Prime Minister Vladimir Putin yesterday visited Tatarstan. In Naberezhnye Chelny he said that the Kamaz bailout programme had been successful, and to underscore his point, he launched an assembly line that will produce diesel engines. In Nizhnekamsk he conducted a conference on the petrochemical industry. Yet in spite of the tight schedule, Putin found the time to discuss the upcoming football match between Russia and Slovenia.
Naberezhnye Chelny-Nizhnekamsk
Three flags - Russian, American and Tatar - were fluttering in the wind in front of the white building of a new Kamaz workshop. The flags symbolised the friendship of the peoples which has manifested itself into the creation of a joint enterprise. It will produce 140-300 hp engines that meet Euro-3, Euro-4 and Euro-5 ecological standards. All the engines will be sold on the Russian market.
"You should have seen this workshop a year ago," a spokesman for the truck plant said, glancing skyward. "It was a drab, dreary and filthy place. Everything changed within a year. The crisis helped us."
Actually, it was not the crisis, but the government.
"I visited Kamaz last December when we mapped out a programme to support the enterprise and the automotive industry, and it has worked," the prime minister said. "I hope that with your help Kamaz will gradually recover from the crisis." Wages have, of course, shrunk significantly since before the crisis: the average worker's wage is now 12,000 roubles a month compared to 17,000 a year ago.
"It's all right, we don't grumble," one worker said. "On the bright side, we have been on a five-day week again since November."
The conversation quickly drifted to football.
"It's hard to make forecasts in sport, this is not forecasting but crystal-ball gazing," the prime minister remarked guardedly. "But I think we will win."
Apologising that he had no time to answer all the questions, Putin suggested that the questions be saved until his live phone-in programme.
"We will have a chance to talk, I will have my traditional video link with the public and I will ask the camera crew to come over," he reassured the workers. In the meantime, the prime minister headed for Nizhnekamsk, the country's petrochemical capital, so to speak.
"The challenge facing us is enlargement and consolidation of that sector; the government will do everything to assist that process, we are determined to do it," he said. "Russia has for some time been moving in the opposite direction as complexes were fragmented and links between enterprises were broken off. As a result, today the size of an average company in the petrochemical and gas chemistry sector is minute compared with Western or Asian giants".
Still, the government is not going to bail out everyone indiscriminately.
"Assistance should be given to established and competitive companies, we should not keep afloat inefficient production facilities at all costs," Putin stressed.
Anastasia Savinykh