Ivanov froze to the floor because his flat was unheated. It should have been heated, of course, like all the apartments in the block where he lived; like all the blocks of flats in Irkutsk, in the third year of Putin’s stewardship.
Why did this happen? The explanation is simple. Throughout Russia, the heating pipes wore out because they had been in service since Soviet times, and those times have been gone for more than a decade, and thank God for that. For a long time the pipes leaked and leaked, and Communal Services, whose responsibility they are, did nothing about the situation. Communal Services is a centralized, state-run monopoly. Every month we pay a substantial sum for the agency’s nonexistent technical support, but it virtually ignore us, goes on not doing its job, and periodically demands a rate increase. The government gives way, but those employed by Communal Services are so used to doing nothing that nothing is what they continue to do.
The day finally came when the monopolized pipes, which had been leaking for so long and had not been repaired for just as long, burst. In the middle of winter, in severe frosts, it was discovered that there was no way to replace them. Communal Services had no money to pay for substitute pipes. Nobody knew what the money we had been paying the agency had been spent on. The communal facilities that had been in service since the Soviet period had finally deteriorated. The fact that there was nothing to replace them with was not to be expected, because we produce thousands of kilometers of all sorts of pipes every year. “The country has no funds available for this purpose,” the agents of Putin’s government announced with a shrug, as if the subject had nothing to do with them. “What do you mean, there is no money?” the opposition politicians parried feebly, making their customary show of standing up for the rights of the people. The president publicly ticked off the prime minister. And that was the end of the tale of the leaking pipes. The politicians agreed to differ. There was no scandal. The government did not resign. Even the appropriate minister did not step down. So what if people had to pace around their flats to keep warm, sleeping and eating in their winter coats and felt boots? The pipes would be repaired come summer.
The old man who died was hacked off the icy floor with crowbars by the other people living in his communal apartment and quietly buried in the frozen Siberian earth. No period of mourning was declared.
The president pretended that the tragedy had not happened in his country or to a member of his electorate. He remained aloof during the funeral, and the country swallowed his silence. To consolidate his position, Putin changed the subject. He gave a grim speech to the effect that terrorists were responsible for all of Russia’s woes and that the state’s priority was the destruction of international terrorism in Chechnya. Apart from that, national life would stumble on in its usual way. The people could not be allowed to reflect on the imperfection of the world as it developed before their eyes.
Soon it was spring. Putin began preparing for his reelection in 2004. There could be no regret at defeats suffered, only joy at victories. Accordingly, several new holidays were announced—in fact, an unheard-of quantity of them, including the observance of Lent.
The nearer summer came, the less people talked about the collapse of Russia’s heating infrastructure the previous winter. Citizens were called upon to rejoice at the preparations for celebrating the tercentenary of Saint Petersburg, and to take pride in the sumptuousness of refurbished czarist palaces, fit to dazzle the world’s elite with their splendor. And that is exactly what happened.
Putin invited the world’s leaders to Saint Petersburg, and the city was subjected to an intensive repainting of facades. The old man in Irkutsk, and even the old men in Saint Petersburg, were forgotten by everyone, including Putin.
“Mind you, if he had died in Moscow… ,” the metropolitan pundits would say, suggesting that there would have been a scandal and a half, and that the authorities would have replaced the pipes before next winter.
Gerhard Schröder, George W Bush, Jacques Chirac, Tony Blair, and many other VIPs proceeded to our northern capital and effectively crowned Putin as their equal. They were received with pomp and ceremony. They pretended to regard Putin with respect, and old Mr. Ivanov and the millions of Russian pensioners who can barely make ends meet weren’t given a thought. Putin’s reign reached its high point, and almost nobody noticed. He decided to base his power solely on the oligarchs, the billionaires who own Russia’s oil and gas reserves. Putin is friends with some oligarchs and at war with others, and the process is called statecraft. There is no place for the people in this scheme of things. Moscow represents life-giving warmth and light, while the provinces are its pale reflections and those who inhabit them might as well be living on the moon.
KAMCHATKA: THE STRUGGLE TO SURVIVE
Kamchatka is at the farthest reach of Russia. The flight from Moscow takes more than ten hours. The planes on the Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky route are basic and predispose you to muse on the immensity of our complicated motherland and on the fact that only a tiny proportion of our people live in Moscow, playing their political games, setting up their idols and knocking them down, and believing that they control this enormous country.
Kamchatka is a good place to recognize how remote the Russian provinces are from the capital. In fact, distance has nothing to do with it. The provinces live differently, they breathe a different air, and they are where the real Russia is to be found.
There are as many sailors living in Kamchatka as there are fishermen, indeed even more. Despite the massive cutbacks in the armed forces, the power base here remains the same: whoever the Kamchatka Flotilla of the Pacific Fleet votes for wins the elections.
As you might expect in a coastal town, there is a predominance of black and navy blue everywhere: reefer jackets, sailors’ vests, peakless caps. The only thing missing is the fleet’s legendary chic. The jackets you see are worn, the vests much laundered, the caps faded.
Alexey Dikiy is the commander of a nuclear ballistic missile submarine, the Vilioutchinsk. He is the elite of our fleet, and so is his vessel, part of the armament of the Kamchatka Flotilla.
Dikiy received an outstanding education in Leningrad—today’s Saint Petersburg—and then made brilliant progress up the career ladder as a highly talented officer. By the time he was thirty-four, he was a uniquely qualified submariner. In terms of the international military labor market, every month of service raised his value by thousands of dollars. Today, however, Alexey Dikiy, captain first class, is eking out a wretched existence; there is no other way of putting it. His home is a dreadful officers’ hostel with peeling stairwells, derelict and eerie. Everybody who could has left this place for the mainland, throwing military careers to the winds. The windows of many now-uninhabited flats are dark. This is cold, hungry, inhospitable terrain. People have fled mainly from the poverty. Captain Dikiy tells me that in good weather he and other senior naval officers go fishing in order to put a decent meal on the table.
On the table in his kitchen he has placed what our motherland pays in return for irreproachably loyal service. Dikiy has just brought a captain’s monthly rations home from his submarine in one of the fleet’s bedsheets. The rations consist of two packets of shelled peas, two kilograms of buckwheat and rice in paper bags, two cans of the cheapest peas, two cans of Pacific herring, and a bottle of vegetable oil.