In an episode that would be hilarious if one read it in the works of Nikolai Gogol or Mikhail Saltykov-Shchedrin, but is actually a grim illustration of Russia’s environmental sickness, officials in a Siberian town were reprimanded last year for painting snow white. Pollution in the coal-mining region is so horrendous that the snowfall is thick with soot and ash. The officials responded, in the time-honoured manner of provincial Russian bureaucracy, by painting over a problem they felt helpless to solve.
Environmental protection is one of several fronts on which lines of confrontation are emerging between an increasingly restless Russian public and the power apparatus of President Vladimir Putin. Dozens of protests have been held across Russia against plans to build vast landfills in the countryside for rubbish from the Moscow metropol