Paul Goble
Vienna, October 30 – Even as the Russian parliament considers building multi-lane toll roads, Russian officials acknowledge that the poor quality of the country’s existing highways is reducing the country’s GDP by there percent a year and that one out of every three Russian villages is not yet linked to the outside world by roads of any kind.
On Friday, the Federation Council approved a measure allowing for the introduction of toll roads, a measure that its supporters say will reduce the impact of the country’s roads on its economy and lead to the construction of more highways thus tying Russia together (http://www.vz.ru/society/2007/10/27/120529.html).
Russia has only 899,000 kilometers of roads, about half of what senators said the country needs, and a large percentage of these are either unpaved or in such poor condition as to be impassable much of the time or a drag on the movement of goods and people around the country.
In many parts of the Russian Federation, there are no roads paved or unpaved at all. And where roads do exist, they are often seasonal – a euphemism for “extremely bad” – or controlled by corporations or government agencies that routinely prohibit the public from using them.
These shortcomings in the highway system in turn mean that the average speed of travel over them is significantly lower than it might otherwise be, a difference that adds to the cost of moving goods and people around and that alternatively promotes local inefficient regional autarkies or serious shortages.
Because of the way in which Russia’s highway funds have been distributed since Soviet times, however, Moscow has provided far more money to repair and then repair again existing roads rather than build new ones either to new places or with more lanes between major cities.
The bill the Federation Council has approved is intended to break out of what has been a vicious circle for many Russian localities and industries. But not surprisingly, beneath promises to build huge new projects like a ten-lane highway between Moscow and St. Petersburg, many of the features of the old system have been retained.
To give but one example: the senators amended the measure so that Russian agencies cannot open a toll roads until sometime after 2010 and so that there must always be an alternative “free” road available so that the toll system will not impose undue hardships on low-income groups.
The first restriction means that the government may not raise the money from tolls that it says it wants to spend on highway construction, thus limiting the ability of the authorities to move away from the existing and for construction firms highly profitable system.
And the requirement that there be an alternative “free” route rather than subsidies of some kind for less well-off drivers almost certainly means that neither the new toll roads nor the rebuilt alternatives will be as good as either might be alone – and as a result, commerce is unlikely to pick up speed in the ways officials hope.
Meanwhile, concerning another part of Russia’s transportation system, officials in Moscow and in the North Caucasus are debating whether and how to revive in the 21st century a Stalin-era plan to build a canal between the Caspian and the Black Sea (http://chernovik.net/article.php?pid=247&aid=4738).
In 1936, stimulated by the Soviet dictator’s preference for gigantist projects, Moscow planners came up with a plan to build such a canal, but both technical and financial difficulties and the impact of World War II put this project on hold, and most people had assumed that it had been cancelled.
Over the last five or six years, however, officials both at the center and in the regions through which such a canal might pass have revived the idea. While it faces stiff opposition on ecological grounds, regional officials whose areas would benefit are pushing hard.to start digging.
But there is a major fight over what route it should take with each of two plans drawing support from the regions through which it might pass. The first would extend from the Caspian, along the Kuma River and thence to the Azov Sea, while th second would go through the Terek and Kuban regions and then on to the Azov Sea.
And below that overarching debate, officials who back one or the other of these plans also hope to introduce some modifications that would benefit their region in particular. Thus, the Kalmyk authorities want the canal to start at a different port on the Caspian than do officials in neighboring areas.
Advocates for the cancal say that building either would cost no more than four to five billion rubles (180 million US dollars), almost certainly a lowball figure, and that construction would take only four to six years, again almost certainly less than is likely especially if funding becomes a problem.
But the possibility of moving goods and especially oil and gas by barge this way means that the return on such an investment could in principle be large, and as a result, this debate is likely to heat up in the coming months, even if not one spade of earth is turned or one barge ever floated.
Tuesday, October 30, 2007
Window on Eurasia: Russia’s Continuing 1937 Problem
Paul Goble
Vienna, October 30 – Nearly half of all Russians cannot identify 1937 as the year of Stalin’s Great Terror and only a relative handful can give the name any of the Soviet dictator’s most prominent victims despite the continuing efforts of Russian human rights groups to keep the memory of those times alive, according to a recent poll.
The All-Russian Center for the Study of Public Opinion (VTsIOM) earlier this fall asked a representative sample of Russians both what references to the year 1937 brought to mind and whether they could give the name of any of Stalin’s most well-known victims (http://www.nr2.ru/society/144892.html).
Only 44 percent correctly linked that year to the Great Terror, and fewer than one in four could identify any of Stalin’s specific victims, VTsIOM found. The remaining Russians either could not say what 1937 stood for or name any of the most prominent victims.
Instead, some of them linked to 1937 events that happened in other years – such as collectivization and the industrialization of the country – while others listed the names of those who fell victim to the Stalinist campaigns in other years entirely – such as Lev Trotsky, Sergei Kirov, and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn.
On the one hand, this pattern reflects the simple ignorance of the Russian population and especially its younger members about the past. But on the other, it is the product of official efforts both in the past and now to portray Stalin in a positive light and downplay his crimes.
Nonetheless, such results are striking especially given the efforts of human rights activists throughout the country to keep the memory of Stalin’s crimes alive lest anyone in the Russian Federation be tempted to think that the country would benefit from a return to his style of rule.
Sometimes, these efforts are local ones and attract little attention. Last Thursday, for example, activists in Irkutsk pointed out that during 1937-38, the Soviet government killed its own citizens at a greater rate than Hitler’s invading armies did in the course of the second world war (http://babr.ru/?pt=news&event=v1&IDE=40668).
But last week, the Memorial Human Rights Society announced the release of a CD containing the names of 2,614,978 who fell victim to “state terror” in the Russian Federation, Kazakhstan, Belarus, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan and Ukraine between 1918 and 1985 (http://www.kavkaz.memo.ru/newstext/news/id/1200292.html).
On the one hand, this listing covers a far larger sweep of time than just the peak of the Great Terror in 1937, but on the other, it is incomplete geographically – many of the former Soviet republics and occupied Baltic states are not included – and because documentation concerning additional victims is not available for one reason or another.
In presenting the new compilation, Memorial’s Arseniy Roginskiy acknowledged that it was incomplete and said that the Russian government and Russian society should devote as much attention to collecting the remaining names as they do to recalling “the fall of the Great Fatherland War.”
Others participating in this release, timed to mark the 70th anniversary of the horrors of 1937, were equally blunt about the need for Russians and all other people of good will to remember what had taken place in the Soviet Union at that time lest someone be tempted to repeat it.
Vladimir Lukin, the government’s human rights ombudsman, said that it was “absolutely essential” that Russians remember what had occurred lest “new generations [be] condemned to starting from zero.” And Yabloko leader Grigoriy Yavlinskiy was even more impassioned about the need to recall what Stalin had done.
“We are speaking about state terrorism,” he said, “and its difference from international terrorism about which many now speak is that those who died from it were not people who suffered by accident but rather “the best, the most notable, and the most honest.”
Given that at least some of Stalin’s victims in 1937 were themselves torturers and the murderers of others, many will disagree with Yavlinskiy on that last point. But given the ignorance of the past highlighted by the findings of the VTsIOM poll, few will dispute that those concerned about the future of Russia need to remember this past.
Vienna, October 30 – Nearly half of all Russians cannot identify 1937 as the year of Stalin’s Great Terror and only a relative handful can give the name any of the Soviet dictator’s most prominent victims despite the continuing efforts of Russian human rights groups to keep the memory of those times alive, according to a recent poll.
The All-Russian Center for the Study of Public Opinion (VTsIOM) earlier this fall asked a representative sample of Russians both what references to the year 1937 brought to mind and whether they could give the name of any of Stalin’s most well-known victims (http://www.nr2.ru/society/144892.html).
Only 44 percent correctly linked that year to the Great Terror, and fewer than one in four could identify any of Stalin’s specific victims, VTsIOM found. The remaining Russians either could not say what 1937 stood for or name any of the most prominent victims.
Instead, some of them linked to 1937 events that happened in other years – such as collectivization and the industrialization of the country – while others listed the names of those who fell victim to the Stalinist campaigns in other years entirely – such as Lev Trotsky, Sergei Kirov, and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn.
On the one hand, this pattern reflects the simple ignorance of the Russian population and especially its younger members about the past. But on the other, it is the product of official efforts both in the past and now to portray Stalin in a positive light and downplay his crimes.
Nonetheless, such results are striking especially given the efforts of human rights activists throughout the country to keep the memory of Stalin’s crimes alive lest anyone in the Russian Federation be tempted to think that the country would benefit from a return to his style of rule.
Sometimes, these efforts are local ones and attract little attention. Last Thursday, for example, activists in Irkutsk pointed out that during 1937-38, the Soviet government killed its own citizens at a greater rate than Hitler’s invading armies did in the course of the second world war (http://babr.ru/?pt=news&event=v1&IDE=40668).
But last week, the Memorial Human Rights Society announced the release of a CD containing the names of 2,614,978 who fell victim to “state terror” in the Russian Federation, Kazakhstan, Belarus, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan and Ukraine between 1918 and 1985 (http://www.kavkaz.memo.ru/newstext/news/id/1200292.html).
On the one hand, this listing covers a far larger sweep of time than just the peak of the Great Terror in 1937, but on the other, it is incomplete geographically – many of the former Soviet republics and occupied Baltic states are not included – and because documentation concerning additional victims is not available for one reason or another.
In presenting the new compilation, Memorial’s Arseniy Roginskiy acknowledged that it was incomplete and said that the Russian government and Russian society should devote as much attention to collecting the remaining names as they do to recalling “the fall of the Great Fatherland War.”
Others participating in this release, timed to mark the 70th anniversary of the horrors of 1937, were equally blunt about the need for Russians and all other people of good will to remember what had taken place in the Soviet Union at that time lest someone be tempted to repeat it.
Vladimir Lukin, the government’s human rights ombudsman, said that it was “absolutely essential” that Russians remember what had occurred lest “new generations [be] condemned to starting from zero.” And Yabloko leader Grigoriy Yavlinskiy was even more impassioned about the need to recall what Stalin had done.
“We are speaking about state terrorism,” he said, “and its difference from international terrorism about which many now speak is that those who died from it were not people who suffered by accident but rather “the best, the most notable, and the most honest.”
Given that at least some of Stalin’s victims in 1937 were themselves torturers and the murderers of others, many will disagree with Yavlinskiy on that last point. But given the ignorance of the past highlighted by the findings of the VTsIOM poll, few will dispute that those concerned about the future of Russia need to remember this past.
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