By Boris Kagarlitsky and Renfrey Clarke
MOSCOW — During the Gorbachev years, the popular Russian journalist Alexander Kabakov published a science fiction story entitled The Non-Returnee, in which he described the horrors of life after perestroika. He depicted a Moscow in which normal life had disintegrated, there was shooting on the streets, and one part of the city was at war with another. The only thing that still worked properly was the city's underground rail system, the metro.
Residents of the Russian capital are simply incapable of imagining the metro shutting down. But it now seems that a continuation of neo-liberal "reforms" is fraught with just this danger.
In Soviet times, the building of metro systems — not just in Moscow, but throughout the country — was funded centrally. The necessary sums were simply not to be found in local budgets.
Now the metro systems have been handed over to local authorities. In Moscow there is one transport policy, another in St Petersburg, and in provincial centres yet another. The uniform fares and technical standards of former years are now things of the past. Every city tries to solve its own problems as best it can.
In the recently adopted federal budget, no provision was made for the centralised funding of urban underground rail systems. City treasury authorities also refused to finance work on building and maintaining metro lines.
The cost of these tasks has been put at 3.4 trillion roubles, close to US$1 billion dollars. An immense sum for an impoverished country, this is nevertheless somewhat less than the Russian government, according to heavily understated official figures, spent up to the end of January waging its war in Chechnya.
Meanwhile, the Moscow city authorities would not seem to be short of money either, when it comes to funding projects dear to the mayor and his acolytes. The Moscow administration is currently spending vast sums building a concrete replica of the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour, demolished in the 1930s. The city government is also outlaying a huge slice of its budget constructing an underground complex beneath the Manezh Square, and is now promising to erect the world's tallest skyscraper on the banks of the Moscow River.
Extremely dubious from the economic, architectural and environmental points of view, these projects have drawn numerous public protests. According to experts, none of them is likely to be fully realised. But none of them has encountered problems with finance.
If the funds needed for the Moscow metro were not found, commentators warned during January, all plans for developing the system further would have to be postponed. There would be no new lines or stations, and thousands of metro construction workers would lose their jobs. The cost of a metro journey, currently 400 roubles, would rise to 1800. There would be long intervals between trains, and one heavily used line would have to shut down entirely.
Executives of Metrostroy, the enterprise responsible for building and maintaining metro lines, warned that the escalators at many stations would have to be stopped, and that accidents underground would become a routine matter. For that matter, Muscovites would not be safe from accidents above ground either. Metro construction workers constantly pump water out of foundation pits and new tunnels. If this work were to cease, the soil would begin to subside and cave in.
At a conference in mid-January, the Metrostroy trade union resolved to call a strike for January 31 in protest against the disintegration of Moscow's underground rail transit system. The city authorities then declared that they would not allow the trade unions to force the redistribution of budget funds. It seemed that the prospect of the collapse of the Russian capital's transport system, and even the danger that people would be killed, troubled them much less than the need to observe "budget discipline".
Then the city authorities began to think again. Unlike most Russian workers, the people who build and run the Moscow metro are not without industrial muscle. The economy of the Russian capital depends on millions of workers being able to travel across the city each day by public transport. The cost to employers of even a brief metro stoppage would be enormous.
As they planned their action, the metro workers had a variety of effective tactics to choose from. If construction workers stopped pumping water from new tunnels, various existing lines would soon be flooded. Metro train drivers would not even have to strike; simply by following regulations and refusing to take out carriages with mechanical faults, they could cut the number of trains per hour to a handful.
The Moscow authorities had little reason to hope that the public would blame the workers rather than the city officials for the resulting chaos. Consequently, the prospect of strike action on the metro appears to have caused the city administration genuine alarm. This evidently penetrated to President Boris Yeltsin, for whom Moscow Mayor Yuri Luzhkov has been a vital political ally. Late in January, Yeltsin ordered the Russian government to come up with the funds needed to continue metro construction in several Russian cities, including the capital.
The future of Russia's metro systems is far from assured. Notoriously, funds budgeted or otherwise promised by the government are delivered late, and rarely in full. Despite Yeltsin's instructions, the new allocations for construction and maintenance will fall immediately under the gaze of cost-cutting zealots in the Finance Ministry.
Defenders of public transport, however, have the perfect answer to the financial hatchet-wielders: just take the money from the funds assigned for fighting the war in Chechnya.