By Anatoly Medetsky FABRICHNY - Wearing a fur hat and a winter coat, 82-year-old Alexei Sanin sat down to eat his sandwich in his kitchen - fully dressed as if he were ready for a subzero outing in this forlorn village in Russia's frozen Far East. "He sleeps dressed this way, too," said Sanin's daughter, Lyudmila, who tries to keep their apartment warm with wood stolen from the nearby tree-covered slopes of the Siberian taiga. "Old people are always cold." So are many other people in Fabrichny and surrounding towns, where bank tellers and doctors in polyclinics sit next to heaters wearing as many warm things as they can put on. After work, they go home, turn on heaters, but never take off clothes. Every winter, tens of thousands of people brace for the biting cold and fierce winds that sweep the Primorye region on Russia's Pacific Coast. They are victims of Russia's failure to restructure the formerly centralized energy system, make repairs or simply prepare for winter. The heating crisis has forced tenants to come up with old-style solutions to survive the frigid winter that begins in fall and lasts through spring. In some freezing Far East villages, residents have installed wood stoves - clumsy, rusty metal boxes on four legs with flue tubes leading to a ventilation slot. The stoves usually stand in the hall and people have to arm themselves with axes and hammers to cut holes in bathrooms with the nearest ventilation outlet. The heating crisis that began in October affected some 60,000 residents in nine villages and towns throughout the Primorye region at its peak, but Fabrichny is among the hardest hit. The local ore plant, which used to smelt half of all the tin in the Soviet Union, has been almost dead since 1996 and because of a lack of funds local authorities have been unable to provide adequate heating since then. To survive in temperatures that plunge to 30 degrees below freezing, scores of families have turned to an appliance that also came in handy during World War II and the years following the Bolshevik revolution. "It's been around for three years," said retired Alexander Sidorov, bundled up and huddled near his stove. Those who have the stoves need wood. "I come home from work, feed my disabled father and go out to saw wood," Lyudmila Sanina, a cleaning worker at the tin factory, said sniffing. "It's hard to carry it because my leg aches." Sanina and her daughter, who cares for her one-year-old baby, take turns to sawing the wood and then hauling it up to their apartment on the fifth floor. The stove warms the main room well in the daytime if they close the doors to the kitchen and the bedroom, where the temperature hovers at 5 degrees Celsius. But the apartment cools off at night and the baby often coughs. Sanina illegally cuts the wood because buying it is too hefty a burden on the family budget. Olga Yakuba, an insurance agent, spends 1,200 rubles (dlrs 43) to purchase wood every month from November to May, a sum that amounts to a third of what she and her husband earn monthly. While people in Primorye have resigned themselves to the situation over the past three years, Yakuba remains livid. "I'm at a loss for words. This is bad beyond limits," she said. "We have been left to the mercy of fate." "The ceiling is black from soot," she continued. "We haven't had hot water since last January and have had to ask our relatives for a wash in the banya." Her first-grader grandson missed a month of school because it was closed due to the unbearable cold in classrooms. The school re-opened in mid December after Russia's emergency situations minister ordered his forces to help restore heating. Electricity consumption has soared so high that high-voltage lines melted down in the neighboring village last week. This week, 2,700 people shivered in their apartments in Fabrichny and two nearby unheated villages. Officially, they are half of all residents freezing in Primorye. But in fact, far more people suffer from the cold. In many towns, heating is enough only to keep the pipes from freezing and tenants use heaters en masse. The most desperate climb down to the basements or sewage wells and turn on to the full the valves on heating pipes which lead to their homes. Emergency workers who are battling to connect homes to central heating are called heroes. They thaw off frozen pipes with gas torches or replace the burst ones in biting frosts. But the work is stalled by extremely worn out pipes inside the buildings and underground. Frozen, they burst when hot water comes in. "Such work hasn't yet been done anywhere else in Russia," said Col. Vladislav Sogomonov, who commanded the emergency works in Fabrichny and the two neighboring villages. "It's difficult and sometimes impossible." Saying they have done the hardest part of the work, emergency troops left Fabrichny and the other two villages on Monday and the residents went sour on hearing the news. "The emergency situations people will leave and everything will come to a stop," said Sidorov near his stove. "You think our plumbers care? They haven't seen their pay in one and half years." © copyright 2000 the Vladivostok News. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed in any form. [Back to News page]  [Back to Front page]  [Write to us]