Where Russian Bosses Stole a Railroad and Sold Off the Rails and Ties to Enrich Themselves

Paul Goble

 

            Staunton, February 6 – Some are giving credit to Vladimir Putin for issuing an order to restore electric train service in Russia’s regions, but others are pointing out that what the Kremlin leader has allowed to happen now with the railroads is also happening in public health, education, and other public services.

 

            And consequently, when Putin asked of the railway managers “have you lost your minds?” on learning of their decision to end service after Moscow stopped subsidies and regional governments were unable to pick them up, some Russians are answering Putin’s question in the affirmative – and including Putin in that answer.

 

            Following the privatization of many rail lines in Russia in the 1990s, many of the new owners paid themselves such exorbitant salaries that they left their lines unable to make a profit and soon resorted to some amazing tactics before closing the lines down and leaving Russians in those regions without service.

 

            According to Albert Speransky, president of the Worker Initiatives Council, one such line running 120 kilometers in the Altay was recently torn up by the new owners who sold all of the rails, ties and other equipment to pay their salaries, leaving people along the route without transport. The authorities have done nothing (forum-msk.org/material/news/10689761.html).

 

            Putin was right to say that Russian businessmen have “gone out of their minds,” Speransky says, but the Kremlin leader fails to admit that “the same thing is being done not only in Russian Rail but in [Russian] health care, education and in other branches. There too people have gone out of their mind and left our citizens in a hopeless situation.”

 

             What is necessary, Speransky says, is “to restore not only the electric rail lines but also to fire those who cancelled these trains in the first place. If these bureaucrats aren’t removed, then tomorrow they will simply think up some new way to make the people suffer.” And Putin has to know this because many Russians have written to him.

 

Perhaps he doesn’t read such letters? the Worker Initiatives activist speculates.

 

            Speransky then gives some true horror stories about the consequences of shutting down the electric rail system, the way the bosses of Russian Rail have been taking care of themselves at the expense of the people and the state, and also the various protest actions that have already occurred around the country to try to force a change.

 

            In Pskov oblast, villagers blocked a highway because one of their number has an illness which requires that she travel to the oblast center, something that without the electric train system she cannot do in the winter. Without such trips, they say, she will die because ambulances can’t reach her village on the bad roads there.

 

            For years, the electric train had been her “guardian angel” but the railways decided that was irrelevant because they weren’t making a profit. Thus, she and her village were put in the position of some place beyond the Arctic circle even though they live in “the European part” of Russia “at the very gateway to Western civilization.”

 

            In Vologda, Chelyabinsk, and Cheboksary people came out to protest the closing of the electric rail lines and to demand that those behind the decision be punished, not simply reversed. They pointed out that the closing of the lines leads to the closing of rural schools, medical facilities, and even the possibility of simply surviving in Russia’s rural areas.

 

            In one village in Novgorod oblast, residents decided that the only way they were going to be able to get to the city was by horse now that the trains had stopped. So they acquired one, the symbol of the extent to which their land has returned to the Middle Ages, Speransky said.

 

            Meanwhile the managers of Russian Rail continued to pay themselves more, took more money from the state by creating daughter companies from which they rented things at inflated rates, refused to declare what they were doing, and in the case of the head of Russian Rail said he would resign if forced to reveal how much money he made.

 

            Rail lines, Speransky concluded, have always been the life lines of Russia, but now these “arteries and veins” are being cut in the name of profit. Reversing the decisions about closing particular lines is a necessary but not sufficient step, he added, to overcome what Moscow continues to call “reform.”