At this frosty start to the year, around 50 kilometers from the Kremlin, entire districts of the city are left without heating, sunk in the cold, and are triggering anger among residents that is extremely embarrassing for the authorities. As winter proves particularly harsh, with temperatures in the capital and its region regularly falling below -25°C, Podolsk and Klimovsk have become the epicenter of this sudden wave of despair.
In these two bedroom towns in Moscow's far southern suburbs, several accidents on municipal heating pipes have served as a reminder of the re-emergence of old problems in infrastructure maintenance, but above all of inadequate investment in the network. “We're cold! It's impossible to stay at home. We're freezing… And the heating officials are lying to us. »
These messages have multiplied in recent days on local social networks in Podolsk and Klimovsk. They are illustrated with photos of families wrapped under blankets at home or sitting in front of a fire in their garden. Some residents have started petitions. Others are calling for local officials to resign.
Decayed public services
The anger has become even greater in recent years as bills for municipal services, particularly heating, continue to rise, limiting the purchasing power of the poorest families. But the long-known infrastructure problems have remained the same: ailing public services, some of which have urgently needed modernization investments since the Soviet era; Local authorities ignore the actual state of the heating networks and shift responsibility to each other.
The government of the Moscow region initially blamed the private owners of the heating networks for the accidents. Official speeches usually refer to simple “incidents” that can be traced back to an unusual cold period and thus to a sharp increase in consumption.
Governor Andreï Vorobyov reassured and announced a rapid resumption of heating in the media available to him. But several families there continue to survive in the cold. They accuse the authorities of lying. In Podolsk, a class action lawsuit was filed against the deputy head of the city administration for abuse of office with serious consequences.
“Administration Podolsk, who are you trying to deceive? Yesterday you closed the governor's page [sur le site local officiel] to the comments, and today you will delete the message? “The telephone numbers for help don’t even work anymore,” complains one resident on local social networks, recalling that the renovation work on the infrastructure has been postponed from year to year. The temporary absence of some local specialists who went to Ukraine to fight would also explain the technical failures of the network in certain cases.
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