Crosstown Traffic
Julia Ioffe’s latest piece for Foreign Policy offers a microcosm of contemporary Russian social class tensions, corruption, elite insolence, and of courge, migalkas, the controversial private sirens given to more than 900 privileged motorists in Moscow.
Rare is a day in Russia when we don’t hear of another accident involving a “VIP car.” As I sat down to write this story, a new story came across the transom: In the wee hours of Friday morning in Rostov-on-Don, Dmitry Ostrovenko, United Russia deputy in the city Duma, barreled through several stopped cars with his Porsche Cayenne. One of the cars, a tiny Zhiguli, was rammed and dragged nearly 200 feet. Its 23-year-old driver (dead on the spot) had to be cut out of the car’s mangled frame. “Ostrovenko was trashed and could barely stand and tried to pay off the cops right then and there,” an eyewitness wrote on his blog. The gathered crowd nearly tore the deputy to bits.
This was not a new reaction; but then again, this is not a new situation. In 1920s Russia, cars were scarce and prestigious. Whereas before the revolution, only the wealthy could afford cars and chauffeurs, in the dictatorship of the proletariat it was only the party functionaries who were permitted luxuries so out of sync with the letter of the law. But Russia was still a rural, agrarian country back then, and the peasants resented these elite cars kicking up dust or scaring their animals as they roared past. Veering into fields and mashing up their crops didn’t help either. So people fought back. They threw rocks at the cars; they strung up wires across the roads to trip them up. One driver was killed when an angry villager flung an owl at his windshield.
Animals really seem to be taking on a big role in this war on reckless traffic … last month a rampaging wild horse disrupted Moscow roads and injured three people, and the year before that a misplaced goat caused hours of congestion by ramming passing cars. There’s an Orwell joke in there somewhere, but I just don’t have the chutzpah right now.
