The residents of the single-industry town "rescued by Putin" are stocking up on macaroni and threatening the authorities with a revolt.
Pikalyovo - the first single-industry town where residents actually dared to stage a revolt - is gripped with fear. All three enterprises that sustain the city are still working. And their managers are scrupulously adhering to the promise they gave Prime Minister Vladimir Putin. But the term of the agreements expires on November 16, and the ghost city is absolutely dreading that date, because nobody has the slightest idea of what will happen. To shed some light on the situation, a correspondent of MK in St Petersburg ventured to Pikalyovo and attempted to find work there.
"Give the plants to the trade union"
Pikalyovo-2. A small tatty railway station. Streets lined with crumbling wooden houses. Poverty. Slogans like "Fewer Russians, More Immigrants" are spray-painted on the walls. As one might expect, many of the words in such messages are misspelled. For some reason, anyone coming to the city for the first time is overcome with the strange urge to fall asleep or get drunk. And that desire only gets stronger later on. From the station, you have to endure a ten-kilometre ride on a road riddled with potholes to Pikalyovo-1. If you're lucky, you can catch a bus.
But as Vasily Smirnov, a worker at one of Pikalyovo's key industries, so aptly quips, "Buses are rare. Maybe you can catch one. Why do you want to go there? Care for a shot of vodka?" It's Friday morning, but for some reason he has chosen to spend it sitting on the steps of a railway platform gazing thoughtfully at the sky.
I shake my head.
"You're not a local, are you?" Vasily says with a look of surprise and a hint of contempt. "You came to cover the strike? We're on strike. But what's the use?"
All the conditions for a revolution can easily be found in Pikalyovo, a town of 20,000 people. The contracts for raw materials supplies between the three key enterprises in the city expired on November 1, with the new contracts to be signed by November 16. Granted, the only person who actually believes they'll be signed is Sergey Veber, the head of the Pikalyovo city administration. Everyone else is busy stocking up on macaroni, cereals, tinned beef and vegetable oil in case the three industrial giants - Fosagro, Baseltsement-Pikalyovo and Pikalyovo Cement - come to a standstill.
"We're fully aware that the plants will never come to an agreement with each other. Why don't their managers just sit down and discuss things over a glass of brandy? But, of course, we're not expecting that. They hate each other," Svetlana Antropova, chairperson of the local trade union at Baseltsement-Pikalyovo, explains, gesticulating vigorously.
"Why do they hate each other?"
"It's all money, money. Everyone just wants a bigger slice of the pie. And they all depend on each other. If one factory fails to supply raw materials to another, everything comes to a halt," Antropova says knowingly. "There's no chance that they'll come to terms in November. They'll just air their dirty laundry in front of the whole country again. Why don't they give the plants to the trade union? We'll manage them ourselves and issue shares."
A dead place
The local administration is an oasis of prosperity amid the city's drabness. The spacious office of the administration's head, Sergey Veber, features a European-style interior. The shelves are crammed with an array of various diplomas and cups. Portraits of Vladimir Putin and Dmitry Medvedev hang on the wall. After giving me some time to settle in, Veber says quietly: "When I became the head of the administration eighteen months ago, there was nothing here at all..."
"You mean the economy was in ruins?"
"Who said anything about the economy? I meant there was no portrait of Putin. My friends gave me one and I hung it up right away."
Sitting in a comfortable armchair, Weber sounds confident, assuring me that the plants will not stop functioning again. Neither the government nor Putin will allow that to happen. And the managers of the three plants know perfectly well that the locals can be quite nasty when they're angry. So the enterprises are all working, albeit not at full capacity. Veber doesn't consider handing the plants over to the trade union an option. He proudly lists the administration's successes: the workers who lost their jobs were paid a lump sum of between one and five thousand roubles. Some of the thousand workers who were laid off even got to do public works. They swept the streets and repaired houses in the city for 4330 roubles a month.
"On the whole, things are pretty good here. The city's average wage is 14000-16000 roubles. Only 630 people are unemployed. And we've already paid all the wage arrears, which is about 40 million roubles. The city's enterprises even have some vacancies," Veber says, smiling cheerfully.
The sex trade in the ghost city
The two-storey house that serves as a gateway to Baseltsement-Pikalyovo is submerged in grey smoke spewing out of the chimney stacks. I head straight for the HR department hoping to land a job. The corridor is dark and empty. A bored blond lady of an uncertain age greets me in the office.
"What's your business?" she inquires without much interest.
"I'm looking for a job, any job," I reply timidly.
"Looking for a job?" the lady stares at me. "We don't even have enough work for our own people. We can only take you on as a worker on the factory floor. Fill in the form."
"What's the pay?"
"Maybe 4300 roubles. But I'm not really sure, actually."
"Why such low pay?" I blurt out and instantly regret it. The hand quickly withdraws the application form.
"You think that's low? You don't stand a chance. We're not taking anyone on. No vacancies," the HR officer announces her verdict.
Victor, the guard at the factory gate, smiles at me ironically on my way out:
"Did you find a job? Folks come here all the time and they always walk away all sad-faced, just like you. But I've got work to offer you. We could use someone like you..."
"What kind of job can you offer me?"
The guard breaks into a whisper:
"Writing stories. Erotic stories, we don't mind a bit of porn... You can suit yourself. It's for our website."
"Is that your business during the crisis?"
Victor ignores my remark and scribbles his phone number on a scrap of paper.
"You can get 200 roubles for each story. That should be enough for you."
Careful not to make the same mistake twice, I nod vigorously. The local businessman who posts pornography on the Internet smiles an almost entirely toothless smile.
"We may have eaten grass, but we never ate dogs".
After my disappointing experience at the HR office, I decide to mingle with the people. The shift has just ended and a trickle of workers is coming out of the factory gate, all of them with the same expression: serious, concentrated faces. Absolutely no one is smiling. Slouching, they all trudge home. A few lucky ones get on their rusty bikes. Baseltsement-Pikalyov's service engineer, Oleg Zagogulko, walks towards his obscenely white Ford.
"I bought it on loan, just before the crisis. Now I have to pay nine grand each month. And my wage is only 11 grand. When they withheld pay for three months, I had no idea what to do. I called the bank and as soon as they heard the word Pikalyovo, they sounded scared and decided to meet me halfway. I have a family to support, too. My mother-in-law was helping us out for a while. She would send us potatoes and sourkraut. Without her vegetable garden, we would have all starved," Zagogulko says, stroking the side of his Ford.
Like everybody else in Pikalyovo, Zagogulko earns money on the side. As soon as his shift ends, he rushes off to photograph weddings.
"It's as if they all woke up after Putin's visit. I get three or four weddings to photograph every weekend, and that's how I'm able to live. I'm happy I can put something on the table in the evening."
This has not always been the case, however. The people of Pikalyovo still vividly remember the summer when they were forced to gather dandelions and nettles to cook. "Everybody was asking everybody else how many hours you need to keep them stewing in the water. A lot of girls were calling me and saying: "I'm cooking the last cut of ham. I'll eat the skin and gnaw at the bones and give the rest to the kids. I have nothing for tomorrow." The newspapers all wrote about how we were eating dogs. But that's a lie. We may have eaten grass, but dogs? Never," Svetlana Antropova says vehemently.
To die or to loot?
Even now, Pikalyovo's residents sit down to frugal meals. A worker at one of the plants, Tamara Bulysheva, gloomily puts macaroni on plates next to finely cut roast sausages. It was the same meal yesterday and the day before.
"We buy macaroni, cereals and soup cubes. I used to buy cod at 33 roubles. Now it costs 40 roubles. So we had to give up fish altogether," Tamara says grimly, leaning back in her chair in a defeated manner. There's talk of the plants stopping again in December. We'll go on strike again. People are ready. I remember when the whole country was in crisis in 1998, but in Pikalyovo, we were living in paradise. Now, it's worse than hell... I can't even think of a name for it. And I'm in arrears on my utility rates. I earn some extra money as a cleaner."
Pikalyovo's shops all folded in the crisis. Only the huge chain stores like Pyatyorochka and Magnit are still managing to stay afloat. Owners of the other shops are all boarding up their doors and moving to Tikhvin or Boksitogorsk, where business is comparatively more lucrative.
"Shop-lifting is getting absolutely terrible," the sales attendant at a chain store, Natalya Blinnikova, complains. "Sales have dropped, we can't meet the target. How is it even possible to do business in such a situation? People never even buy vodka, they just steal it. But they steal sausages and ham even more often, probably to sell it on the side. We catch old grannies a lot. It's understandable, they have nothing to eat. They cry and moan to me, so I let them go. What else can you do with old grannies?"
Life in Pikalyovo dies down at about 7 p.m. Three hours later, all the streetlamps are turned off to save money. The only sound is from the factories, still humming soothingly. Semyon, a taxi driver, takes me to the empty hotel and regales me with stories about how drivers run over people in the dark streets because they can't see anything in the road. Semyon works a day job at the factory for 9000 roubles a month, and at night he transports tardy passengers. That adds five thousand roubles to the family budget. If the enterprises stop, he'll again join the strikers blocking the federal highway. Surprisingly, he's not afraid of losing his job.
"We've already been told from high up: don't you dare strike. But we've got nothing to lose, nowhere to go. You could drop a nuclear bomb on us, and we still wouldn't leave our parents, our vegetable gardens and our ancestors' graves," Semyon says, rubbing his tired eyes.
Katerina Kuznetsova