#6
The Pioneer (India)
No smooth drive, this
By Tatiana Shaumian
(Dr Tatiana Shaumian is Director of the Centre for Indian Studies in Moscow)

One of our most famous historians, Nikolai Karamzin, once remarked that "Russia has two misfortunes: its roads and its fools". It was a very sharp perception in its time, but that brilliant scholar of two centuries ago could have never imagined how those two malign factors have come together in post-Soviet Russia to create real mayhem.

The roads of Moscow were designed in Soviet times to be broad and impressive. Most of the traffic in those days consisted of official cars tearing down those vast avenues at full speed, as if no one else existed. Even in the 1980's, when quite a few ordinary people had acquired cars, the streets still looked empty. A traffic jam seemed an unimaginable thing. Since the collapse of the USSR, every fool in Russia has expressed his sense of liberation by purchasing an automobile - preferably a big, growling American or German one. Suddenly Moscow's roads are crammed with cars, millions of them, crawling like legions of ants through every corner of the city, filling the air with choking smog and creating a constant background rumble. Yet each Russian man tries to drive according to the only example he knew in his youth: official cars. He tries to speed down the street, weaving between cars, potholes and pedestrians, as if he were on crucial state business. If a road is jammed, he might jump the curb and go racing down the sidewalk, scattering people to all sides as if they were peasants of Czarist days. If his car has an accident or breaks down - both very common occurrences - he will leave it sitting in the middle of the road, snarling traffic and creating mayhem, while he goes off to find a repairman.

When you add the Russian weather to this mix, the result can be total paralysis. During several big blizzards last month, some traffic jams lasted for 16 hours or more. I know a man who left his downtown Moscow workplace at 5 o'clock on a Friday afternoon and finally arrived at his suburban home at 11 o'clock the next morning! I myself have sat in my car for 9 hours, trying to complete a journey that should normally take half an hour. Experts say the situation is one of the worst in the world, due to the combination of bad roads, ill-considered traffic rules and maniacal, idiotic drivers. I know what my Indian readers are thinking: that Delhi, Calcutta and Mumbai are just as bad. I used to think there could be nothing more chaotic than the thick gasoline fumes, careening three-wheeled vehicles and stampeding traffic of a big Indian city. Now I know there is. It is the total breakdown that has occurred in Moscow, where the streets are so choked with cars that normal mobility has become impossible. Thank goodness Moscow's metro system still functions like clockwork, swiftly and efficiently transporting about 18-million people per day to most points of the city. But those underground trains have also become crowded to the point of being dangerous, and experts say the old Soviet-era system is exhausted and badly over-extended.

Don't imagine that Moscow's post-Communist traffic madness is at least democratic. It is not. Russian officials still travel as they always did, by forcing the peasants to get out of their way. I happen to live on the Uspenskoye Highway, a suburban region which is home to President Vladimir Putin and many other top government leaders. Twice daily the entire 30-kilometre route from Putin's home to the Kremlin is closed down by police, who order cars to the side of the road and back them up at intersections, just so the President's 8-car cortege can race from home to work, and back, without any inconvenience. The delay for ordinary drivers can be 30 minutes or more each time. If this were a privilege enjoyed only by President Putin, it might be understandable. But in Russia it seems that every government minister (there are over 50 of them), innumerable deputy ministers, rich oligarchs, crime bosses, military chiefs and god-knows-who-else has the power to charge down the road with sirens blasting, lights flashing, and police waving everyone else out of his way.

Moscow's traffic pandemonium is far beyond being just a nasty irritant. It is a creeping social, economic and environmental catastrophe that threatens to overwhelm Russia's capital city, and drag it under. It may also be a looming political problem. President Putin remains the country's most popular leader in many decades, but I have often heard drivers cursing him furiously as they wait at roadside for his cortege to sweep past. If I were him, I'd worry about things like that.