#4
Moscow Times
January 15, 2002
Ded Moroz's Darker Side
By Boris Kagarlitsky

Ded Moroz is usually considered to be the Russian counterpart of Santa Claus -- a bearded, good-natured fellow who stuffs presents into children's stockings hung by the fireplace and is used to advertise various brands on television. In fact, Ded Moroz, according to the fairy-tales, is a severe and capricious man who depending on his mood will distribute gifts or make people freeze to death.

This winter, the darker side of Ded Moroz's character was strongly in evidence. At the beginning of the New Year's holidays, Moscow Mayor Yury Luzhkov ceremonially presented him with the keys to the city. Moscow was assailed with a terrible cold spell immediately after this. The mayor, however, didn't ask Ded Moroz to give the keys back and it would seem that he returned to his hometown of Veliky Ustyug with them.

This winter in Moscow alone more than 300 people have died from the cold. In December and the first half of January, between 5 and 10 people froze to death each day -- more than the casualties sustained by the army in Chechnya.

The fact that people are freezing to death on the streets of the country's most affluent city is not just a result of a high level of drunkenness and the poor state of city services, but is also indicative of a broader social malaise and the increasing numbers of homeless living on the streets of the capital.

In Helsinki, where the climate is not dissimilar to ours and the people no less prone to hit the bottle, there is a municipal service that picks inebriated people up off the streets. On public holidays, volunteers are drafted in to provide reinforcement.

Driving a car in Moscow in winter has turned into a hazardous adventure that can have unpredictable results. I get around town on the metro and usually make my meetings on time. The only time I took a taxi, however, it ended unfortunately, when the car I was in got stuck in a one-and-a-half hour traffic jam and I was late getting to the television studio where I was supposed to be participating in a live debate.

Moscow is surprisingly poorly adapted to winter conditions and snow-fall can have disastrous consequences.

If over the past month you haven't slipped on the ice that covers sidewalks at least once, it can mean one of only two things: either you are extremely lucky or you're a big boss and only ever have to take a couple of steps from the door of your car to the door of your office, home, etc.

Complaints about the city authorities' lack of preparation for winter are nothing new. The real tragedy is that things are getting steadily worse. Ice-covered sidewalks as a universal phenomenon only came in with perestroika. Members of the older generations recount how under Stalin, dvorniks, or street cleaners, worked irreproachably, sidewalks were swept clean and even in winter, women could go out in high heels.

Do we really need a regime of terror in order to keep the streets free of ice? I, for one, have no desire to return to Stalinist times.

Cold weather has undoubtedly also played an important role in East European politics. In temperatures of minus 20 and below, people's desire to get out on the streets and protest drops off remarkably rapidly.

In Poland in 1981, General Jaruzelski's regime introduced a martial law when the cold weather set in. Activists from the free trade unions responded with the slogan, "The winter is yours, but the spring will be ours!"

In Russia, reforms normally take place in the warm season, while with the onset of the cold season the state has a tendency to demonstrate the full extent of its repressive might. It is no accident that Nikita Khrushchev's reforms were referred to as the "Thaw."

It's also very convenient to conduct elections and referendums in winter, as the fewer people that make it to the polling booths, the easier it is to add "dead souls" to voting protocols.

Officials sit in well-heated buildings and the roads they use to get around town tend to be among the few that are properly cleared of ice and snow. I can't think of a single incident of a city official freezing to death in his office or dying from a blow to the head from a falling icicle.

That may go some way to explaining the city authorities' affection for Ded Moroz.

Boris Kagarlitsky is a Moscow-based sociologist.