Post-Soviet neglect of vital infrastructure has led to an increasing number of fatal accidents across Russia, writes Conor Sweeneyin Moscow
Russia is fast approaching a tipping point, goes one of the country's whispered conspiracy theories, when the creaking Soviet infrastructure suddenly starts to fall apart.
In the past week, there's been a sad litany of disasters to nurture those fears along, as miners, air passengers and the elderly all perished in a series of tragedies.
Back in Soviet times, many accidents simply never got reported, so nobody knows just how many aircraft accidents never made the headlines.
In the most notorious case of suppressing bad news, a 1977 fire in the enormous Rossiya Hotel in Moscow was at first slow to be reported, and even now the true death toll is thought to be much higher than the 43 acknowledged. There may be criticisms of censorship within the Russian media, but stories about similar tragedies are no longer hidden. The local media was aghast at the start of the week at the botched rescue operation when a 30-year-old TU-134 aircraft crashed in bad weather in Samara.
Just six of the 57 passengers and crew on board perished, but the survivors told horrific tales of dangling upside down for 20 minutes strapped into their seats before finally freeing themselves. Aviation experts believe the only reason the death toll didn't climb much higher was because the aviation fuel didn't explode.
One passenger, Vadim Titlov, explained the chaos: "We dragged our neighbours out of the plane. We went through the cabin looking for a knife to cut the seat belts." After a fire broke out on the aircraft's damaged wing, passengers used their hands to heap snow on the flames. "We did everything ourselves," said another passenger, Andrei Beglitsin. "We put out the fire as best we could, and we rescued people from the plane."
NOT ONLY DID the crash highlight the increasingly poor track record of Russia's ageing air fleet, it demonstrated the stretched capacity of the emergency services too. One Irishman living in Moscow told this week of his trepidation at flying in a Yak-42, since 15 of the 115 aircraft built have already crashed.
The weekend news was soon eclipsed by images from the worst mine disaster since the end of the Soviet Union. More than 100 miners, mine executives and a visiting British geologist were killed in a methane explosion deep underground. Although the mine was less than five years old, independent trade unionists in Russia complain of dangerous working practices in the country's mines, with workers encouraged to cut corners to boost productivity and their pay packets.
Like the recent spate of plane crashes in Russia, there have also been at least 10 other fatal incidents in the country's mines over the past decade.
Less than a day after the mine disaster, a retirement home in the south of the country burned down, with locked doors and the slow arrival of the fire services blamed for contributing to the death toll of 62. Many of the old people suffocated in the blaze, with strong echoes of another fire in Moscow late last year, when more than 40 women died in a drug and alcohol treatment centre, where the windows and doors were also locked.
These accidents take place in a country that can no longer be deemed poor, as it wonders how to spend the €100 billion piling up in its stabilisation fund from oil and gas exports. Russia is home to at least 66 billionaires, and the Kremlin proudly predicts that, 15 years after the collapse of the Soviet Union, the economy will be bigger than those of France or Britain within two years.
Yet the wealth of the country has not only been spread very unevenly, but there are doubts over whether the money being reinvested actually ends up being used effectively. Russia may be showing more confidence on the global stage, but it still faces a serious challenge in making up for decades of under-investment closer to home.
ACCORDING TO A recent study of the Russian military conducted by a Nordic think tank, just over 10 per cent of the money earmarked for reinvestment in new equipment could be identified. The rest had somehow disappeared - new tanks which should be in service just don't exist.
Russians, of course, have never been used to high standards after suffering all those years of queuing, but these days they aspire to something very different.
Nevertheless, the country's road network makes Ireland's look good, with few developed motorway networks outside the biggest cities. In some of the most remote regions of the country there is as little as 200km of paved roads, sometimes in areas the size of France. Instead, the only way in or out is on winter roads, when frozen rivers become navigable for a few short months.
In Soviet times, say Muscovites, some of the biggest engineering achievements at least functioned, even if they were a little rough or ready. Moscow would grind to a halt if its loud and overcrowded metro system broke down. But it carries more people every day than the London and Paris underground networks combined. Nobody rushes for a train, because commuters know the next one will come along within 150 seconds.
And yet the metro is beginning to look run-down, with wooden elevators of the kind that caused the King's Cross fire in London two decades ago still common.
So, just as the rate of plane crashes accelerates, there are uneasy feelings that it's just a matter of time before other tragedies befall the people of this country, or at least those who are not cushioned by extraordinary wealth.