Moscow Stories

Fred Weir on how President Putin and his nouveau riche hangers-on are wasting water in dacha-land, and why the city's Metro is going broke

I live in Razdori, a dacha village just outside Moscow. Dachas used to be humble wooden dwellings to which people escaped at weekends and in summer for a bit of rural peace, but now our rich and powerful neighbours are fast becoming an insufferable curse.

One of these is no less than President Vladimir Putin (below), who lives in his heavily guarded country complex at Novo Ogaryovo, just a few miles up the Uspenskoye Highway, the main link with Moscow. We have become used to seeing the road closed for up to an hour twice daily, so that Mr Putin can race to and from his Kremlin office at 125mph. Police also shut down traffic completely whenever his predecessor, Boris Yeltsin, leaves his opulent villa just outside Razdori for his regular check ups at the élite Krylatskoye heart clinic.

Even when the highway is open, there is always the risk of being run into the ditch by a speeding, siren-blaring, light-flashing convoy of some top official, business oligarch or mafiya boss, who cluster in their fortified communities around here like bees in a hive. Huge numbers of Russia's new-rich have built big, garish mansions in recent years along the highway, apparently desperate to share the same address as the country's political élite. Once-modest dacha villages such as Zhukovka, Barvikha and Usovo have sprouted Disneyland-like suburbs of hulking monstrosities that look more like Dracula's castle or the Pentagon than somebody's home.

At the same time as all this is going on, nobody seems to have given any thought to extending public amenities. Many local roads are a mess. Pressure in the natural-gas pipes has fallen disastrously, and electrical brownouts are increasingly common. This summer we are also enduring water cut-offs which, according to local whispers, are due to the strict supply priority enjoyed by the big shots. Farmers in the village of Ogaryovo, next to the lavish presidential residence, say they have to fill their bathtubs late at night or they will have no water to make tea next day. No complaints have been heard from the Putin entourage, on the other hand, of any difficulties in watering his villa's vast lawns or filling the huge swimming-pool, where he sometimes entertains visiting foreign leaders.

Just beside Razdori, a walled complex enclosing about 30 big, opulent villas has sprung up. Last week, on a day when we couldn't coax a single drop of water from our kitchen tap, I walked over there and peered through the gate. Dozens of lawn sprinklers inside were going full blast. I had no luck in getting officials at any level to comment on this. Finally, a mid-level bureaucrat in the Moscow regional department of communal services admitted there had been critical problems with water supplies in the Uspenskoye area this summer. Was that because Mr Putin was using it all? "Well, he isn't the only one," was all the man would say.

Apart from our problems in dacha country, public-transport systems across Russia are on the verge of collapse, according to the government. This time it is not the fat cats who are to blame; quite the opposite.

Despite Russia having supposedly undergone a decade of harsh market reforms, the number of people entitled to travel free on municipal bus, metro and trolley services has been rising steadily since the demise of the USSR. Fully three-quarters of passengers on the Moscow metro don't pay a kopek. In Soviet times, despite the Communist ideology, only a fifth enjoyed this privilege. Generous post-Soviet politicians have granted 64 categories of people the right to unlimited free rides, including pensioners, war veterans, invalids, emergency workers, police, soldiers, civil servants and priests.

"This cannot continue," said Anatoly Pinson, a Transport Ministry official. "Either we get more income into the system or services will begin to fold."