Putin is Destroying Russian Culture for Cash

Paul Goble reports:

Just as he worked to disband Russia’s forest protection service, the consequences of which have now become all too obvious, Vladimir Putin is seeking the liquidation of the federal agency responsible for ensuring that Russian laws protecting historical and cultural monuments are observed, an action that may have equally far-reaching effects.

The proximate cause of this latest action, Kommersant suggested, was the opposition of Rosokhankultura, the agency’s Russian acronym, to the construction of the 403-meter Okhta Center for Gazprom in St. Petersburg, a project Putin supports but that most preservations argue would destroy the integrity of the North Capital’s landscape. But beyond that, Putin’s latest move, just like his destruction of the forest protection service five years ago, reflects his desire to promote business development at any cost and to push out of the way experts and activists who raise questions about the impact of what he and the Russian powers that be want to do.

Know-nothing Russians wallow in Ignorance

Boris Kagarlitsky, writing in the Moscow Times:

Since so many predictions about the future are negative, few people want to wait around to see whether they come true. Perhaps that is why the Russian authorities and society prefer to ignore information about impending problems. When the world began speaking about global warming, no countries in Europe treated the topic as lightly as we did. Russia believed that it was all much ado about nothing, a fabricated crisis invented by the West or leftist environmentalists.

Moscow’s responses were: 1. There is no climate crisis; 2. Humanity and the existing economic system are not responsible for it; 3. The crisis in no way affects Russia; and 4. Even if it does exist, it can only be to Russia’s benefit.

Not only did Russia make no attempt to help solve the global environmental crisis, it did everything to exacerbate the problem on its own territory.

While Russia burned, Putin Sang

A modern Russian fire truck rushing down a modern Russian road. courtesy of the New York Times

“Why the [expletive] do we need an innovation center in Skolkovo if we don’t have common firefighting vehicles?”

— Russian blogger top_lap

Hero journalist Yulia Latynina, writing in the Moscow Times:

Since the first wildfires started a month ago, 125,000 hectares of Russia’s forest have been destroyed in 17 regions, and 40 people have died.

Russia’s statistics on casualties from fires have always differed drastically from those in the West. For example, four firefighters died during wildfires in Washington state in 2001. Nine firefighters died in Colorado in 2002. Eleven firefighters died during Spain’s fires of 2005. Only one firefighter has died during this summer’s fires in Russia.

The Further Adventures of Vladimir Putin’s Gestapo

The Moscow Times reports (watch a video of the arrest described on YouTube):

Moscow region police flexed their muscle Wednesday in the conflict over the Khimki forest, detaining anti-deforestation campaign leader Yevgenia Chirikova in downtown Moscow in front of dozens of reporters.

Meanwhile, a Moscow region court has approved the arrest of two suspects in a daring attack last week on Khimki City Hall, despite what supporters said was shaky evidence against them.

Part of the Khimki forest is being cleared to make way for an $8 billion highway connecting Moscow and St. Petersburg. Opponents of the project say the highway could be built around the woods.

“Ten riot police officers grabbed me and dragged me away,” Chirikova said by phone after her questioning ended.

She had been speaking at the Independent Press Center, not far from the Kropotkinskaya metro station.

Russia, Melting

Jim Heinz, Moscow correspondent for the Associated Press, reports:

As Moscow’s record heatwave began, I threw open all the screenless windows in my apartment, hoping for some breeze — but mostly what I got was visits from bugs and, briefly, an inquisitive crow. Then, tendrils of the acrid smoke from the peat-bog fires surrounding the city wafted in, bringing nausea and dry-mouth.

The recommendation of Russia’s top doctor to hang wet sheets at the windows to block the smoke just makes the rooms more stifling. With no end in sight to the misery, another doctor’s advice may be the only one thing that brings relief — think as little as possible. In my 11 years in Moscow, the most frequent question from friends abroad has been “Aren’t the winters tough?” Maybe so. But Russians handle winter with aplomb — fur hats, afternoons in steamy bathhouses, long evenings gulping warming vodka around the table in toasty kitchens.

The country’s not geared for summer, however.

EDITORIAL: In Russia’s Tuapse, a Rising

EDITORIAL

In Tuapse, a Rising

Maybe, just maybe, when the story of the demise of Vladimir Putin and Dmitri Medvedev is written, the story will begin:  “It all started in Tuapse.”

This utterly charming hamlet by the sea (if you’ve not been, you should) rose defiantly to spit in the eye of Putin and Medvedev once again last week.  After the jump, photographs from the scene tell the tale better than any words could do.

More than two thousand brave Russian citizens poured into the streets, heedless of the Kremlin’s threats and its jackbooted thugs called “policeman” and demanded that their government stop killing them, slowing poisoning their environment with toxic chemicals as if their lives did not matter.

One protester declared:  “We address those troublemakers and environmental racketeers and those who sponsor them: Stop causing a nightmare for our terminal!  Think about where your children and grandchildren will work, and whether life be sufficient for all of us”

We can’t help but wonder:  How long before the same happens in Sochi?

CARTOON: Putin the Environmentalist

Putin asks: "How come it's so dirty around here?" The polar bear mumbles: "Oops . . ."

Source: Ellustrator.

Explanatory news item here (Ellustrator is saying Putin might as well ask the bears to do it).

Russians desperate for Toilet Paper: Won’t you help?

Paul Goble reports:

In the latest test of the old notion that those in power can survive almost anything except being laughed at, environmental activists in Moscow and St. Petersburg plan to collect toilet paper for Vladimir Putin since he apparently feels Russia has too little of it and is prepared to allow Lake Baikal to be contaminated in order to produce more.

On March 27th “For Baikal,” a coalition of Russian public organizations that seek to defend that environmental wonder from being contaminated by the restarting of the Baikalsk paper mill on its shores, staged demonstrations in Moscow and St. Petersburg to call attention to this issue.

The demands the group raised were not new. They seek to prevent the Baikalsk plant from sending waste products into Lake Baikal, to find alternative jobs for any workers displaced if the plant is closed permanently, and to prevent the burial of nuclear wastes in the region under the terms of a plan approved by Putin earlier this year. But in order to attract attention to their demands, organizers are calling on all those who will take back to bring not only “a good attitude” and posters or banners in defense of Lake Baikal but also “a roll of toilet paper” because Putin and his regime have suggested that the Baikalsk plant must be allowed to operate because Russia lacks enough of that essential product.

Putin’s Assault on the Russian Ecology

Paul Goble reports:

In the name of economic development and in pursuit of profit, Vladimir Putin, both as president and now as prime minister, has systematically dismantled Moscow’s earlier and limited environmental protection arrangements, a campaign that not only threatens various eco-systems there but also is driving down Russian life expectancies.

In an interview posted online, Aleksey Yablokov, an advisor to the Russian Academy of Sciences and president of the Green Russia Fraction, argues that countries like Japan which have cleaned up the environment have seen their life expectancies rise while those like Russia which have despoiled have seen just the opposite effect.

And he places the blame for Russia’s retreat on this front squarely on Vladimir Putin, who operating on the assumption that the country cannot afford environmental protection yet and pursuing profit above all else has destroyed even the limited environmental protection arrangements set up in Soviet times.

Russian Barbarism at Baikal

Vladimir Ryzhkov, writing in the Moscow Times:

At a pompous meeting of the board of regents of the Russian Geographic Society held on March 15, Prime Minister Vladimir Putin reaffirmed his January decision to permit the reopening of the Baikalsk Paper and Pulp Mills. In his words, Baikal’s problems should be resolved by the state and “without a lot of noise.” But if we ignore Putin’s advice and examine this question thoroughly from all sides, it becomes clear that Putin’s decision was completely incompetent.

The main argument for reopening the plant has been the desire to save jobs in Baikalsk, a small single-industry town built around the mill. But since 1966, when the mill first opened, it has been the main polluter of Lake Baikal. The mill sends about 5 tons of harmful emissions into the atmosphere annually, polluting up to 400 square kilometers of territory around Baikalsk, and builds up millions of tons of dangerous solid wastes along the shores of the lake.

There was a time when the plant was crucial to the town’s economy, employing 2,200 of the town’s 14,000 inhabitants. But the situation has fundamentally changed now. To restart the mills, 1,450 workers have been re-employed. What’s more, the local unemployment office listed only 700 people out of work in late January, and that number had decreased throughout last year at a time when the plant was not working.

EDITORIAL: Russia’s Toxic Kremlin

EDITORIAL

Russia’s Toxic Kremlin

We were awash last week in the toxic sludge that is the Moscow Kremlin’s effluent of dictatorship.

We looked left, and we saw the Kremlin’s insidious effort to build on a protected nature reserve in Sochi a palace for its new royalty, the KGB.

We looked right, and we saw the Kremlin’s malignant stormtroopers descending on the valiant environmental activists who dare to challenge the efforts of a dastardly Kremlin-friendly oligarch to pour filth in to Russia’s most valuable environmental jewel, Lake Baikal.

We looked right again, and we saw the Kremlin’s apes at work again, this time tossing people out onto the street and razing their homes in direct contravention of written promises not to do so, driving the desperate citizens to offer to defect to the USA and Germany.

EDITORIAL: Russia and the Environment

EDITORIAL

Russia and the Environment

Two items in the news last week made for an odd juxtaposition as an international forum on global warming got underway.

EDITORIAL: Kudrin Makes a Funny

EDITORIAL

Kudrin Makes a Funny

Oops! Kudrin makes a funny.

One thing surely nobody can deny about Putin’s Russia is that it’s always good for a laugh (if you can put out of mind momentarily the tortuous suffering of so many innocent children that results from the insane incompetence of the Kremlin these days).

A great example was the statement by Finance Minister Alexei Kudrin last week that Russia would increase its energy efficiency by 40% within the next decade.  We can’t remember when we’ve heard something come out of Russia that sounded quite so monumentally ridiculous.

The Plot against Plotina

Paul Goble reports that the Putin regime is now attempting to turn the extremism law, supposedly aimed at terrorists, towards crushing Russia’s infant environmentalist movement:

RusHydro, which builds and operates hydroelectric stations for the Russian government, has accused a group opposing a dam it wants to build in Krasnoyarsk kray of extremism, a charge that prompted interior ministry officers there to call in representatives of the website of the opposition yesterday for “an explanation.” But the charge and the expansive definition of “extremism” interior ministry officials have accepted has prompted the Russian section of the World Wildlife Fund, Greenpeace, and other environmental protection groups to denounce the company for engaging in such “black PR” against its opponents.

This battle goes back several years. If RusHydro goes ahead with its plans, some one million hectares of land will be flooded, destroying not only a unique natural habitat but also putting at risk the survival of a small ethnic community, the Evenks, who have lived there and depended on that environment from time immemorial.

Putin Gives Russia an Environmental Nightmare

Reuters reports:

Pesticides still poison people in the ex-Soviet Union almost two decades after the fall of the Communist superpower when farm managers liberally sprayed chemicals over fields, an environmentalist said in an interview.

Olga Speranskaya — who won an international award last week for her push to clean up the Soviet Union’s toxic legacy — also said the global economic crisis had diverted cash from cleaning up chemical waste, including from Soviet-era factories. “There is a lot of concern about toxic contamination. It’s getting worse and especially because of this financial crisis,” she told Reuters by telephone. “Our governments show a lack of political will to tackle chemical contamination and now they have one more excuse because of the financial crisis.”

Russia’s ecology ministry declined to comment.

Toxic Russia

Russian reporter Anastasia Ustinova reports in the San Fransisco Chronicle on Russia’s catastrophic envirnmental nightmare and courageous Russian who dares to demand better from the Kremlin:

The residents of Chapaevsk, a city in Central Russia, say the lakes near local chemical factories are dead from toxic waste, no longer freeze and contaminate the town’s water supply.

In the western Russian city of Dzerdjinsk, the mortality rate of children and adolescents is 50 percent higher than the national average because of pollution from chemical plants. The city is one of the world’s 10 most-polluted places, according to the Blacksmith Institute, a consulting firm in New York.

Such environmental disasters are well-known thanks to Olga Speranskaya, a petite, 46-year-old physicist who is the driving force behind a nongovernmental group that works to identify, reduce and safely store chemical stockpiles in Russia and the republics of the former Soviet Union. For her tireless work, she is being honored with the Goldman Environmental Prize.

EDITORIAL: Russia, Scorched by Global Warming, Ravaged by AIDS

EDITORIAL

Russia, Scorched by Global Warming, Ravaged by AIDS

Some Russophiles might be inclined to imagine that the phenomenon of “global warming” might be good for frigid, frozen Russia because it might thaw out vast swaths of unproductive territory and make them more fertile and habitable.

One problem with such a theory, of course, is that Russia’s population is dwindling by the day, expected to fall by one-third in the next half-century or so.  Which means that Russia can hardly manage to populate the territory it has now, much less new territory uncovered by global warming.

And now, scholar Paul Goble is reporting that in fact the whole notion is bogus.  He states:   “the Russian Federation will be more profoundly and negatively affected by global warming over the next 40 years than will any other country, a projection that Russian experts and officials say make it critical that Moscow take the lead both domestically and internationally to combat this trend.”

Global Warming Melts Russia

You might think that, being frozen, a nice warm-up due to global warming would be good for Russia, in contrast to many nations. But the Middle East Times begs to disagree:

Global warming could deal destructive blows to Russia’s defense infrastructure over the next 22 years, a top official said in Moscow last week.

Defense infrastructure, including key airfields, oil storage facilities and strategic oil reservoirs, could all be destroyed if the hard permafrost covering the ground year-round across Russia’s far north melts by 2030, Russia’s First Deputy Emergencies Minister Ruslan Tsalikov told the Federation Council, the upper chamber of the Russian parliament, Thursday.

Tsalikov described as a catastrophe the damage that would result from widespread permafrost melting, the RIA Novosti news agency reported.

Russia’s widespread coniferous forests also could be inundated by flooding and unprecedented warmer weather triggered by climate change, Tsalikov said.

“If the annual temperature rises by one or two degrees … the permafrost could decrease 50 percent,” Tsalikov said. The “risk of flooding would also double,” he said, according to the RIA Novosti report.

Global warming could also cost Russia its huge supplies of methane gas trapped beneath the permafrost, believed to be almost one third of the entire world’s reserves, RIA Novosti said.

The news agency said West Siberia’s permafrost was currently disappearing at the rate of 4 centimeters per year. That would cause the permafrost’s southern boundaries to retreat by an average of nearly 50 miles across northern Russia over the next 20 years, the report said.

Across the Arctic, levels of sea ice have shrunk by nearly 50 percent from 7.2 million square kilometers in 1979 to 4.3 million square kilometers in 2007, RIA Novosti said.

Tsalikov’s warnings mark a significant reversal from previous Russian complacency on the global warming issue. Russian scientists and top officials have readily acknowledged the reality of global warming for years, but they often described it as a welcome process because it freed up for human exploitation and habitation enormous areas of land and Arctic Ocean floor resources that previously have been inaccessible.

Russia also announced it is revising its strategy to concentrate more military resources in the far north to establish and enforce its claims to the vast reserves of oil, gas and other natural resources that it expects will be discovered in the Arctic.

However, Tsalikov’s comments reveal that Russian officials now recognize the process will not be cost-free and likely will involve catastrophic damage to existing military assets and infrastructure on an enormous scale.

Thanks for reading La Russophobe !

Don’t Let Toxic Russia Get it’s Claws into the Arctic

A scorching opinion piece from the Times of London exposes the true horror that underlies Russia’s arctic imperialism:

It was often said, by half-hearted western Soviet apologists back in the 1970s, that one should wonder not why Russia was so badly ruled, but marvel that it could be ruled at all.

I always assumed that this was a reference to the geographical magnitude of the country and its diffuse ethnic mix, rather than an insinuation that Russians themselves were genetically predisposed towards incompetent and vicious autocracies. Might have to think again, though. A good proportion of that geographical magnitude and ethnic mix got the hell out as soon as it could in the years following 1991 – leaving Russia smaller, more ethnically heterodox, but scarcely better ruled.

There’s another little nugget of information to wonder at with Russia: despite, or perhaps because of, possessing one of the lowest population densities in the world, it has wreaked easily the most environmental havoc and misery of any country on earth. From Kamchatka to the Gulf of Finland, Russia is still a land of acid rain, heavy metals and plutonium. Stick a pin in a map of Russia and you are likely to alight upon a poisoned river or the rusting hulk of a nuclear submarine, an irradiated steppe, some chemically defoliated birch trees or a gently glowing peasant with a life expectancy of 34 years.

Karl Marx would have been impressed, I suppose, that in the great battle between man and nature, the Soviet Union succeeded in wiping from the map almost an entire sea – the Aral, now largely a toxic desert – and turning the world’s deepest freshwater lake, Baikal, into a borscht of cadmium and mercury deposits. Shorn of its dumb and vindictive state socialism it was blithely assumed that Russia would improve, but there was nothing in Russia’s history to suggest this would be the case.

Now the Russians have planted a flag 13,980ft beneath the North Pole, claiming some half a million square miles of Arctic seabed for themselves (despite being signatories to the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea). There are rich oil and mineral deposits down there.

It is assumed by the Russian newspapers that this is the first blow in the battle for control of this bounty and that some day soon there will be a brave new closed city like Chelyabinsk or Krasnoyarsk rising from the snow up there – perhaps the usual tower blocks of grim concrete apartments surrounded by belching refineries, decomposing seal carcasses and woebegone polar bears.

It’s a pleasing, if naive, thought that the Arctic should belong to all of us and, by extension, none of us. But if it is to be divided up I think I would rather it fell into the hands of Chad than Russia. Maybe Moscow should be told that it can have the North Pole when the Aral Sea has been restored to its previous size and Siberia no longer has a half-life.

Thanks for reading La Russophobe !

Don’t Let Toxic Russia Get it’s Claws into the Arctic

A scorching opinion piece from the Times of London exposes the true horror that underlies Russia’s arctic imperialism:

It was often said, by half-hearted western Soviet apologists back in the 1970s, that one should wonder not why Russia was so badly ruled, but marvel that it could be ruled at all.

I always assumed that this was a reference to the geographical magnitude of the country and its diffuse ethnic mix, rather than an insinuation that Russians themselves were genetically predisposed towards incompetent and vicious autocracies. Might have to think again, though. A good proportion of that geographical magnitude and ethnic mix got the hell out as soon as it could in the years following 1991 – leaving Russia smaller, more ethnically heterodox, but scarcely better ruled.

There’s another little nugget of information to wonder at with Russia: despite, or perhaps because of, possessing one of the lowest population densities in the world, it has wreaked easily the most environmental havoc and misery of any country on earth. From Kamchatka to the Gulf of Finland, Russia is still a land of acid rain, heavy metals and plutonium. Stick a pin in a map of Russia and you are likely to alight upon a poisoned river or the rusting hulk of a nuclear submarine, an irradiated steppe, some chemically defoliated birch trees or a gently glowing peasant with a life expectancy of 34 years.

Karl Marx would have been impressed, I suppose, that in the great battle between man and nature, the Soviet Union succeeded in wiping from the map almost an entire sea – the Aral, now largely a toxic desert – and turning the world’s deepest freshwater lake, Baikal, into a borscht of cadmium and mercury deposits. Shorn of its dumb and vindictive state socialism it was blithely assumed that Russia would improve, but there was nothing in Russia’s history to suggest this would be the case.

Now the Russians have planted a flag 13,980ft beneath the North Pole, claiming some half a million square miles of Arctic seabed for themselves (despite being signatories to the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea). There are rich oil and mineral deposits down there.

It is assumed by the Russian newspapers that this is the first blow in the battle for control of this bounty and that some day soon there will be a brave new closed city like Chelyabinsk or Krasnoyarsk rising from the snow up there – perhaps the usual tower blocks of grim concrete apartments surrounded by belching refineries, decomposing seal carcasses and woebegone polar bears.

It’s a pleasing, if naive, thought that the Arctic should belong to all of us and, by extension, none of us. But if it is to be divided up I think I would rather it fell into the hands of Chad than Russia. Maybe Moscow should be told that it can have the North Pole when the Aral Sea has been restored to its previous size and Siberia no longer has a half-life.

Thanks for reading La Russophobe !

Don’t Let Toxic Russia Get it’s Claws into the Arctic

A scorching opinion piece from the Times of London exposes the true horror that underlies Russia’s arctic imperialism:

It was often said, by half-hearted western Soviet apologists back in the 1970s, that one should wonder not why Russia was so badly ruled, but marvel that it could be ruled at all.

I always assumed that this was a reference to the geographical magnitude of the country and its diffuse ethnic mix, rather than an insinuation that Russians themselves were genetically predisposed towards incompetent and vicious autocracies. Might have to think again, though. A good proportion of that geographical magnitude and ethnic mix got the hell out as soon as it could in the years following 1991 – leaving Russia smaller, more ethnically heterodox, but scarcely better ruled.

There’s another little nugget of information to wonder at with Russia: despite, or perhaps because of, possessing one of the lowest population densities in the world, it has wreaked easily the most environmental havoc and misery of any country on earth. From Kamchatka to the Gulf of Finland, Russia is still a land of acid rain, heavy metals and plutonium. Stick a pin in a map of Russia and you are likely to alight upon a poisoned river or the rusting hulk of a nuclear submarine, an irradiated steppe, some chemically defoliated birch trees or a gently glowing peasant with a life expectancy of 34 years.

Karl Marx would have been impressed, I suppose, that in the great battle between man and nature, the Soviet Union succeeded in wiping from the map almost an entire sea – the Aral, now largely a toxic desert – and turning the world’s deepest freshwater lake, Baikal, into a borscht of cadmium and mercury deposits. Shorn of its dumb and vindictive state socialism it was blithely assumed that Russia would improve, but there was nothing in Russia’s history to suggest this would be the case.

Now the Russians have planted a flag 13,980ft beneath the North Pole, claiming some half a million square miles of Arctic seabed for themselves (despite being signatories to the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea). There are rich oil and mineral deposits down there.

It is assumed by the Russian newspapers that this is the first blow in the battle for control of this bounty and that some day soon there will be a brave new closed city like Chelyabinsk or Krasnoyarsk rising from the snow up there – perhaps the usual tower blocks of grim concrete apartments surrounded by belching refineries, decomposing seal carcasses and woebegone polar bears.

It’s a pleasing, if naive, thought that the Arctic should belong to all of us and, by extension, none of us. But if it is to be divided up I think I would rather it fell into the hands of Chad than Russia. Maybe Moscow should be told that it can have the North Pole when the Aral Sea has been restored to its previous size and Siberia no longer has a half-life.

Thanks for reading La Russophobe !

Don’t Let Toxic Russia Get it’s Claws into the Arctic

A scorching opinion piece from the Times of London exposes the true horror that underlies Russia’s arctic imperialism:

It was often said, by half-hearted western Soviet apologists back in the 1970s, that one should wonder not why Russia was so badly ruled, but marvel that it could be ruled at all.

I always assumed that this was a reference to the geographical magnitude of the country and its diffuse ethnic mix, rather than an insinuation that Russians themselves were genetically predisposed towards incompetent and vicious autocracies. Might have to think again, though. A good proportion of that geographical magnitude and ethnic mix got the hell out as soon as it could in the years following 1991 – leaving Russia smaller, more ethnically heterodox, but scarcely better ruled.

There’s another little nugget of information to wonder at with Russia: despite, or perhaps because of, possessing one of the lowest population densities in the world, it has wreaked easily the most environmental havoc and misery of any country on earth. From Kamchatka to the Gulf of Finland, Russia is still a land of acid rain, heavy metals and plutonium. Stick a pin in a map of Russia and you are likely to alight upon a poisoned river or the rusting hulk of a nuclear submarine, an irradiated steppe, some chemically defoliated birch trees or a gently glowing peasant with a life expectancy of 34 years.

Karl Marx would have been impressed, I suppose, that in the great battle between man and nature, the Soviet Union succeeded in wiping from the map almost an entire sea – the Aral, now largely a toxic desert – and turning the world’s deepest freshwater lake, Baikal, into a borscht of cadmium and mercury deposits. Shorn of its dumb and vindictive state socialism it was blithely assumed that Russia would improve, but there was nothing in Russia’s history to suggest this would be the case.

Now the Russians have planted a flag 13,980ft beneath the North Pole, claiming some half a million square miles of Arctic seabed for themselves (despite being signatories to the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea). There are rich oil and mineral deposits down there.

It is assumed by the Russian newspapers that this is the first blow in the battle for control of this bounty and that some day soon there will be a brave new closed city like Chelyabinsk or Krasnoyarsk rising from the snow up there – perhaps the usual tower blocks of grim concrete apartments surrounded by belching refineries, decomposing seal carcasses and woebegone polar bears.

It’s a pleasing, if naive, thought that the Arctic should belong to all of us and, by extension, none of us. But if it is to be divided up I think I would rather it fell into the hands of Chad than Russia. Maybe Moscow should be told that it can have the North Pole when the Aral Sea has been restored to its previous size and Siberia no longer has a half-life.

Thanks for reading La Russophobe !

Don’t Let Toxic Russia Get it’s Claws into the Arctic

A scorching opinion piece from the Times of London exposes the true horror that underlies Russia’s arctic imperialism:

It was often said, by half-hearted western Soviet apologists back in the 1970s, that one should wonder not why Russia was so badly ruled, but marvel that it could be ruled at all.

I always assumed that this was a reference to the geographical magnitude of the country and its diffuse ethnic mix, rather than an insinuation that Russians themselves were genetically predisposed towards incompetent and vicious autocracies. Might have to think again, though. A good proportion of that geographical magnitude and ethnic mix got the hell out as soon as it could in the years following 1991 – leaving Russia smaller, more ethnically heterodox, but scarcely better ruled.

There’s another little nugget of information to wonder at with Russia: despite, or perhaps because of, possessing one of the lowest population densities in the world, it has wreaked easily the most environmental havoc and misery of any country on earth. From Kamchatka to the Gulf of Finland, Russia is still a land of acid rain, heavy metals and plutonium. Stick a pin in a map of Russia and you are likely to alight upon a poisoned river or the rusting hulk of a nuclear submarine, an irradiated steppe, some chemically defoliated birch trees or a gently glowing peasant with a life expectancy of 34 years.

Karl Marx would have been impressed, I suppose, that in the great battle between man and nature, the Soviet Union succeeded in wiping from the map almost an entire sea – the Aral, now largely a toxic desert – and turning the world’s deepest freshwater lake, Baikal, into a borscht of cadmium and mercury deposits. Shorn of its dumb and vindictive state socialism it was blithely assumed that Russia would improve, but there was nothing in Russia’s history to suggest this would be the case.

Now the Russians have planted a flag 13,980ft beneath the North Pole, claiming some half a million square miles of Arctic seabed for themselves (despite being signatories to the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea). There are rich oil and mineral deposits down there.

It is assumed by the Russian newspapers that this is the first blow in the battle for control of this bounty and that some day soon there will be a brave new closed city like Chelyabinsk or Krasnoyarsk rising from the snow up there – perhaps the usual tower blocks of grim concrete apartments surrounded by belching refineries, decomposing seal carcasses and woebegone polar bears.

It’s a pleasing, if naive, thought that the Arctic should belong to all of us and, by extension, none of us. But if it is to be divided up I think I would rather it fell into the hands of Chad than Russia. Maybe Moscow should be told that it can have the North Pole when the Aral Sea has been restored to its previous size and Siberia no longer has a half-life.

Thanks for reading La Russophobe !

Annals of Neo-Soviet Barbarism: Now, Russia Physically Attacks Environmentalists

The Moscow Times reports:

Masked attackers armed with metal rods and baseball bats raided a camp of environmental protesters near an east Siberian uranium enrichment plant over the weekend, beating one person to death and injuring several others.

The attack appeared to be linked to simmering hostilities between local nationalist and anti-fascist groups. But it is bound to stoke worries about a resurgence of nationalist groups, as well as the work of nongovernmental organizations critical of the government.

About 15 darkly dressed attackers stormed the camp of 25 activists in a woodland clearing near the Angarsk Electrolysis Chemical Complex at about 5 a.m. Saturday, said one of activists who was on night patrol at the time. “I tried to wake everybody up so we could start a coordinated defense,” said the activist, Maxim, 21, who refused to give his last name because he said police had asked the activists not to speak to the media.

Shouting nationalist slogans, the attackers knocked down tents and dragged out activists before beating them with metal rods, baseball bats and sticks, Maxim said, speaking on a friend’s cell phone because the attackers stole his. One activist, Ilya Borodayenko, 26, died of severe head injuries in a hospital a few hours later. “I saw blood coming out of his mouth and ears,” Maxim said. “The doctors told me he had a punctured lung as well as a cracked skull.” He said another activist — whom he only identified as Marina, 25 — suffered multiple fractures to her right arm after being beaten on the face and arms. He sent a reporter several photographs of the woman being treated by a white-coated doctor at the camp shortly after the attack. Blood is seen glistening through the woman’s matted hair, and her right arm is bound in a makeshift splint. “In between the blows, they shouted, ‘Anti-Antifa!’ and, ‘Do you like being in Antifa now?'” Maxim said.

Several of the activists are also members of a vocal anti-fascist group called Antifa, and this probably motivated Saturday’s attack, Maxim said. The activists represented three environmental organizations, including Defending the Rainbow and Autonomous Action. Two activists remained hospitalized in stable condition Sunday, Maxim said. Eight suspects, aged 18 to 22, were in custody Sunday, Interior Ministry spokesman Valery Gribakin said. He suggested that the motive for the attack might have been theft, saying one of the suspects had been detained carrying a backpack with several cell phones. The suspects will be charged with hooliganism and intentional grievous bodily harm resulting in death, Gribakin said. A hooliganism conviction carries a maximum punishment of seven years in prison, while the second, more serious charge has a maximum sentence of 15 years in prison. Gribakin promised to bring all the attackers to justice. “Work will not stop even for one minute,” he said, Interfax reported.

Irkutsk regional police, however, are reluctant to classify the attack as a nationalist-related crime, the activists said. “The local police want to present the attack as ordinary hooliganism. They very grudgingly wrote down that we told them the attackers shouted slogans against anti-fascists,” said Igor Kozlov, a member of Autonomous Action, Ekho Moskvy radio reported. “Many people flatly deny the existence of neo-Nazis in their city,” Kozlov said. Authorities were keeping an eye on the camp before the attack, and several police officers stopped by the day before the attack to search the tents, Maxim said. Police suspected that one or more of the activists was involved in spraying graffiti on municipal buildings calling for a halt to nuclear waste processing, he said. Several members of the camp refused to present their documents because police failed to produce a search warrant, Maxim said. No one was charged and the police left, he said.

Repeated calls to local police and the hospital went unanswered Sunday.

Mikhail Kreindlin, head of Greenpeace in Russia, and Alexander Brod, director of the Moscow Bureau for Human Rights, said it was too early to start pointing fingers in Saturday’s attack. But Brod said authorities in the past have hired local criminal groups to silence dissent and write it off as hooliganism. Brod said he had asked associates in Irkutsk to make sure the police investigation is conducted properly and is not allowed to fizzle out.

Despite the attack, the activists were hoping to renew their protest with a new camp Thursday. They accuse authorities of illegally making money at the Angarsk Electrolysis Chemical Complex by allowing foreign companies to send spent fuel there for reprocessing. In addition to reprocessing, the plant has been enriching uranium for the past 50 years for use in nuclear power plants. Officials deny importing spent fuel, even though a law that came into force in 2001 allows it. The plant is right outside Angarsk, a city of 260,000 located 100 kilometers west of the southern tip of Lake Baikal, the world’s largest freshwater lake and a symbol of Russia’s environmental heritage.

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GAZPROM, Quite Literally, Stinks

The Moscow Times reports on the Putin adminstration’s laughably hypocritical environmental policy. Only foreigners, it seems, can be polluted. How neo-Soviet can you get?

For several months last year, Shell fought off daily accusations that its construction of the giant Sakhalin-2 oil and gas project was causing unspeakable damage to the land and animals of the far eastern island. Then, at a Dec. 21 Kremlin ceremony, welcoming Gazprom as a majority shareholder into the foreign-owned project, President Vladimir Putin declared that all of the island’s environmental problems had been resolved. Yet with the summer thaw allowing for increased inspection of the project’s work sites, environmentalists are now warning that Gazprom has done nothing to ease the damage and have renewed calls for project operator Sakhalin Energy to halt its construction work.

“I cannot say that anything is OK. Everything is probably worse than it was before,” said Dmitry Lisitsyn, the head of Sakhalin Environment Watch, an environmental group based on the island.

The construction of an 800-kilometer pipeline that runs the length of the island is nearly completed, and Sakhalin Energy announced Thursday that it had inaugurated a third offshore drilling platform. It is the project’s later stages that will see subcontractors confronted with the island’s most difficult and sensitive terrain, including steep mountain slopes prone to landslides and mudflows in the face of intense construction work, environmentalists say. “It’s like pupils who are doing their homework and leave the most difficult lesson for the end,” Lisitsyn said by telephone from Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk, the island’s capital.

The Natural Resources Ministry’s prolonged campaign against Shell and its Japanese partners, Mitsui and Mitsubishi, was widely seen as a means of putting pressure on the firms to sell a majority stake in the project to Gazprom. After the sale of a stake of 50 percent plus one share in Sakhalin Energy was finalized April 18, the state’s charges of environmental damage — led by Oleg Mitvol, the deputy head of the ministry’s environmental watchdog, appeared to simply melt away. The environmental campaign against Sakhalin Energy prompted sharp criticism from Western diplomats and analysts, who said the state had failed to act transparently as it began its moves to bring all major oil and gas projects under majority state control.

“Unfortunately, immediately after Gazprom entered the project, the activity of [the environmental watchdog] was significantly diminished,” said one environmentalist involved in the campaign, who asked not to be identified. “It was just a show, to scare the companies and put pressure on them,” the activist said. “It was very clear to me that it was a short-term but very noisy campaign against Shell. But we had no choice but to cooperate with them, and they knew it,” the activist said. “It would have been wrong if we had stayed out of it.”

Environmentalists have long been trying to draw attention to the problems on and around Sakhalin, a mountainous island whose rivers are home to spawning salmon and whose surrounding waters provide the only feeding ground for the region’s endangered gray whale. This summer, the whales began arriving June 20, the day after the winter’s last ice melted from the nearby Sea of Okhotsk. Environmentalists still cannot say for certain where the creatures, who reach an average of 22 meters in length, spend the winter months, but they flock to the sea each summer to feed on its crustaceans.

Activists with the World Wildlife Fund and the International Fund for Animal Welfare, both of which maintain observers on the island, say the noise of recent construction work has begun to scare the whales away. “The company made a commitment they would keep the noise under a certain level to prevent the impact on whales,” but it hasn’t, said Grigory Tsidulko, a marine mammal campaigner with IFAW. “This summer we started to hear lots of noise in the area — this means there is even more noise underwater,” he said. So far this summer, nine whales at most have been observed in the area, Tsidulko said. “Usually at this time of year we can count 12 to 16, but this summer was unusual in that the ice disappeared later than usual. We hope there will be more,” he said. Sakhalin Energy spokesman Ivan Chernyakhovsky said the company was committed to protecting the island’s environment. “Environmental responsibility is one of our top priorities,” Chernyakhovsky said. “Nothing in our approach has changed” since Gazprom’s entry into the consortium, he added. “We are still committed to minimizing any negative impact that might possibly be there.” On Thursday, Sakhalin Energy said it had completed the installation of its third production platform at the site. “With this milestone, construction operations are nearing completion,” the company said in a statement.

“The entire operation was executed to the highest safety standards and within the established noise levels, without any impact on the Western Gray Whale population,” it said. A Gazprom spokesman declined to comment, referring all questions to Sakhalin Energy. The $20 billion project is due to begin exporting liquefied natural gas in 2008, sending key energy resources to markets in Asia and North America. Gazprom’s entry into the world’s largest integrated oil and gas project was seen as a strong symbol of the state’s desire to reassert its control over energy resources, and signaled the company’s desire to enter the lucrative LNG market. Yevgeny Shvarts, the head of WWF Russia, said Gazprom was ill equipped to deal with the environmental problems on the island. “It looks like Gazprom has some internal managerial problems — getting actual and serious answers to anything is difficult, sometimes impossible,” he said.

Another environmental activist involved in the campaign to save the gray whale agreed. “Gazprom has told us, ‘We haven’t yet communicated because we still don’t know how to deal with Sakhalin Energy,'” said the activist, who also asked not to be identified. Several environmentalists interviewed for this article requested that they not be identified, citing the political sensitivity of the matter. Shvarts said Mitvol’s agency was continuing to take an interest in the environmental situation on Sakhalin. “Oleg Mitvol has expressed the same worries as we have. At the same time we don’t like to look like the hands of [the environmental watchdog],” he said. “Our goal is to protect the whales, and we don’t like that it can be used for other purposes, like dishonest competition,” he said.

Mitvol, who has championed his role as the country’s leading environmental crusader, insisted that he would continue to be involved. “Our inspectors on Sakhalin are working with WWF and IFAW, particularly regarding the problems with whales,” he said. “Of course we deal with Gazprom,” he said, when asked how the new shareholder was responding to the problems there. “They’ve explained that the noise has been at the level that was agreed with the project.” On Friday, members of IFAW and WWF met with Sakhalin Energy and Gazprom representatives to discuss the issue of the endangered gray whale. One participant said Gazprom had invited members of the environmental group Vernadsky Fund to the meeting and had encouraged them to take a leading role on the environmentalists’ side. The fund, established in 1995, counts Gazprom among its founding members. No one at the fund could be reached for comment Friday.

Meanwhile, the activists continue to push Western banks to avoid funding the project. The European Bank for Reconstruction and Development dropped talks on providing loans for the project in January, just three weeks after Gazprom’s entry into the project. “There’s a question if this damage is permanent,” said Lisitsyn, speaking in particular of the damage the mudflows have caused to the islands’ hundreds of rivers and streams. “Unique environmental conditions demand unique construction solutions, and the company is not doing this,” he said, warning of the possibility that the pipeline could rupture once the oil begins to flow. Nikolai Kazakov, the deputy director of the Far East Geological Institute on Sakhalin, also warned of the potential for pipeline ruptures. “There are very big problems with the protection of the pipeline’s construction,” Kazakov said by telephone from the island. “The company’s policies in relation to this will lead to catastrophe.”

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