Putin Speaks, Plants Re-open

Last week I wrote this post about the verbal beating Prime Minister Vladimir Putin gave to local officials and billionaire Oleg Deripaska, the owner of a shuttered factory complex in the town of Pikalyovo. Now, less than a week later, Russia's RIA Novosti news service is reporting that the plant was scheduled to reopen on Thursday.

The folks in Pikalyovo got the attention of Putin himself after blocking a highway to protest the shutdown of the Deripaska-owned plant. That closure had a ripple effect that also shut two other plants in town, basically leaving the citizens of Pikalyovo without any jobs at all.

The Guardian took the Pikalyovo protests as a reason to run this piece: "Protests against Putin sweep Russia as factories go broke". While the article makes some good points, particularly that Russia's economy is especially vulnerable because of the hundreds of factory towns across Russia that rely on a single industry for most (if not all) the employment in that town, the problem I had with it was that a large chunk of the article focused on protests against a tax on importing automobiles, that we talked about here last year (recap: to help Russia's ailing auto industry, Putin imposed a 50% tax on all used imported cars sold in Russia, Vladivostok in Russia's Far East, has a booming trade in used Japanese imports, so folks there were not at all happy with the new tax).

The Guardian makes the case that protests like Pikalyovo are far more common than the Russian government would like you to think they are. Fair enough, I just wish they had used stories of some recent wage-driven hunger strikes to back up that claim, rather than a rehash of a story of tax protests that happened seven months ago.