Kommersant: “A fire makes a house a home”
Vladimir Putin opens the heating season in Verkhnyaya Vereya.
Yesterday Prime Minister Vladimir Putin arrived in the village of Verkhnyaya Vereya in the Nizhny Novgorod Region. He was keeping a promise he made to attend a housewarming party for a local resident. Kommersant special correspondent Andrei Kolesnikov describes the exciting details of this trip.
When you drive along the main street of the newly rebuilt Verkhnyaya Vereya, which was burnt to the ground on July 29 (see Kommersant of July 31), you feel like you are in a model Finnish village. Even rows of white houses under brown roofs, a paved driveway leading up to each house, tall lampposts and a tidy artificial pond... This village does not look Russian. Everything is so right that it seems wrong. There's something about it that offends the eye – the village looks too white, too clean, too immaculate. It just doesn't seem Russian.
I entered a house with a floor space of 65 square metres. And elderly woman by the name of Yevdokia is its only resident. She was sitting on a sofa in one of the three rooms with her back to the door. She was rocking slightly, paying no attention to the sounds of the door opening and closing. In summer her grandchildren come to stay with her.
Her son and his wife from the Urals are visiting her right now. They saw that the house was filled with furniture. Yes, they were promised all the necessary furniture worth 150,000 roubles from IKEA, but why would she need a bunk bed? A single bed would have suited her perfectly.
It turned out that the furniture was from one of IKEA's two show rooms. Yevdokia's son said that IKEA employees left her all the furniture from one show room because it made no sense to take it back to the store.
Her son, who is in his mid fifties, said that the people who sold furniture in the village with a gracious 30% discount have long left and that he was also going to go soon because everything seems okay.
"Will your mother manage to live on her own?" I asked cautiously.
"Sure! Why not? She's only 87," he replied merrily.
He said he will go home after two more couches are delivered.
"What two couches? You have more than enough furniture," I said in surprise.
"We are entitled to these couches," he said, and I heard stern notes in his voice. "We'll take them because they were meant for us. They are ours and we'll find room for them."
There is no doubt they will find room for the couches.
"Is your mother pleased?" I asked him.
"Well..." he said with a sigh.
"What do you mean? Before that, the toilet was in the yard. I don't even understand how your mother got there at night, and now there is one in the house... There is gas and you'll have a telephone..."
"Indeed, some Chinese company is stretching a telephone cable to us," he said. "But why does she need a telephone?"
"So that you could call her," I said.
"And what happened with our hayloft, our sauna, our yard? Where is our stable?" he suddenly exclaimed in despair.
"Who lived in the stable?" I asked in surprise. "Did you have horses there?"
"What horses? We had a cow there. Our house was 60 square metres but we had 200 square metres of extensions."
About a hundred people were standing at a bus stop. They were waiting for the helicopter carrying prime minister. More people were waiting for Vladimir Putin in an enormous pavilion with semi-transparent white curtains, but those at the bus stop simply came to see the prime minister. Antonina Ryazanova, a woman of about 50, said they were so happy with what had been done. She said they didn't believe that they would receive the keys to the houses by November 1, but they got them and the houses were already heated. Antonina added that if I didn't believe this, I was welcome to visit her at home and see for myself. She invited me for a cup of tea but said we'd have to sit on the window sills because there is no furniture yet.
Her driveway was paved as all others and Antonina had the same rooms as Yevdokia, but they were still empty.
"We'll have everything," she said. "In fact, we already have everything. We've received insurance for our house that burned down."
"Is it a big sum?" I asked.
"257,000 roubles," she smiled.
"How much did you pay for it a year?"
"Quite a bit – about 2,000 roubles. Also, my husband, my son and I received 200,000 roubles each."
"I guess you aren't spending a lot of this money."
"There's not much to spend it on," she laughed. "Some people buy cars but we don't need a car."
"Do many buy cars?" I asked.
"Yes, many do."
"Well, you can spend this money to build a sauna in the yard," I advised. It's my third trip to this village since July 30 and I understand what a sauna means to them.
It turns out I'm not the only one who understands this.
"They promised to build us a sauna for free," she laughed again. "So we are rich! I also received money from the plant I retired from (she is older than 55 but doesn't look it – A.K.). Someone has bought us a TV set, a fridge and a washer (it's clear who this someone is but I won't mention it – I don't want to speak too soon – A.K.).
"This is not our house," Vladislav Ryazanov, Antonina's husband, said glumly.
"What do you mean?"
"We had a wooden house and I don't even know what this one is made of. We had just fixed the roof... Of course, we are grateful for not being left in the street..."
"Don't provoke the wrath of God!" Antonina said. "We have everything. Would we ever have had gas?"
"No, we wouldn't have had it. Never," her husband agreed reluctantly.
"And what about a toilet in the house?" I interjected.
I think a toilet in the house is a major convenience. I didn't pay much attention to it in my apartment but now I appreciate it.
"We don't need it," he said abruptly. "We go to the one in the yard."
"Even now?" I asked in shock.
He didn't reply.
"We're not very..." he said after a long pause.
"And what about plastic air-tight windows?" I asked, trying to cheer him up.
"Yes, we have them, but a lot of people had these windows before the fires," he agreed.
Ryazanov holds out to the very end.
"But you didn't have them before, did you?"
"No, we didn't," he forced a reply. "But 400 stones of hay were burnt."
"We've already bought a cow but haven't yet brought it in," said his wife, as if she were not listening to him. "We wanted to build a stone sauna but it was too close to the house (she pointed at 1.5 metre-high unfinished walls about 10 metres away from the house), so now we'll have a hencoop here."
"I'll build a wooden sauna," Ryazanov said stubbornly.
I went out and saw posters all around: "Thank you, AFK Sistema!" and "Happy housewarming" with a waist-up portrait of the company's head Vladimir Yevtushenkov.
There is certainly a personal touch. Why not remind people yet again that you were the one who helped them in their time of need?
The posters that read "Verkhnyaya Vereya is our home and we must care for it" and "We love our Nizhny Novgorod Region" did not produce much of an impression comparatively.
Hopefully the small new post office will never be as crowded as it was yesterday when Putin arrived. Cameramen packed in so tightly that he got worried: "The post office has just been built and now you'll pull it to pieces!"
Irina, a postal worker, admitted that before she could find any house in the village with her eyes closed, but now she's afraid to venture out because she doesn't recognise the place.
"Thank you on behalf of our people. Thanks to the party," she said. She knew whom to thank.
At the medical station a pleased Vladimir Putin told the nurse: "There you go! You had a shed here before."
"Well, it wasn't quite a shed," the nurse said, obviously taking offence. She didn't like to think of herself as having worked in a shed before.
In a new grocery store, a kind of a minimarket, one of the customers told Putin proudly: "We have everything here, all essential items."
A girl in a new green uniform thanked the prime minister for the government's decision to set the highest price ceiling for cereals and sugar and the lowest possible price level for socially significant products, including bread.
"Bread is baked here in the Nizhny Novgorod Region, so we can lower prices for it," she explained.
"Indeed, this bread doesn't look like French bread," the region's governor, Valery Shantsev, said.
Then Putin walked into another house (90 square meters) and was met by Svetlana Romanova, a middle-aged woman.
"Please just call me Svetlana," she requested. She lived with her old mother who kept muttering all the time: "My Lord, what a bit of luck!"
Svetlana told Putin that she had chosen red coloured furniture (at least she didn't choose redwood) although she was worried that "her mother would not appreciate this modern look."
"What the eyes fear the hands do!" Shantsev said.
The prime minister headed for the door but Svetlana stopped him:
"Wait! I'd like you to see my bathroom!"
Shantsev also had a look. "Good job," he said approvingly.
Before parting, Svetlana presented the prime minister with an icon. He had visited her before and she promised to give him a present.
When Vladimir Putin walked by a playground, he saw a girl of six by the name of Zhenya.
Before Putin's arrival, her mother had to literally drag the girl to the playground.
"We're not allowed to go there yet," she protested.
"Go, you are a child and you can go. Off you go! And give him the letter," her mother said.
The girl, or rather the prime minister, ultimately did everything right. He noticed Zhenya and approached her. She asked him for an autograph (not on the letter that she handed in to him). Vladimir Putin took a seat in a rocking chair, and the chair started rocking rhythmically. He was surprised.
"Hold onto me," he asked the girl, and she gripped him by the shoulder.
Never before had the prime minister given an autograph in such a dramatic atmosphere.
Vladimir Putin walked into the enormous pavilion with white curtains and congratulated all those present on what has been done.
"I've just seen a woman who almost drowned me in her tears on July 30. 'You won't do it!' she said. I said: 'We will do it!' 'No, you won't.' 'We'll do it and do it better! 'It will never be better!' she said. But we have done it and done it better. We promised to complete everything by November 1 and we did."
Then the prime minister held a video conference with the governments and residents of more than a dozen regions. He listened to the reports on the completion of work and touching stories from residents. "The wife of a builder asked me to make sure the builders receive a bigger lunch because they work 12 hours a day," Putin said. "This shows that the wives care for their husbands, which is a good thing, and that their husbands are really working hard."
"The government has proved that it is capable of resolving problems on such a large scale. I can tell you with confidence that the work of this magnitude could not have been accomplished several years ago. There was no money, no technology... I hope you will live happily ever after," Putin said.
It could have been the end of a fairy tale.
Standing by the houses that differed mainly in the colour of their roofs (blue roofs in the Moscow Region and red roofs in the Lipetsk Region) the governors continued reporting about their successes.
Sewer systems and gas pipelines have been installed in the Vladimir, Ulyanovsk, Saratov, Tambov, Sverdlovsk and Ivanovo regions. ("Now they don't need wood or coal," Mordovian President Nikolai Merkushkin explained to Vladimir Putin. "I know all about it, I know," Putin replied).
The more the governors talked and the more inspiring their reports on the new villages (or at least a couple of new houses) became, the more obvious was the scale of misery in the Russian villages unaffected by the fires. They don't have any sewage systems, indoor bathrooms or gas.
"We've revived one more village thanks to this misfortune," Ivanovo Region Governor Mikhail Men said, without a hint of irony.
The fire victims were very lucky. Others are not so fortunate.
By Andrei Kolesnikov
