Norilsk Disaster Became ‘a Little Chernobyl’ Because Officials were Afraid to Report It to the Kremlin, Polish Paper Says

Paul Goble

            Staunton, June 6 – In Soviet times, problems often grew into disasters because those on the scene were afraid to report them upwards until too late. That was one of the reasons that the Chernobyl disaster got out of hand. Now, as events around the Norilsk oil spill show, the same problem is infecting Putin’s Russia as well.

            Warsaw’s Gazeta Wyborcza says that this fear “paralyzed” the response and turned what might have been more quickly contained into an accident that threatens the Russian economy and political system (wyborcza.pl/7,75399,26002501,nikt-nie-chcial-powiedziec-putinowi-o-wycieku-oleju-w-norylsku.html?disableRedirects=true; in Russian at unian.net/world/katastrofa-v-norilske-i-taymyre-chinovniki-nedelyu-skryvali-mini-chernobyl-novosti-mira-11024603.html).

            The catastrophe began on last Saturday but word did not reach Moscow for several days. Indeed, it might never have been reported by the companies and officials involved had not local people turned to social networks to describe it, forcing the Moscow media to publish on it, and thus attracting the Kremlin’s attention.

            According to the Polish paper, the governor of Krasnoyarsk Kray and the Russian emergency situations ministry did know about the disaster “less than an hour” after it began. “But no one who sits on the following levels of the power hierarchy has the courage to report about it to the ruler in the Kremlin.”

            “None of them said that the federal center had to intervene,” the paper continues; but “because today Russia is preparing for a referendum on changes in the constitution which will give Putin the right to rule the country in practice forever, the Kremlin wants to hear only ‘positive things’ from its bureaucrats.”

            Putin will no doubt blame others for failing to report, Gazeta Wyborcza says; but it was “Putin himself who build this power structure installing in senior positions people not on the basis of their competence but above all on their loyalty.”  This case shows that behind that loyalty is largely fear alone.