When residents in the quiet town of Pikalyovo, 200 kilometers east of St. Petersburg, learned their hot water was being cut off indefinitely, it was the last straw.
Hundreds of people besieged the town's administration building on Wednesday during an emergency funding meeting, and about half of them stormed into the building, telling officials, includingAnd that was a lot. Two of the town's three cement plants, providing jobs for about 4,000 people - one-fifth of the town's population - shut down months ago. The third plant, owned by BasEl Cement - a company affiliated with Basic Element, the holding of Russia‘s former richest man, the now-heavily indebted Oleg Deripaska - owes its workers up to three months' wages.
The eruption of anger may not be the norm across the country, where many similarly stricken towns and cities are waiting out the crisis as savings run out and desperation sets in. But the example of Pikalyovo, where a spiral of cross-company debts has left thousands out of work and local services at a standstill, is one that could be repeated many times over if help does not arrive soon.
The Pikalyovo protest spawned a flurry of wild Internet media reports on Wednesday, including a false one that hungry locals were resorting to eating dogs. Local officials did say on Thursday, however, that the poverty had reached such levels that people had been talking of taking advantage of the chickenweed that grew wild in their gardens, and eating it with mayonnaise.
"Of course there's nothing to eat, if people aren't getting paid," said an official at the city administration who asked not to be identified. "But we have such a difficult situation, please don't exaggerate things. No one is eating dogs. But if you have sour cress growing in your garden, why not eat that?"
The official insisted there was no public "siege," as some media reported. Instead, locals had met outside of the building during the crisis meeting. After waiting for hours, about 30 or 40 people, the official said, tried to get inside the building. "They pushed up against the doors, and the doors opened. The people were surprised. And they started telling the officials, ‘We want work.' They started telling them about all the problems that had accumulated."
Svetlana Antropova, a local union official, has become something of a bogeywoman for officials at the BasEl Cement plant, where she represents the workers, and for town officials. They blame her for organising the protest that led to the storming of the town hall, but she denies this.
"There was no protest rally, about 400 people just gathered in front of the building," said Antropova, whose union is affiliated with the pro-Kremlin Federation of Independent Unions.
An old man asked the mayor directly to "reach into his pocket and give him 1,000 rubles, so that he could feed his family", she said.
According to Antropova, about 100 people went inside the building, but it was not a siege or a takeover - they just wanted to know when they would get their jobs back and when the water would be turned back on.
BasEl officials said they wanted to know too. "The only electricity plant that produces power for the town is controlled by the company," said Svetlana Andreyeva, a spokeswoman for BasEl Cement. "The city is supposed to pay for this, but it isn't paying."
Peterburgregiongaz, the local Gazprom subsidiary, has cut off gas supplies to BasEl Cement because it owes it 141 million rubles ($4.5 million). But the municipality owes the company about 180 million rubles ($5.7 million), BasEl Cement claims.
Utilities disputes between private companies and municipal authorities are at the heart of most cases of water or heating getting cut off in provincial Russian cities. For BasEl Cement, the crisis has exacerbated the problem.
In the autumn of 2008, world prices for alumina, an oxide of aluminum produced by BasEl, dropped by 50 per cent. A ton sells for $160, but costs $500 to produce.
Because the plant supplied byproducts of the alumina to the two other plants at reduced prices, it was unable to make ends meet and production stopped. Half the employees were put on enforced leave, getting only two-thirds of their salaries. So far they have been paid only part of their March salaries.
Now, the company wants its bills paid, so it in turn can pay its debt to the gas company and have the power plant start working again. But municipal authorities, who used to pay the company through two municipal unitary enterprises - one of which is on the verge of bankruptcy - say they owe BasEl only part of the debt.
The conflict between BasEl Cement and the municipal authorities was what officials met Wednesday to discuss, in the presence of regional prosecutors and Federal Security Service agents, Andreyeva said. They are currently negotiating two solutions: either the Leningrad region government agrees to provide debt guarantees for BasEl's gas bill, or the municipal authorities agree to pay part of it.
In the meantime, some of the locals are resorting to Soviet-era black humour. One, Alexei, quipped in a forum on the city's web site, www.pikalevo.net: "Just had boiled shoelaces for the first time today. With salt, they tasted like spaghetti Mayor Sergei Veber, exactly what was on their minds.
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