Putin’s Renaming Airports Attracts Attention: His Destruction of Airports Doesn’t

Paul Goble

            Staunton, June 2 – Vladimir Putin’s renaming of 44 airports in Russia after a public campaign to have people suggest what names from Russian history, carefully circumscribed to be sure, they would like has attacked widespread given some of the names  (windowoneurasia2.blogspot.com/2018/11/authorities-wanted-airports-to-have.html and thebarentsobserver.com/en/travel/2019/06/putin-renames-airports-throughout-russia-now-nikolai-ii-murmansk-international).

            But that has only served to obscure the real and vastly more important story: the collapse of the system of airports in the Russian Federation over the last decades and of the network of flights within the largest country on earth and between it and the countries it hopes to keep under its control.

            Putin’s renaming campaign, the Narodny zhurnalist portal says, is only the latest example of “the imitation of stormy activity,” part of the Kremlin’s  “strategy of distracting attention from real problems,” including n this case, “the problems of the degradation of civil aviation” that have cut off parts of the country already (narzur.ru/pulkovo/).

            In 1991, the Russian Federation had 1450 functioning airports. Now it has only 228, less than half as many as Papua New Guinea and less than two percent of the 13513 airports in the United States. As a result, it is now impossible to fly from many places in Russia to others or to fly from the regions to neighboring countries. 

            This collapse in the number of airports has been paralleled by the collapse of regional air services in many parts of the country where flying is the only way to get from one place to another. Much of that is the result, Russian experts say, of massive corruption and profiteering from the sale of regional carriers (regnum.ru/news/economy/2635738.html).

            What is even more surprising and disturbing because it flies in the face of claims about integration with neighboring countries has been the collapse in the number of flights between the Russian Federation and members of its Eurasian Economic Community, a trend that undercuts its possibilities (ritmeurasia.org/news--2019-06-02--tolko-samoletom-problemy-transportnogo-soobschenija-mezhdu-regionami-eaes-42988).

                But at least some Russians will be pleased and some foreigners amused by the fact that Russia now has an airport named for Nicholas II.