TODAY: Putin likens Oleg Deripaska and other Pikalyovo factory owners to ‘cockroaches’ in open castigation of the super-rich; fears of social unrest due to unemployment becoming a reality?; Poland angered by Russian ‘rewrite’ of the origins of World War Two

Prime Minister Putin has made an all-guns-blazing appearance in Pikalyovo to reprimand the owners of the town’s three factories and instruct them to pay their workers’ wages, in what Bloomberg calls ‘the most visible industrial action in Russia since the Siberian miners’ strike of 1998.’  He launched a stinging attack on the businessmen behind the wage arrears, including Oleg Deripaska, saying: ‘you have made thousands of people hostages to your ambitions, your lack of professionalism — or maybe simply your trivial greed’.  He also threw a pen at the oligarch and made him to take a tour of a cement factory.  The Telegraph interprets Putin’s attack on Deripaska, ‘an unloved figure in Russia’, as a deflection tactic.  Apparently workers have now been paid $1.3 million in wages arrears.