[Our correspondent in Russia recently discovered that the border town of Vyborg near St. Petersburg was going to hold discreet (practically secret) public hearings on Gazprom’s mega-project, the Nord Stream pipeline, to discuss the social and environmental impact of the initiative. Below is the first of three reports from the hearings, which Pasko attended at the end of November.] If you’ve heard, does that mean you approve? A report from the public hearings in Vyborg on the Nord Stream pipeline construction project, Part 1 By Grigory Pasko, journalist After late November’s freezing temperatures in Moscow, Vyborg greeted me with rain. It was dirty and damp, and there were hardly any people around. I bought the local newspapers in a kiosk. It turned out that there were only two of them. I went into the city library in order to read these newspapers and leaf through older issues in binders. The local newspapers had calls to vote for «the party of Putin» and «Putin’s Plan». But reports about how public hearings were supposed to be taking place that day about a burning issue for the residents of Vyborg Rayon – the impact of the Nord Stream gas pipeline on the environment – were totally absent in all the newspapers. Later I found an archive of announcements for the mass media from the press service of the administration of Vyborg Rayon. Here’s the information bulleting for 23 November 2007.