Thieves Dice with Death to Steal Power from Russia Cable Thefts Are Putting Nation's Lights Out, Reports Marcus Warren in Koza The Daily Telegraph London ( July 21, 2001 )

THE TOOLS of the trade are basic: a pair of pliers and an axe or a spade with a wooden handle will do. The risk is great and the rewards are pitiably small.

Poverty-stricken thieves are dicing with death by plundering electricity cables from the national grid to sell the metal in them.

For the middlemen and "Mr Bigs", the pickings from exporting copper and aluminium to the West can be rich, but those who do the pilfering earn only enough for a bottle or two of vodka.

The result of the illicit trade is that lights are going out in villages and small towns all over the country, deepening the misery in the provinces, the undisputed losers of Russia's reforms.

When Vyacheslav Putkov, 13, shinned up a 30ft electricity pole near his home one afternoon last spring, he had no idea which villages he was in danger of disconnecting. Nor did he care. He just sliced through the cable with his pliers.

When the wires hit the ground, the current set the undergrowth alight. To stop the fire spreading, his mother's then boyfriend, Mikhail Chestyakov, tried to lift the cable off the grass with a log. He knocked it into his face instead.

"He fell down and was lying there all pale and shaking," recalled Vyacheslav, a truant from school for the past three years. "We had to massage his chest and give him the kiss of life."

Chestyakov finally came to and managed to walk home to Koza, where he won fame for surviving a massive electric shock, although it was probably only a few hundred volts.

The story had no happy ending, however. Vyacheslav's mother kicked Chestyakov out for sending her son up the pole and he is now serving a five-year sentence in Siberia for that and other crimes.

Alexander Bandin, a veteran of the Afghan war who has fallen on hard times, wept as he recounted how he and a friend, Vladimir, tried to plunder an underground power cable in Yaroslavl last month.

"I was holding the casing and he was pulling the wiring out," said Mr Bandin, 34, an alcoholic tramp. "Then I looked round and saw he had turned black.

"I buried his charred remains there and then. I told the police what had happened but they couldn't give a damn. This is not Russia any more; the whole country has become a wild beast."

Down-and-outs, petty criminals and teenagers are mainly to blame for the stealing, which nets the traders just 30p per pound of cable. Often the deed is done on impulse to finance the buying of vodka.

"It is quick money and, so they think, easy money," said Major Ivan Lavro, a policeman in Tutaev, a town of 40,000 which recorded three fatal cases of cable theft last month. "They don't care about pulling the plug on a hospital."

Early summer is a particularly bad time for stealing. The snow has finally melted and dacha owners, who increasingly remove cable over the winter to stop it being stolen, replace it in the spring when they return for the summer.

In the Yaroslavl region alone thieves disconnected 45 villages last month. More than 5,000 miles of wiring - almost the distance between Moscow and Russia's Pacific coast - has disappeared from the national grid in the last two years.

"Ageing generators and metal theft are the biggest problem the power companies face," said Anna Mironova of Yarenergo, the local electricity utility. The lights in her dacha went out this spring thanks to the thieves.

Their activity has only worsened the state of the country's crumbling infrastructure, seen by many Russians simply as a stockpile to be pillaged and sold off on the black market.

The forces lead by example. Nuclear submarines have found themselves without communications with headquarters because wiring has been plundered and there is wholesale haemorrhaging of "scrap" metal from bases.

According to Capt Nikolai Galkin, the police officer in Koza, 230 miles north-east of Moscow, and by his own admission the place's "public enemy number one", the thieving will only stop when there is nothing left to steal.

http://199.97.97.163/IMDS%PMAINTL0%read%/home/content/users/imds/feeds/bellsuper/2001/07/21/DTEL/0000-1322-KEYWORD.Missing

-- Martin Thompson (mthom1927@aol.com), July 21, 2001