Paul
Goble
Staunton, November 29 – Last week, Vladimir
Putin celebrated the opening of the M-11, a high-speed toll road between Moscow
and St. Petersburg. But although he got
credit for doing so, the reality is that the road isn’t in fact finished and
that those who use it have to go off it near Tver before getting back on,
Sergey Aslanyan says.
The Ekho Moskvy journalist
says that the Kremlin leader has long made a practice of this. In February
2004, for example, he declared open the M-58 Amur highway in Khabarovsky
Kray. At the time, officials said Putin
had made the far east “near” as a result. But the road wasn’t finished: It wasn’t
even paved (rosbalt.ru/posts/2019/11/28/1815657.html).
Most of the time Putin has made
these declarations about roads far from Moscow (windowoneurasia.blogspot.com/2010/04/window-on-eurasia-russias-road-system.html),
but in recent times, he has become brazen, asserting roads near the center have
been finished when in fact they have not.
Although most journalists Russian and
Western report Putin’s declarations about the opening of new roads without
comment, some journalists like Aslanyan are appalled at the fact that they aren’t
checking to see if what he claims is anything more than the latest version of a
Potemkin village -- and are even beginning
to call him on it.
The Moscow-St. Petersburg road project
has all the problems typical of Russian construction even where the road
actually runs: there aren’t enough gas stations or rest areas, there are dead
zones for cellphone calls, and the curbs are not graded as they should be (cf. windowoneurasia2.blogspot.com/2019/11/new-moscow-st-petersburg-highway.html).
Aslanyan speculates that the reason
the road is called the Neva has nothing to do with the river but rather the
slang name for razor blades Soviet soldiers were given. They weren’t sharp
enough to shave with, he says; but they perhaps could be used to slit the throat
of an enemy or open one’s own veins.
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