Monday, December 2, 2019

Potemkin Like, Putin Keeps Opening Roads that Aren’t Finished


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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