An Inauspicious August in Moscow
It hasn't been a very good beginning to the month in Russia. With the worst drought in some 150 years, raging wildfires have spread uncontrollably across the Western regions, killing about 50 people and destroying hundreds of homes, causing wheat prices to soar. Moscow has been blanketed in heat wave, bringing a think smoky haze over the city from burning peat bogs that has practically shut down the airport. Igor Sechin is getting excited about taking over BP's assets, while the next big wave of privatizations is raising concerns. Poland is having trouble getting some basic documents on the plane crash that killed their president. The government passed even more powers to an already overbearing FSB spy agency, opposition leader Boris Nemtsov is beat up, arrested, and charged on his to a pro-democracy rally, and the trial of Mikhail Khodorkovsky and Platon Lebedev is wrapping up to its conclusion with little optimism for justice.
Accompanying all the heat and pressure is anger. Vladimir Kara-Murza, leader of Solidarnost and an organizer of the Strategy-31 protests for the basic right to protest, took the pages of The Wall Street Journal to denounce the government's recent treatment of protesters. In response to the mass arrests, he commented that "this heavy-handed tactic can only get the government so far. No cordons can stop Russians' growing awareness that their everyday problems, including rampant corruption, high unemployment, property-rights violations, environmental pollution and hazing in the military, cannot be addressed by an authoritarian system."
Both President Dmitry Medvedev as well as Prime Minister Vladimir Putin have been feeling the heat on a lackluster and disorganized response to the wildfires. A very popular video has been circulating of Vladimir Putin being confronted outside a government building by angry citizens in Nizhny Novgorod - they shout, they interrupt, and the prime minister is prompted to angrily defend himself.
Then, a few days later, Putin entered into a well-publicized dispute with a blogger who had complained about the government's reaction to the wildfires. According to a report from Bloomberg, "The blogger complained that after the collapse of communism 20 years ago, the ponds used for fighting fires in his village were filled with earth and sold to developers, the local fire truck vanished and the ship's bell used as an alarm was replaced with a phone number that was never connected." He also questioned why Russia would be building a Silicon Valley when its fire response teams were so inadequately staffed.
Putin's handwritten response letter to the blogger was exceedingly polite, but also revealed the uneasy position of the government during the wild fire crisis, facing an increasingly bold and restless public which has become exhausted with the state's lack of accountability.
It is certainly no fault of the leadership that these fires have occurred, but the blame game of responsibility has been just as disastrous. Medvedev has fired scores of officials, but the majority of his instructions for investigations have been ignored. Pundit Stanislav Belkovsky has even claimed that the firefighting corps had been disbanded due to Russia's corruption-based economy, while financial commentator Chris Weafer has pointed out the pattern of bad events which seem to pop up in August - from war with Georgia in 2008, and then the explosion of a hydro-electric plant in 2009.
Until Russia incorporates more representative elements to its system of governance, and some form of accountability and rule of law is developed, disasters such as the wildfires will continue to be further exacerbated. The impatience of the people, it appears, is finally beginning to outweigh the popularity of the leadership, and the old solutions are no longer working. It's time to try something else.
By James Kimer, Guest Commentator to the Khodorkovsky and Lebedev Communications Center