A news story that has gone almost unnoticed, yet fully deserves front pages, TV coverage, and discussion in the State Duma and the Security Council: Vologda Region has become the first region in Russia where commuter trains have stopped running.
Maybe people in Moscow do not find this news especially gripping, but as someone who spent several years taking commuter trains to and from university every day—and 60% of the country knows exactly what that means—I can say this is HELL.
Take a look at Vologda Region:
It is enormous—about the size of the entire Baltic region. Its population is 1.2 million, and only 0.3 million of them live in the administrative center, Vologda. And you know how our country works: you constantly have to travel “to the center.” For a document, for a certificate, for groceries, for clothes.
How are people supposed to get around if there are no commuter trains?
Nothing like this happened even in the impoverished mid-1980s or in the most wretched years of the “cursed ’90s.” The commuter trains ran reliably and on schedule.
So this is what we got from all those “fat and stable 2000s”: after taking in $2.1 trillion from oil and gas sales over the past 15 years, Russia is abolishing public transport.
This is now the country’s literal degradation, with no exaggeration at all. Next up will be a decision requiring people to cut their own kindling splints for lighting because some regional power grid company cannot be paid off.
In 2012, when China—where hundreds of millions had been starving not so long ago—launched the world’s longest high-speed railway, Russia began making huge, forceful leaps toward the Stone Age.
The bitter irony is that for many months now, the lead story on television has been tales of the “genocide of Russians.” Wikipedia tells us that if there is anywhere one should look for Russians, Vologda Region is the place:
Even the famous color photograph by Prokudin-Gorsky of a Russian peasant girl with wild strawberries—which has become one of the images through which we imagine what Russians looked like at the beginning of the 20th century—was taken in Vologda Governorate:
One hundred and six years have passed, and that girl’s great-great-great-grandchildren are scratching their heads, unable to understand why the Cherepovets–Vologda commuter train was canceled.
And meanwhile, in that very Donetsk—where there is a war—commuter trains are running, or at least they were running in July of this year. Do you get it?
As part of this struggle against the Banderites (a reference to Ukrainian nationalist followers of Stepan Bandera) and the Americans—a struggle supposedly taking place everywhere: in Donetsk, Luhansk, Cuba, Syria, Venezuela, and so on—we have cut off suburban rail service for the most quintessentially Russian people in Vologda Region, which is, of course, a genuine act of sabotage aimed at making them drink even more once they are deprived of the basic benefits of civilization.
And how are you not supposed to start drinking? You work honestly, pay taxes, take care of your family, and then—BAM—your commuter train is canceled. There is no way to take your child to the regional hospital. You can bang your head against the wall all you want, but you are not going to restore that train by yourself.
You try to go to a rally to demand the trains be brought back—that does not work either.
The governor is not listening to your rallies; he is busy burning the cars of the people who organize them, together with the Interior Ministry.
You go online to find out what bastards did this, and you come across photos of the palace of Yakunin, the head of the state-owned Russian Railways.
You also learn that Yakunin’s son’s house in an upscale area of London costs £4.5 million—more at current prices than your region’s entire annual debt to Russian Railways, the very debt because of which you lost your commuter train.
You can also learn about the Yakunin family’s offshore empire, worth billions and built on corruption and theft at Russian Railways.
You can also learn that Putin’s friends—Yakunin, Timchenko, and the Rotenbergs—built the most expensive and most useless railway in the world in Sochi, stealing at least half of its cost.
And of course, you learn that there have been no investigations into any of these facts.
What is all this, if not deliberate genocide?
There it is: point 5. As we established above, Vologda Region has the highest percentage of ethnic Russians, and clearly everything is being done to make sure they do not live and reproduce in Vologda Region. Though of course this genocide hits the Vepsians no less hard.
In short, I think the news that in the 21st century a major region of Russia no longer has commuter trains should be hurled in the insolent faces of United Russia members, Putin loyalists, and the whole rotten lot every time they start yapping about fifth columns, Mistral warships, NATO, wars, and the schemes of some supposed enemies.
Who was it—the NATO secretary general who canceled the commuter train to Cherepovets? Was it Obama who stole everything from Russian Railways and funneled it into Panamanian offshore accounts? Was it Bandera who created a budget system in which everything is sucked into Moscow while the regions are so poor they cannot maintain suburban rail service?
Stop lying. Stop stealing. Give commuter trains back to Russian people.