'Crisis of Power' Leaves Russians Without Heat

By Sharon LaFraniere Washington Post Foreign Service Tuesday, December 19, 2000 ; Page A01

RUDNY, Russia -- Three weeks ago, Olesya Popava was awakened in the predawn darkness by the sobs of her 8-year-old daughter Nikka, huddled against her in the bed in their three-room apartment.

"My feet hurt," the third-grader wailed.

Her mother took one look and ran to a neighbor's to summon an ambulance.

"They were blue and swollen," Popava said. "The doctor said it is a reaction to the cold and the girl should be kept in warm conditions -- or she could lose both her feet."

A simple enough instruction, it would seem. But not in this mining village of 3,000 nestled in the hills of Russia's far eastern Primorye region. There is no heat here -- not even when the temperature falls to 13 below zero Fahrenheit, as it did Saturday. The school closed Nov. 27 after four students suffered frostbite and frozen pipes burst in the gymnasium. The preschool shut down when the pet fish froze in their bowls.

In a country blessed with one of the world's biggest oil and gas reserves, Primorye residents have suffered from severe fuel shortages for four years in a row, victims of what critics call staggering mismanagement and corruption in the administration of the region's governor, Yevgeny Nazdratenko.

The situation is being watched closely this year now that the Kremlin is occupied by President Vladimir Putin, who has pledged to crack down on corruption. Political observers in Primorye and elsewhere in Russia will scrutinize Putin's response to the crisis unfolding 5,500 miles and seven time zones from Moscow to see if he is as willing to take on a notorious and powerful governor as he is the media critics he has targeted.

"It is a check of whether [Putin's] intentions are serious, when he declared he would follow the dictatorship of law," said Yuri Rybalkin, head of the Primorye legislature's economic committee. "If he makes this decision, it will make other criminal, lazy officials in the regions start thinking about their deeds. And this will be the beginning of the stabilization of the social, political and economic situation in our country."

An estimated 33,000 residents in this region of 2.2 million people on the Sea of Japan are trying to warm themselves with small electric heaters and the steam from electric tea kettles. When they plug in too many heaters, as they do daily in places like Rudny, they are left without heat -- or light.

So far, Putin has confined his attacks on Nazdratenko to words. He recently characterized the lack of heat in Primorye as an "utter disgrace." The federal emergency ministry set last Friday as a deadline for the heat to be turned on, and it was restored to some areas. But in a half-dozen other towns and villages, specialists said they did not know how long it would take to repair the pipes that had burst and boilers that had cracked from the cold.

Cold is only Primorye's latest problem. Doctors and teachers have not been paid since August, newspapers are full of reports of killings attributed to organized crime, and foreign investors have fled. Elections, at least to the 700,000 citizens of the capital, Vladivostok, are a sham. Businessmen, judges and journalists say Nazdratenko rules like a dictator, intimidating and threatening all who dare oppose him.

Meanwhile, the region's economy, full of promise in the early 1990s, is crumbling. Investors say the Far East Shipping Co., one of Primorye's biggest companies, has lost $500 million -- fully half its assets -- under managers backed by Nazdratenko.

Under president Boris Yeltsin, who appointed Nazdratenko in 1993, the Kremlin tolerated the governor's excesses. The most common explanation for this is that Nazdratenko, nicknamed the "green governor" in Moscow because of the riches he has supposedly amassed, bought off enough central government officials to protect himself.

He is somewhat more exposed under Putin. One of his supposed protectors, media and oil tycoon Boris Berezovsky, left the country when Kremlin prosecutors tried to question him about whether he had skimmed profits from the state-owned airline, Aeroflot.

At a news conference this month, Putin's envoy to the Far East, Konstantin Pulikovsky, said "the bad work of the Primorye Territory governor's team" was directly to blame for the situation. "This is not an energy problem or a fuel crisis," he said. "It is a crisis of power."

Asked as he was leaving a banquet at a Vladivostok hotel why so many people lacked heat, Nazdratenko paused just long enough to reply: "There are not as many as you think." He told other reporters that no more than 800 families lacked heat.

Nazdratenko blames the crisis on the post-September rise in fuel prices and the central government's failure to pay its debts to the region. Putin's envoy, Pulikovsky, contends the Far East's 10 other regions are all owed about the same amount -- $7 million -- but were able to operate their boilers.

He said Nazdratenko should have signed supply contracts earlier, before the oil companies jacked up their rates. Now, authorities must not only pay high prices, but are struggling to repair many pipes that burst and boilers that cracked in the cold. The damage to the infrastructure is so extensive that despite the arrival of fuel trucks and the Kremlin's order to restore heat by Dec. 15, tens of thousands of people are still suffering in below-zero temperatures.

Last week, the official in charge of heating one city outside Vladivostok was arrested, and the administrator responsible for the district that includes Rudny was fired.

Eight hours by car northeast of Vladivostok, Rudny is heated -- like most Russian towns -- by a central boiler that pumps steam through a maze of pipes to radiators in apartments and classrooms.

The boiler is supposed to crank up every Oct. 15. But villagers have learned not to count on what they refer to sarcastically as "the so-called heating season" any more than they count on jobs, or on wages for their labor. Nothing in their village of two-story wooden apartment buildings and tiny cottages seems certain anymore.

The heart of the village was an ore extraction plant built into the hillside. Outmoded and depleted of ore, it closed three years ago, leaving most villagers jobless. Those with money moved out. The others "are panicking," said Olga Krisko, director of the preschool, which has lost two-thirds of its pupils because residents are leaving town. "They don't know what to do. They don't know how to survive. The village is dying."

It is a cold, comfortless death. One recent sunny morning, the village electrician, his face haggard, hurried down the snow-covered main road. The small electric heaters that villagers use to try to warm their apartments short out the electrical system two or three times a day, he said.

At the preschool, Krisko guided visitors past chunks of ice that formed when a pipe burst near the empty lockers. The water in a bucket she filled earlier that morning was already frozen. At the stately School No. 1, the halls were deserted when the bell rang at 9 a.m. Of 209 students, only two dozen 11th- and 12th-graders are allowed to study; any more would overflow the school's single heated classroom, warmed by a donated, crudely fashioned radiator. "We have never been in such a situation," said school principal Valentina Simakova. "I don't think our teachers and pupils deserve this fate."

One of the absent students was seventh-grader Nadia Evchuk. Weeks after a doctor diagnosed her frostbite, her fingers were still red, raw and dotted with sores. A small wooden thermometer, shaped like a house, displayed the temperature inside her apartment: 41 degrees, despite an ancient tea kettle steaming in the corner and a portable heater in the center of the room. In the corner of her grandfather's closet-size bedroom, there was a little pile of snow.

At the village's central heating plant, workers with dirt-blackened faces shoveled chopped-up logs into the boiler, housed inside a yellowish, peeling three-story cubicle next to a towering brown smokestack. Their goal was not to provide heat, only to keep enough heat flowing to prevent more pipes from splitting. "We cannot restart the whole system," said Mikhail Khisametsinov, the engineer in charge. "Everything is damaged. Our major pipe is down."

In the nearby village of Khrustalny, home to 2,500, it was no warmer. At the school, the assistant principal tried to type papers while seated on a tiny stool a few feet from a makeshift boiler installed near the cloakroom. Rusted pails of water surrounded the boiler. Parents had stacked wood four feet high against the wall. "We are ready to enter the next millennium," the assistant principal said. "But you see the way we live. It is medieval."

http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A7340-2000Dec14?language=printer

-- Martin Thompson (mthom1927@aol.com), December 19, 2000