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, including Mayor Sergei Veber, exactly what was on their minds.
And 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.
http://mnweekly.ru/news/20090521/55377597.htmlUtilities have been privatized and are owned by the bankrupt employer thus the shut-down of utilities.
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