The Real Russia. Today. Russia's fire tragedies and Moscow's trash uprisings

Thursday, March 29, 2018

• A man who lost his family in the Kemerovo fire says he knows why the movie theater's doors were locked
• Meduza looks at how the USSR covered up a fire in 1961 that killed more than 100 children
• Kemerovo's governor offers some charity to the families who lost loved ones on Sunday, and then he doesn't
• The “Winter Cherry” shopping mall has a shady remodeling history
• Moscow complains that its wrestlers aren't getting the U.S. visas they need, and London has some plans in this area, too
• Putin's cabinet says no to extra “patriotic education”
• Meduza reviews the “trash uprisings” around Moscow
• Officials in Tver don't want the capital's garbage
• The new head of Volokolamsk contradicts the Emergency Situations Ministry

The tragedy in Kemerovo

🚪 Locked doors

Dozens of children died in the Kemerovo fire on Sunday because the doors were locked at the movie theater in which they were trapped. According to Igor Vostrikov, a random adult shut the doors and plugged the cracks, trying to keep smoke out of the screening rooms, in hopes that rescuers would reach the children before the flames did. In a video shared on Vkontakte, Vostrikov says he knows this because he was granted access to the shopping center’s security camera footage. The man who sealed the doors supposedly escaped the fire. In his video, Vostrikov accused the firefighters of failing in the line of duty.

Who is Igor Vostrikov? He’s the man who lost his wife, his sister, and his three children in the fire. Vostrikov was one of the people who organized a 10-hour protest outside the Kemerovo administrative building on Tuesday, and he’s also part of the civic group that accuses the authorities of hiding Sunday’s “true” death toll. This same group met briefly with Vladimir Putin, who told Kemerovo residents not to believe rumors and fake news circulating online.

🔥 Russia has a history of covering up tragic fires

According to preliminary figures, at least 40 children died in the March 25 fire at the “Winter Cherry” shopping center in Kemerovo. There are few disasters in Russian history that claimed so many young lives. In recent history, only the Beslan hostage crisis comes to mind. When the Soviet Union still existed, however, there was a fire that killed more than 100 children — and nobody apart from the victims’ relatives and neighbors knew about it until the 1990s. Meduza looks at how tragedy struck the Chuvash village of Elbarusovo in 1961.

• Read the special report by Daniil Turovsky: “Fifty-seven years ago, 106 children died in a fire at a village school. The Soviet public didn't know about it until the 1990s.”

🐇🎩 Tuleyev's charity: now you see it, now you don't

A message briefly appeared on the Kemerovo administrative website on Thursday announcing that Governor Aman Tuleyev and his cabinet are donating all their earnings for the day to a fund for the families who lost loved ones in Sunday’s fire. As soon as national news agencies started reporting the announcement, however, the bulletin disappeared from the government’s website. According to reports, the total amount of money donated to the families was said to be more than 24 million rubles ($416,000). Governor Tuleyev’s 2016 income declaration says his daily earnings average to 14,850 rubles (about $260).

🚧 A shady remodeling

Rinat Enikeyev, Russia’s chief fire inspector, told reporters earlier this week that the “Winter Cherry” shopping center in Kemerovo started operating in 2016 after remodeling without any coordination with the Emergency Situations Ministry. When the fire broke out on Sunday, the fire alarm system didn’t sound. One security guard now in police custody says he failed to trigger the alarm from his station because he panicked.

Fire safety is making news elsewhere in Russia, too. In Buryatia on Thursday, police detained Dmitry Unagaev, the deputy head of the local Emergency Situations Ministry branch, on charges of accepting bribes to ignore fire safety violations by a local commercial organization. Investigators say he received more than 177,000 rubles (about $3,000).

Visa woes 🇺🇸🇷🇺🇬🇧

The Russian Foreign Ministry is upset with the U.S. embassy in Moscow, again — this time for delaying the issuance of American visas to Russia’s team of wrestlers, who hope to compete in this year’s Freestyle Wrestling World Cup in Iowa City, Iowa. Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova complained on Thursday that U.S. officials blame a shortage of consular staff that, she says, is Washington’s own fault for initiating a series of expulsions that has left both countries operating diplomatic skeleton crews on each other’s soil. Most recently, on March 26, the United States announced the expulsion of 60 Russian diplomats, in retaliation for the poisoning of the Skripals in Salisbury, England.

Russia could have problems with British visas, too. According to reports in London, “super-rich Russians could be stripped of their British visas as part of a Home Office review into the applications it approved over the past decade.” These visas are a way for wealthy Russians to “fast-track” their residency and citizenship in Britain, says The Daily Telegraph. The review could affect hundreds of people.

Cool it on the patriotism, guys 🏫

Vladimir Putin’s cabinet is reportedly withholding its support for legislation drafted by several members of United Russia, the country’s ruling political party, that would double down on so-called “patriotic education.” According to the government, the draft law’s language is still too vague and what isn’t merely duplicates existing classroom norms. “Patriotic education” and “military-patriotic education” are both already part of Russia’s school curriculums.

Moscow's trash uprisings 🚮

Since early 2018, the people of Volokolamsk have been organizing protests against a local trash dump that has been spewing noxious fumes into their city, located just outside Moscow. The demonstrations against the “Yadrovo” local landfill got especially tense in mid-March, when dozens of school children in the area fell ill and needed medical attention, apparently due to the effects of air pollution leaked by the garbage dump. After an embarrassing confrontation with angry parents at a local hospital, the head of the Volokolamsk district government was fired, and regional officials promised to close the landfill and end the health crisis within the next few months. The “Yadrovo” dump isn’t the Moscow region’s only controversial landfill, however, and there are several other “garbage riots” simmering in towns outside the city.

• Read Meduza’s special report: “Moscow's trash uprising: An ecological catastrophe is unfolding around the Russian capital, and locals are fighting back”

🙅‍♂️ Moscow ain't getting no help from Tver

As Moscow authorities look for alternative places to dump the region’s enormous waste, officials in Tver say they don’t want any of the capital’s garbage. Tver Governor Igor Rudenya said at a meeting of his cabinet on Tuesday that Tver won't accept trash from any other regions. “It’s a matter of our ecological security and the future of our territory,” he explained. Beginning in 2019, all the region’s landfills will be managed by the regional government.

Why is this suddenly such a crisis? In 2017, acting on presidential orders, the Moscow region shut down four waste processing centers. In the past five years, the region has closed 24 of its 39 landfills. Regional officials have also refused to open new garbage dumps. Why? Popular unrest has erupted in towns surrounding Moscow, growing particularly tense in Volokolamsk, where locals have protested against the “Yadrovo” landfill. The authorities have promised to “modernize” the facility to cut down on the noxious fumes it is currently leaking into the air.

📈📉 State officials aren't on the same page

Andrey Vikharev, the acting head of the Volokolamsk district, went off script on Thursday, announcing that the local “Yadrovo” landfill has released a new burst of gas into the air, sending hydrogen sulfide levels 12 times above what's considered safe. The Emergency Situations Ministry promptly clarified that it hasn’t recorded any new excesses of harmful gases in the area. Vikharev previously told the public that emissions could continue until the officials can install a forced gas recovery system at the landfill. That work is expected to take until at least June 15.

🔕 False alarm

Earlier this week, the Emergency Situations Ministry warned that low winds could lead to bad air quality conditions in the Moscow region. The ministry initially published the information as an “emergency warning,” which it later blamed on a technical error. Since March 22, schools in Volokolamsk have opened two hours later than normal because of air pollution that sent dozens of children to the hospital in mid-March.