Fear and Freezing in Vladivostok

When winter temperatures start to drop, keeping warm in Russia’s Far East means being remarkably resourceful—stuffing old pillow cases or clothing into empty cans, soaking them in vegetable oil, and lighting them on fire to make a miniature heater or cooking stove, for example. It means wearing outdoor clothing inside and whole families huddling together in one room. Sometimes it even means freezing to death.

The energy crisis in the maritime region of Primorye has reached panic proportions. The central heating system, like many such systems in Russia’s more remote regions, is a monolith of malfunctions—from rusted, cracked pipes that should have been replaced decades ago to the soaked, debilitated tape and rags used to hold them together. Fuel to operate the system is in seriously short supply. Local authorities are blaming the federal government and the energy provider for the crisis, while the federal government is blaming the local authorities for negligence. The people are less concerned with who’s at fault—they’re just plain cold.

Cold kills hundreds of people in Russia each year. On 27 November, two young girls in Artyom—8-year-old Sasha and 3-year-old Zhenya Kolchigin—died in their sleep of smoke inhalation after their electric blanket short-circuited. They were trying to keep warm in their unheated apartment.

In the villages of Khrustalny, Rudny, and Fabrichny in the Kavalerovsky province, about 18,000 people are experiencing temperatures close to zero in their homes. The central heating system for Russian cities is scheduled to begin on a certain date every year, regardless of the weather. Temperatures now are falling below freezing, and there is no heat. Since 27 November, three schools have been closed because the temperature in classrooms is only 4 degrees.

The inability to stave off the bitter cold has prompted many people to simply pack up and leave. Vladimir Sorokoput, deputy head of the local administration, said that only 30 percent of residents are still living in their homes. “Many have left for their dachas [summer cottages] or to relatives who have old wood stoves,” he said. Those who have nowhere else have moved into one room and sealed off the rest of their apartments, using small electric heaters to confine the heat to a smaller place and to keep warm in numbers.

HALF THE BATTLE

The province needs 100 tons of fuel per day to provide central heating to its residents. The prices for mazut (black oil) doubled this summer, jumping to 5,000 rubles per ton ($18)—an amount the area’s budget can’t handle. “The budget deficit is so huge that we can only buy fuel for three days, that’s all,” Sorokoput said. The regional administration recently sent 800 tons of fuel to assist the province—enough to sustain heating for little over a week.

But obtaining the fuel is only half of the battle. Getting the central heating system to function properly is perhaps even more challenging. “The pipes are already frozen, and they keep breaking,” Sorokaput said. With or without fuel, it will still take several weeks to repair them and start providing heat to homes.

In the meantime, citizens are growing increasingly fed up with what they see as the inability of the authorities at all levels to organize normal living conditions in the winter. Residents of 19 apartment blocks in the village of Uglovoye—40 kilometers north of Primorye’s capital Vladivostok—blocked the major highway leading north on 30 November to protest the lack of heat.

Some 60,000 people, including children, in the town of Arseniev, an industrial town 200 kilometers northeast of Vladivostok, still have no heating, according to Yevgenia Khokhlenkova, editor in chief of the local weekly The Business Ars. There is also no electricity for at least three hours every day in residential buildings.

In the town of Partizansk, just outside Vladivostok, every morning starts with a two- or three-hour blackout, according to Vera Karas, executive director of the Koruss sewing factory. “They turned on the central heating on 10 November, but the temperature never rose above 14 degrees. The radiators are still lukewarm,” she said. Due to frequent blackouts, her factory has sat idle on numerous occasions. “We suffer huge losses and we are filing a lawsuit against Dalenergo [the energy provider],” she said. Forty apartment blocks in Partizansk are not even hooked up to the heating system, and the temperature on Kutuzova, Suvorova, and Leninskaya streets is only five to six degrees, she said.

Even in Vladivostok, where the central heating is turned on, the average temperature in homes is 14o Celsius (57o F). “I am freezing, and I wear my fur coat even at home,” said Danila Vityuk, a 90-year-old World War II veteran.

POINTING COLD FINGERS

The regional prosecutor’s office has launched eight criminal cases against the local authorities, but, according to Sorokoput, it is not their fault. The real problems began in 1997 after the enactment of then-President Boris Yeltsin’s decree on household maintenance reform. Yeltsin decided that the federal authorities should cover 40 percent of utilities and maintenance and the local budget should take over 60 percent of the costs. However, the local budgets have never been able to absorb that cost. “Out of 35,000 residents in my county, 11,000 are pensioners earning only 600 rubles [about $21 per month]. People are just unable to pay for their apartments and utilities out of this sum,” Sorokoput said.

Konstantin Pulikovsky, presidential representative to the Far East, however, puts all the blame on the regional Primorye Governor Yevgeny Nazdratenko. At a December press conference in Moscow, Pulikovsky answered journalists’ questions as to who is responsible for the situation by referring to Nazdratenko: “There is no one else responsible other than the leader.” Nazdratenko was also summoned to Moscow to address the issue in front of the State Duma, Russia’s lower house of parliament, after the media began to take a great interest in the crisis.

His explanation was that the federal government owes his region 600 million rubles in debt for electricity and other utility services used by the military and other agencies. He also blamed high oil prices and unfair electricity tariffs that are much higher than in other regions of Russia.

In response, Anatoly Chubais, director of the Unified Electric Systems of Russia energy giant, accused the local authorities of negligence. Chubais said that tariffs for electricity should be increased to fund maintenance, and that the whole crisis can be explained by a crumbling pipe system and theft of metal parts and their subsequent resale on the black market. Theft, he said, accounts for the fact that some 90 percent of hot water leaks from the pipes into the ground before it ever reaches consumers. Chubais also said that, out of the 4.2 billion ruble debt to Dalenergo, the local energy monopoly, the bulk belongs to local users, and only 10 percent is the responsibility of federal agencies.

Following the State Duma discussions, the Finance Ministry decided to earmark two loans to Primorye to help ease the crisis. According to Finance Minister Alexei Kudrin, 70 million rubles will be assigned to cover the federal agencies’ energy debts, and 100 million rubles will be given for the purchase of additional fuel. Kudrin also said that in December Primorye would get 300 million rubles—though he did not say for what that money would earmarked.

In an interview with the independent Ekho Moskvy radio station, Nazdratenko accused the media of blowing the situation out of proportion, saying the crisis isn’t nearly as bad as most would think. “The heating in Vladivostok is turned to its maximum. One can always find one or two buildings where the pipes have broken or where tests showed poor readiness [for winter]. But no matter how hard the mass media tries to prompt the city to go on strike, the city doesn’t strike. And all those horrible pictures that have been shown do not correspond to the reality in Vladivostok.”

Both Nazdratenko and Vladivostok Mayor Yury Kopylov have insisted that the extensive coverage of the Primorye energy crisis is a “political order” or “information war launched by Moscow.” In the 29 November issue of the municipal newspaper Primorskie Vesti an entire page is devoted to describing the horrors of Russia’s freezing regions. “There’s no heat in Arkangelsk, Yoshkar-Ola, Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky, Barnaul, Blagoveshchensk, etc. We can name many more places, but nobody cares about those regions. They only care about [what’s happening in] Primorye,” the weekly wrote.

In the meantime, temperatures continue to drop, the federal aid flowing in is hardly enough to get to the heart of the problem—an archaic and impractical heating system—and the elderly in particular are wondering if they’ll make it through yet another freezing winter.  RL

Nonna Chernyakova is a freelance journalist based in Vladivostok, Russia. This article originally appeared in Transitions Online (www.tol.cz) and is reprinted here with permission.