#13 - RW 260
Transitions Online
www.tol.cz
June 4, 2003
Notes from St. Petersburg: After the Ball
It was quite a shindig, but was all the money really spent on celebrating St. Petersburg’s 300th anniversary?
by Vladimir Kovalev

ST. PETERSBURG, Russia -- In the countdown to St. Petersburg’s 300th anniversary, the residents of Russia’s northern capital have become used to flurries of activity by workmen previously not famous for speed. Still, residents in the city center were a little surprised to wake up the morning after the city’s massive anniversary celebrations to discover that even that night, workers had been busy digging up and repairing the sidewalk. Even more so as the sidewalk had just been relaid.

As it turned out, the workers’ bosses had become scared of the imminent attentions of the Prosecutor's Office, which had begun to investigate whether the required 16 inches of sand had been put under the bricks. It seems that in this part of the city, at least, 16 inches had not been used and the savings had been pocketed.

Which all begs the question: How much of the money nominally spent on the city had in fact disappeared like water into sand?

There was certainly plenty of money to disappear. Originally the state had promised to provide something like $500 million for the celebrations, a huge affair with 44 foreign leaders. By the time the leaders had arrived, the amount of government money spent had risen to about $1.9 billion, according to Valentina Matvienko, President Vladimir Putin’s representative in the northwest.

There were certainly some big outlays. The facades of iconic sites were refaced, palaces rebuilt, major roads relaid, and a new branch of the national library constructed.

Above all, there was the $280 million spent on Putin’s seaside residence, the Konstantinovsky Palace, the improvement that the president seemed most proud of. "This is the first time in Russia that work on such a scale has been completed in such a short time,” Putin told the men, who had worked on the palace since 2000. "You've not only brought a cultural memorial to life again, but you have created a work of engineering art. The Konstantinovsky Palace has earned the right to become the monument to St. Petersburg’s jubilee."

Apparently none of the costs for this centerpiece of the city’s celebration came from the state’s pocket.

Still, despite the huge sums provided by the state and the state’s ability to tap local businesses, Petersburgers have plenty of complaints. The sum spent on doing all this was almost as much as the city’s annual budget (about $2.4 billion) for all its services--education, welfare and so on--yet no money was found to repair the metro line flooded back in 1995.

Bigger projects, too, remain mothballed. The government has not finished a 152-kilometer ring road and has not even begun to complete a river barrier that has remained untouched since the late 1980s. Environmentalists insisted then that the project would damage the environment in the Gulf of Finland. The need remains, though, and the government has done little to find alternatives.

Embarrassingly, the failure to provide public services came to a symbolic head during the festivities themselves. Over 1.5 million people turned up to see a laser show to mark the anniversary but then found themselves unable to get home--public transport was not working at that time of night, and getting across the most important of the city’s many bridges was impossible, as they had been drawn up.

DON’T RUSH TO INVESTIGATE

Misallocation of resources is one thing, corruption another. As the pilferers of sand can testify, the federal authorities are now on the trail of those who have siphoned off money. Judging by such assiduousness on the part of the authorities, people should at least have fewer complaints about the government on this front.

But the sums in question are small, and questions over bigger sums seem to be going unanswered.

Back in February, Vladimir Zubrin, the prosecutor for the northwest region, announced that "serious investigations are targeting work in the historic center.” He said 21 projects would be looked into. But since then, the prosecutor has announced none of his findings.

In the suspicious minds of the city’s inhabitants, that might have something to do with the subsequent decision of the city’s governor to stand down. Long out of favor with Putin, the launch of investigations perhaps suggested to the governor, Vladimir Yakovlev, that it was wisest to go now.

Though the latest rumors suggest he may be changing his mind, Yakovlev has plenty of other reasons to leave office. Analysts say that the president’s former representative in the region, Viktor Cherkesov, had isolated all of Yakovlev's political allies; the city’s Prosecutor's Office is occupied by an ally of Putin; and the city’s legislative assembly is controlled by the pro-Kremlin Unity Party.

The favorite to replace Yakovlev is the president’s current representative, Valentina Matvienko.

Matvienko, who was also the one who announced the latest soaring estimate of the cost of the celebrations, has said that investigations into whether the anniversary funds had been stolen or misspent should not be rushed.

She may not be in a rush about that, but she did seem very determined to seize the moment. The government has already started to discuss funds for the renovation of St. Petersburg’s historic sites in 2004, she declared, saying that “the president of Russia has requested the government, ministries, and agencies not to let up in any way on the tempo of work on renovating the city’s historical center.”

Only the “first level” of problems had been touched, and “there are many problems ahead." We should “load [builders and restaurateurs] with work.”

So the people of St. Petersburg may possibly continue to see workers day and night. But perhaps the workmen’s bosses will not be so worried about investigators knocking on their doors.

Vladimir Kovalev is TOL’s correspondent in St. Petersburg.

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