
Putin Plays Sheriff for Cowboy Capitalists
By ELLEN BARRY

PIKALEVO, Russia — Prime Minister Vladimir V. Putin arrived here by 
helicopter on Thursday to publicly chastise the three businessmen who 
jointly own the city’s lone factory, which has not paid its workers for 
the last three months. He saved his sharpest criticism for Oleg 
Deripaska, once Russia’s richest man.

“I wanted the authors of what happened here to see it with their own 
eyes,” Mr. Putin said in a televised meeting inside the factory. 
“Addressing these authors, I must say that you’ve made thousands of 
residents of Pikalevo hostages of your ambition, your nonprofessionalism 
and maybe your greed. Thousands of people. It’s totally unacceptable.”

Mr. Deripaska hung his head like a schoolboy. Meanwhile, $1.5 million in 
back wages flowed into citizens’ bank accounts, and snaking lines 
appeared in front of cash dispensers all over the city.

Mr. Putin’s intervention in Pikalevo, population 22,000, comes as 
similar economic troubles unfold across Russia’s industrial heartland, 
despite the recent rise in world oil prices, which has relieved some 
budgetary pressures on the Kremlin. There are at least 400 Russian 
“mono-cities,” places like Pikalevo where the shuttering of a single 
factory could throw a whole population into crisis.

Since late last year, sociologists have debated whether these towns had 
the potential to explode — or whether Russians would quietly adapt to 
hardship, as they have in the past. For months, evidence has pointed to 
the latter.

But that calculus changed this week in Pikalevo, where many workers have 
been surviving on staples like cabbage soup and becoming progressively 
angrier. When the local utility shut off the city’s hot water over 
unpaid wages in mid-May, a group of them forced their way into the 
mayor’s office. On Tuesday, several hundred people blocked a federal 
highway for six hours; the next step, they said, was blocking the 
railroad, or a hunger strike.

During his visit, Mr. Putin took pains to say he did not approve of the 
workers’ protest actions, and even suggested that demonstrators had been 
paid to participate. But the police did not disperse Pikalevo’s 
demonstrators, mostly middle-age women who had logged decades at the 
factory. As they celebrated, citizens here said they could never have 
attracted Mr. Putin’s attention if it were not for the protests.

Pikalevo “is not dying, it’s already practically dead,” said Aleksandr 
Kruglov, 26. “People were so worried about their families that they went 
out into the street. I think it is the only way to defend yourself.”

That message could resonate in other industrial cities. Mikhail 
Viktorovich Shmakov, chairman of the Federation of Independent Trade 
Unions, said Thursday that the protest mood was rising in “many 
one-factory towns,” among them the cities of Tsvetlogorsk and Baikalsk, 
where 42 employees of a paper mill have begun a hunger strike over 
unpaid wages.

Svetlana Antropova, the energetic head of Pikalevo’s trade union, was 
more blunt in her assessment. “Other trade unions should behave like 
us,” she said.

Pikalevo is a consummate company town — its factory was built in 1959 
and the city grew around it — and that is the heart of its troubles.

After the collapse of the Soviet Union, the factory was split into three 
parts, which remained interdependent. In 2007, a company controlled by 
Mr. Deripaska, BaselCement, acquired the largest one, which produces 
alumina, a component of aluminum. Since the economic crisis struck, 
market prices alumina for have dropped so steeply that the company has 
been losing $300 for each ton it sold, said Svetlana Andreyeva, a 
spokeswoman for Mr. Deripaska.

In the fourth quarter of 2008 alone, she said, Mr. Deripaska’s business 
lost $12 million. She said the other two companies were profitable, but 
would not renegotiate their contracts to relieve the financial pressure 
on BaselCement.

BaselCement cut off production in January, creating a domino effect. The 
other two companies — producing cement and potash — could not operate 
independently of the alumina factory, and began making deep layoffs. 
Then BaselCement largely ceased paying its idled work force in February.

Mr. Deripaska’s company also operated the utility plant that provided 
Pikalevo’s heat and hot water, and on May 15 workers at the heating 
plant announced they would not work until they were paid and shut off 
the hot water.

Each move rippled through the city, where about half the working-age 
population was employed by the factory. Four of five restaurants have 
closed, and the fifth goes whole days without a customer. Families have 
fallen back on stores of canned goods and traditional dishes like stews 
made of stinging nettles. Lilia Krashenkova, 69, said people had become 
so desperate that they were stealing from one another’s gardens.

“We used to be a city; now we’re something worse than a village,” she 
said. “We are eating — excuse me — grass. It’s shameful.”

The protests got only sporadic coverage in the Russian news media until 
May 20, when a group of citizens burst into the meeting of an emergency 
committee at the mayor’s office. A camera crew from a regional 
television station, 100-TV, captured a passionate speech by a young 
mother, which can be accessed on the station’s Web site. Ms. Antropova, 
the trade union leader, said that film clip was a “turning point.”

Viktor Garmin, who spent much of Thursday waiting outside the factory 
for a chance to speak to Mr. Putin, said news media coverage had been 
crucial to the protests’ success, preventing a crackdown by the riot police.

“If they start beating demonstrators, everyone has a phone with a 
camera, and people can say, ‘Where is your democracy, Mr. Putin, Mr. 
Medvedev?’ ” said Mr. Garmin, 54, referring to President Dmitri A. 
Medvedev. He added that recent months had undermined local support for 
the government.

“By inertia people still trust them, but it is beginning to change,” he 
said. “But there is not so much enthusiasm.”

In his public meeting in the factory on Thursday, Mr. Putin pointed to a 
contract that would resume delivery of raw materials, allowing the 
50-year-old factory to lurch back to life. “Has Oleg Vladimirovich 
signed?” he asked, eyeing Mr. Deripaska. “I don’t see your signature. 
Come and sign.” When Mr. Putin emerged from the meeting, visibly angry, 
he promised a crowd of workers that production would resume shortly.

Most citizens said they had hoped he would announce the nationalization 
of the factory, returning to Pikalevo a taste of its Soviet glory days. 
But Ms. Antropova, more realistic, said her main concern was that the 
federal government monitor capitalists who hold sway over large populations.

“The government should bear responsibility not only for Deripaska but 
for every employer or citizen,” she said. “Otherwise, you may as well 
put Deripaska in charge of the government.”

---

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/jun/07/russia-putin-policies-protests
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

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."

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