Pikalyovo trade union leader Svetlana Antropova was locked up by security services during Putin's phone-in programme.
In Pikalyovo (Leningrad Region) the leader of the local factory trade union, Svetlana Antropova, was chosen to address Prime Minister Vladimir Putin on behalf of the workers during his phone-in programme.
The people of Pikalyovo say with one voice that this had been planned and approved long before the programme went on air. But on the morning on December 3 VGTRK correspondent Yevgeny Rozhkov and the representatives of the Pikalyovo Aluminum Plant's management (ZAO Bazeltsement-Pikalyovo) invited Svetlana Antropova to the factory canteen to tell her that "the situation had changed."
"I was given to understand," Svetlana Antropova told Novaya Gazeta, "that VGTRK journalists had received an order from Moscow to strike me off the list of speakers and off the list of those allowed to be before the cameras. The order was carried out by the factory's security men who obviously felt ill-at-ease. But it was an order."
Shortly before the link-up with Pikalyovo, Antropova was locked up in a security service room.
"An hour before the link-up, at around 11, the trade union leader says, the workers who had been picked in advance and excused from their duties, were taken into a room for a briefing."
Antropova claims that the questions to Putin were discussed in advance and agreed with the channel's officials and Moscow bureaucrats. Yet in spite of all these precautions, the two questions from the Leningrad Region that were aired on December 3 had not been previously agreed.
"People asked their own questions," Svetlana Antropova stresses. "But in the end they managed to ask only two questions although there were supposed to be many more."
The people of Pikalyovo were not satisfied with the Prime Minister's answers, they said. Vladimir Putin said that "the government is closely watching the situation," that a road network is being created in the city and a swimming pool is under construction." Actually, the repair of Pikalyovo's only road was completed in the summer (it was started because a second high-level visit was expected) and the swimming pool had been built 30 years ago.
Nina Petlyanova