Paul Goble
Staunton, Oct. 13 – Having one of the lowest densities of highways and railways plier square kilometer of any country in the world, Russia is far more dependent on air travel to link communities together, to bring medical help, and to fight fires and other natural disasters, a reality that multiplies the losses when these links are disrupted or cancelled. (On that pattern, especially east of the Urals, see windowoneurasia2.blogspot.com/2025/04/sixty-percent-of-population-points-in.html. )
At the end of Soviet times, there were slightly more than 1500 airports; but since then, their number has fallen to 226, the victims of privatization, rising prices, and predatory realtors who have taken over the land on which the airports were located, Anatoly Zhurin of Svobodnaya Pressa says (svpressa.ru/economy/article/535881/).
Despite Moscow’s promises that 75 of these will be modernized over the next five years, the prospects are that many of the smaller airports will close, given the absence of planes, passengers and flights. The result will be a tragedy: ever more Russians will be cut off from one another with little prospect that the situation will change for the better anytime soon.
One sign pointing to that outcome, the Svobodnaya Pressa journalist says, is that some of the existing airports have been shuttered in the names of “repair” and to provide places where aircraft can be serviced rather than passengers served. If so, Russia may soon have lost 90 percent of the airports it had four decades ago.
For background and more details about the disappearance of airports in Russia, see windowoneurasia2.blogspot.com/2022/05/civil-aviation-most-of-russia-relies-on.html, windowoneurasia2.blogspot.com/2021/02/moscows-failure-to-subsidize-more-seats.html and .windowoneurasia2.blogspot.com/2021/05/moscow-closes-44-more-airports-in-north.html .
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