Kommersant: “A kopeck here, a kopeck there add up to a lot”
Vladimir Putin unveils the National Geographical Programme to the business community.
An enlarged meeting of the board of the Russian Geographical Society (RGO) was held in Moscow yesterday. Our special correspondent ANDREI KOLESNIKOV saw it as the birth of a heady new national idea whose realization Vladimir Putin will oversee personally.
When I entered the auditorium of the Asia and Africa Institute, where an enlarged meeting of the Board of Trustees of the Russian Geographical Society was to be held, I wondered for a moment whether I had come to the right place.
If you looked to the right, you might get the impression that you were at a meeting of the board of the Russian Union of Industrialists and Entrepreneurs (RUIE) in its heyday. Seated there were the heads of several major companies -- Oleg Deripaska of Rusal, Alisher Usmanov of Metalloinvest, Viktor Vekselberg of Renova, Mikhail Prokhorov of UNEXIM, and Vladimir Potanin of Interros. Come to think of it, the RUIE Board was never graced by such high-powered businessmen.
One could also be forgiven for thinking that a meeting of the presidium of the United Russia Party was about to begin. In another section of the hall were seated State Duma Speaker Boris Gryzlov, Moscow Mayor Yuri Luzhkov, Saint Petersburg Governor Valentina Matviyenko and, of course, Emergencies Minister Sergey Shoigu.
Sitting to the left were Director General of Channel 1, Konstantin Ernst, Director General of Rossiya Channel, Oleg Dobrodeyev, Editor-in-Chief of RIA Novosti, Svetlana Mironyuk, Editor-in-Chief of Komsomolskaya Pravda, Vladimir Sungorkin and Editor-in-Chief of Moskovsky Komsomolets, Pavel Gusev.
In fact, I felt as if I had come to several wrong places all at the same time.
At last, this could also have been the founding congress of a new party. This alone could justify the presence of all these people in one beautifully refurbished hall.
But, as I soon found out, the occasion was even more serious than I had thought. I was witnessing the birth of a national idea - uniting the Russian lands and providing them with global publicity and global financing under the leadership of Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin.
The prime minister was greeted with the now customary welcome, with the audience rising to their feet (with varying degrees of alacrity). He wished a speedy recovery to the "well known explorer Vasily Peskov" who had turned 80 and talked about creating a multipurpose environmental and geographical information space before discussing the Baikal Pulp and Paper Plant.
The topic was bound to come up. By signing a resolution authorizing the plant to resume operations, the head of the RGO Board of Trustees (Vladimir Putin) had taken an ambiguous position: the informal leader of an organization called upon to protect the environment had given permission to dump some of the world's filthiest waste into the world's cleanest lake.
Mr Putin felt that an explanation was in order. Otherwise he would not have looked up from his notes and switched almost completely to the language of hand gestures.
"Arguments are raging over the fate of this plant," he said. "The plant has been operating since 1965. Since 1965!"
This, however, did not prove that the plant should continue operating.
So the prime minister mentioned how he had diverted the Eastern Siberia pipeline 400 km away from the Baikal runoff zone several years ago. And while it cost a lot of money, he said he did not regret his decision. But that wasn't a valid argument about why the Baikal Pulp and Paper Plant should continue operating.
Finally, the prime minister said that the 400,000 residents of Baikalsk depend on the plant for their livelihood. But providing employment is not an explanation for why waste should continue being discharged into Baikal's clean water.
The prime minister then walked through the issues most in need of attention (I think that the issue foremost in his mind is how to preserve and increase the population of polar bears in the Arctic; apparently the Siberaian tiger, after Putin's intervention, was no longer a cause for concern) and noted that the Russian Geographical Society is a non-governmental organization, which is not financed by the federal government and relies instead on fundraising by members of the Board of Trustees.
He glanced at the members, a group of businessmen obsessed with the idea of saving the white-naped crane, which is facing extinction. Some of them looked down, as if Putin's appeal for fundraising did not apply to them, at least not directly. ("Why me?" was the message written on their faces). However, some did not need to bow their heads. No matter how much Mr Prokhorov, for example, drooped his head in response to an aggressive Mr Putin, he was still head and shoulders above his colleagues.
"Actually, it is not money that is needed, we are talking about paltry sums," the prime minister said, as if consoling them in the face of the inevitable, i.e. the funding of the programme to preserve the population of walruses and northern deer.
Realizing this provided little consolation, he added that the names of some Russian bankers, for example, Ryabushinsky, went down in history only because they contributed to the work of the Russian Geographical Society.
That was a stronger argument. Heads raised, backs straightened.
Was Mr Putin thinking about immortalizing only their names?
"Otherwise nobody would have remembered Ryabushinsky," the prim minister concluded cheerfully. "In fact, social responsibility is good for everyone."
Next the President of the RGO, Sergey Shoigu, was given the floor to deliver his report.
"The time has come to simplify the registration of RGO members,"
he said in such a solemn tone, as if he was referring to simplifying the procedure of removing Lenin's body from the Mausoleum.
The editor-in-chief of RIA Novosti spoke about the upcoming international conference on the Arctic, restoring Russia's claim to that part of the earth and the debate over the delimitation of the Arctic continental shelf, and announced that Prince Albert of Monaco, a well-known philanthropist in this sphere, was going to attend the conference. (It was not for nothing that some Russian businessmen donated to his fund and the donations added up to impressive sums).
Mr Putin awarded the first few grants of the Russian Geographical Society (most of them went to the Russian Geographical Society itself).
He recalled when Russia planted its flag in the Arctic and the row it triggered in the world.
"No one is forbidden to plant a flag there," he explained. "We work within the UN framework on all these issues..."
The prime minister then returned to the problem of the Baikal Pulp and Paper Plant. He must have sensed that his arguments in favour of reopening the plant had not convinced everyone.
"I've already mentioned the Baikal Pulp and Paper Plant, and I would like to invite everyone to discuss this topic," the prime minister said. "I repeat, we will spare no money for Baikal... It is not about taking something away from somebody or allowing somebody to make money... I asked for a comparison of the work of the plant with other enterprises that discharge waste into the lake... The plant discharges 27,400 tons a year, Gusinoozersky Hub, 400,000 tons... air pollution: the plant discharges 4.3 tons into the atmosphere and Angarsk, for example, 221,000 tons.
So far these appeared to be strong arguments in favour of shutting down the Gusinoozersky hub and cracking down on air polluters in Angarsk.
"One should look at the problem as a whole," the prime minister urged his audience. "One should look at everything carefully without much ado... people live there... what happened when the plant was shut down? Degradation of the city set began..."
He said that one of the grants would finance a comprehensive study of the situation around the plant. So, he is still not quite sure that he had done the right thing in signing the resolution. Which is what we set out to prove.
"These are only the first steps. Work will gain scope in the future," the prime minister said commenting on the handing out of the grants.
There was a note of pity in his voice for the kind people who deemed it their duty to finance all these grants and projects, so he offered some words of consolation.
"I have said that we are not talking about an awful lot of money... but I understand that a kopeck here and a kopeck there add up to a lot..." he said, smiling sympathetically.
Some in the audience could not help smiling back, sympathetically.
They probably should have known better.
Andrei Kolesnikov
