Paul
Goble
Staunton, August 17 – Russian
regional governments are being asked to come up with ever more money from their
own budgets to pay for the construction or reconstruction of stadiums that will
allow Moscow to host the 2018 World Cup.
To do so, they are being forced to divert money from the construction of
schools and hospitals.
Boris Vishnevsky, a Yabloko deputy
in St. Petersburg’s legislative assembly, says that residents of the northern
capital, who already had taken upon themselves thanks to their regional
governments past and present to build the World Cup stadium have now been asked
for 2.6 billion rubles (45 million US dollars) more (echo.msk.ru/blog/boris_vis/1821430-echo/).
The only place they think they can
get it, Vishnevsky continues, is by making cuts in spending for the
construction of schools, polyclinics and hospitals, institutions that have
already been hard hit by Moscow’s cutbacks that have been made in favor of
rearmament and military actions abroad.
For the last five years, he says, he
has repeated pointed out that “the residents of St. Petersburg have already
been financing out of their own pockets the construction of one of the most
expensive stadiums in the world … Neither the federal center nor Gazprom has
contributed a kopeck for this construction.”
Moscow has required the spending as
part of an unfunded liability it has imposed on the cities and regions where
the international football championship is currently scheduled to be held. Now, as a result, the regions are being
forced to put off the construction of schools and kindergartens just so this latest
gigantist Kremlin project can go forward.
Vishnevsky says that all his earlier
efforts to have the city appeal to Moscow and Gazprom have ended in failure,
apparently because the city’s government doesn’t want to get in trouble with the
Kremlin and because former governor Valentina Matviyenko promised that Gazprom
would not have to pay anything.
“Perhaps,” he continues, “now the
reaction of Smolny will be different?” The city administration is under greater
pressure as its cuts begin to bite, and there is even an online petition
demanding that money for the stadium come from somewhere other than things like
schools and hospitals.
“Sports,” Vishnevsky says, “are
something remarkable,” adding that he hopes to go to World Cup matches. “But
schools, parks and polyclinics are more important. To save on them is
impermissible.” He expressed his “certainty
that very many Petersburgers” think exactly the same.
The situation the St. Petersburg
deputy describes is true in many of the other World Cup venue cities. And it
comes on top of what Vladimir Putin calls “the optimization” of public
services, a euphemism for drastic cuts in the number of schools, hospitals, and
other public facilities.
Just how deep those cuts are and how
angry they are making many Russians around the country is reported in an
article on the Svobodnaya pressa portal by that outlet’s chief editor Sergey Shargunov
who describes the drastic cuts in several regions of the Russian Federation and
their human costs (svpressa.ru/society/article/154553/).
As he reports, villages are losing
their focal points, children are having to travel by bus to distant schools,
and ordinary people are having to wait in ever longer lines at clinics and
hospitals, if indeed they can even get to them.
Russians are angry at these cuts, he says, even if they have not yet
focused their anger on the man responsible – Vladimir Putin.
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