I’m watching this video in which medical workers from Nizhny Tagil tell their story:
- how the official “average staff salary” at their hospitals is 23,000 rubles, but in reality they are paid 14,000 rubles;
how they recorded a video appeal to Putin;
- how, after the scandal, they were promised the problem would be resolved;
- how that problem was “resolved” by adding another 1,000–1,200 rubles to the previous 14,000.
And I think: why, then, were these workers planning to go to Moscow and break up protests in order to “defend stability”?
Maybe what needs to be broken up there, on the spot in Nizhny Tagil itself, is the local crowd of tough guys, so that the city maternity hospital starts paying wages people can actually live on?
Although perhaps, for Tagil’s workers, “stability” means their wives and mothers earning 14,000 rubles and dreaming of being paid the full legal amount — all the way up to 23,000. If that’s the case, then yes, they should go break up protests in Moscow — the best way to defend their own poverty and powerlessness.