“Patriotism?” A young captain second class from Rybachie smiles wryly. He is an officer on the submarine Omsk. “Patriotism is something you have to pay for. It is time to put an end to this nonsense, this playing at being paupers. We need to get back on our feet, not limp through life like Dikiy. He is a commander, yet he always has cheap sneakers on his feet and drinks cheap brandy. The way the fleet is being treated is out of order, and the only way to respond is by making up your own rules.”
“What do you mean by that?”
By “making up your own rules” the young officer means making a living by fair means or foul. He says that all the officers of his age are quietly trading whatever they can get their hands on under the counter.
“I get fish and caviar brought to my home now,” he says proudly. “Two years ago I was bartering spirits I’d stolen from the ship, and people had no respect for me then.”
“For the young officers a good standard of living is beginning to be the main reason for being in the navy,” mourns Vice Admiral Dorogin. In his opinion, any thought of responding to state neglect by “making up your own rules” is just as fatal for anybody in the service as questioning a commanding officer’s orders.
OLD LADIES AND NEW RUSSIANS
Two old ladies, Maria Savina, a former champion milkmaid, and Zinaida Fenoshina, a former champion cowherd, stand in the middle of the forest, angrily shaking upraised sticks in the direction of a bulldozer. The machine is roaring away at full throttle, and they are shouting as loudly as they can for all to hear: “Be off! Away with you! How much longer must we put up with this sort of thing?”
From behind ancient trees, surly security guards appear and surround them as if to say, “Leave now while you still can, or we shoot.”
Nikolai Abramov——a retired veteran, the village elder, and the organizer of the demonstration—spreads his arms. “They want to drive us off our own land. We shall defend it to the death. What else is left?”
The theater of operations is on the outskirts of the village of Pervomaiskoe, in the Narofominsk District of Moscow Province. The epicenter is the grounds of an old estate formerly owned by the Berg family. It dates from 1904 and is today protected by the state as a natural and cultural heritage site.
When they have calmed down a little, the old people shake their heads sadly. “There, in our old age, we’ve joined the Greens. What else can we do? There’s only us to defend our park from this scum. Nobody else is going to.”
The scum are New Russians who have hired soulless developers to erect thirty-four houses right in the middle of the century-old Berg Park. Maria and Zinaida are members of a special ecological group created by the village assembly of Pervomaiskoe to organize direct action against the despoilers of the environment.
Paying little attention to the Green activists, the trucks continue to drive and the bulldozer to roar among the precious ancient trees. After an hour’s work, they have cut a swath through the woodlands. It is to be the central avenue of the future cottage settlement. Pipes, reinforcement wire, and concrete slabs lie all over the place. The building work, in full swing, is being carried out as if to maximize damage to the natural environment. Already 130 cubic meters of timber have been taken as rare tree species were felled. Wherever you look, there are notches on cedars and firs, marking them for slaughter. The machinery brazenly wrecks the environment, churning up layers of clay from the depths and pitilessly burying, deep beneath it, the ecosystem of the forest floor that has formed over the years.
“Have you heard of the Weymouth pine?” Tatyana Dudenis asks. She is head of the ecological group and a research associate at one of the region’s medical institutes. “We had five specimens growing in the grounds of our heritage park. They were the only ones in the whole of Moscow Province. The Bergs made a hobby of propagating rare tree species. Three of these Weymouth pines have now been sawn down for no better reason than that the developers wanted to run a street for their new estate just where the trees were growing. Other precious species are under threat: the Siberian silver fir and larch, the white poplar, a white cedar, Thuja occidentalis, the only specimen in Moscow Province. In just the last three days we have lost more than sixty trees. It wouldn’t be so bad if they were destroying the less outstanding or sickly specimens, but they have quite a different approach. They decide where they want to construct a road and cut down anything that’s in the way. They decide where they want to put up a cottage and clear the site, taking no account of the rarity of the trees they are destroying. The forest here is legally classified as Grade One, which means it is against the law to touch these trees. To obtain permission to fell them, you have to demonstrate ‘exceptional circumstances’ and support your application with a recommendation from the State Ecological Inspectorate. For every such hectare—about two and a half acres—you need the express permission of the federal government.”
When the fate of Berg Park was being decided, no such applications were submitted. The Pervomaiskoe Greens lodged writs with the Narofominsk court to bring the nouveaux riches into line. They petitioned Judge Yelena Golubeva, who had been assigned the case, for an injunction to halt the building work until the hearing, since otherwise, after the trees had been felled, a verdict in their favor would be of little use.
However, as we have seen, this is the age of the oligarchs in Russia. Every branch of government clearly understands the language of rustling banknotes. Judge Golubeva did not even consider granting an injunction to halt the construction and, when the work was already in progress, deliberately failed to conduct a hearing.
Nearly all those unique trees were felled.
Valerii Kulakovsky emerges from the posse of guards. He is the deputy director of the Promzhilstroy Company, which calls itself a cooperative of home builders. Kulakovsky advises me to stay out of this dispute. He says that some highly influential people in Moscow have an interest in the estate; they are going to live here. The information is soon confirmed. I discover that the “cooperative” has managed to acquire property rights over the Berg hectares, which, according to the law, are the property of the nation. The takeover is illegal.
Kulakovsky just shrugs and tries to explain his position. “We are very tired of these endless demonstrations by the villagers. What do you expect me to do now, when I have put so much money into this, bought the land, started building? Who do you think is going to give it all back to me?”
He also says that the developers have no plans to back down.
They did not back down. Berg Park ceased to exist. The felling of our most precious forests in the interests of the oligarchs and their companies goes on throughout the land.
Not long before the Green old ladies of Pervomaiskoe mounted the desperate defense of their ancient park, the Supreme Court of Russia considered the same matter of principle as it applied to Russia as a whole. The case was known as the Forest Issue.
“Bear in mind the interests of the property owners. They have acquired the land, built the houses, and now you want to turn everything back.” The lawyer in the Supreme Court case repeated, almost word for word, what Kulakovsky had said.
The ecologist lawyers Olga Alexeeva and Vera Mishchenko, who were defending the interests of society against the caprices of the New Russians, had a different take on the matter: “Every citizen of this country has the right to life and enjoyment of the national heritage. If we are truly citizens of Russia, then it is our duty to ensure that future generations receive no less a national heritage than today’s generations enjoy. In any case, how can we take seriously property rights that have been acquired illegally?”