Paul
Goble
Staunton, June 23 – Many regions
have looked to Moscow for help in saving the company towns on which much of
their population depends, but few have taken the next step and suggested that
the central Russian government is directly responsible for their plight. But now deputies in Buryatia’s parliament
have taken exactly that step.
Speaking
to the People’s Khural this morning, Leonid Silivestrov told his fellow deputies that the city of
Babushkin’s most important factory was being closed down “on Moscow’s orders,”
infuriating the workers and the residents of the city and republic and setting
in motion the closure of other facilities there (newsru.com/russia/23jun2016/bab.html,
baikal-daily.ru/news/16/211304/,
gazeta-n1.ru/news/41941/ and baikalfinans.com/ekonomika/v-buryatii-zakryitie-gradoobrazuyuschego-relsosvarochnogo-predpriyatiya-32-grozit-sotsialnoy-katastrofoy-gorodu-babushkin-23062016-14952318.html).
Silivestrov and
the other deputies argued that there are places in other parts of Russia where
closing one factory would not destroy an entire community but that in the case
of Babushkin, that was exactly what Moscow’s decision will mean. Their anger is
all the greater because of Medvedev’s recent comment that “there is no money,
but hang in there.”
One Buryat journalist proposed on
his Facebook account that he had an idea on how to save the factory: Perhaps,
Arkady Zarubin said, the factory could be repurposed to produce “gingerbread”
that the Russian prime minister could hand out to the suffering population
given that he has nothing else to offer.
The workers and deputies
have begun collecting signatures on petitions to the republic leadership, to
Dmitry Medvedev and to Vladimir Putin demanding that they reverse this “order”
from the capital and garnering support from pro-labor groups elsewhere who are
also worried about the deindustrialization of the country (forum-msk.org/material/news/11931546.html).
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