This Is Why Valodya Is Hated By The Patrons Of "Our Democracy"

NYTimes  | 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.