“Fire and arson,” writes Cathy Frierson in All Russia is Burning!: A Cultural History of Fire and Arson in Late Imperial Russia, “carried intense symbolic and material meaning as part of Russia’s search for a modern identity. When Russia joined the European experience of “high modernism,” uncontained fire in the hands of recently emancipated peasants came into view for educated Russians and became an object of the campaign against Russia’s developmental delay behind the West.”
Whether the campaign against “uncontained fire” that Frierson speaks of continues to exist is unlikely, the idea that fire represents Russia’s “developmental delay behind the West” continues to occupy some minds. Take for example, C. J. Chivers’ article “Deadly Fires Expose Disorder in Putin’s Russia.” Ravaging fires, engulfing flames, and thick smoke more than just kill people and damage property. They, according to Chivers’, are symbols of Russia’s backwardness in general, and the chimera of its prosperity in particular. He writes:
Eight years into the administration of President Vladimir V. Putin, the Russian government has filled its coffers with cash and its ministries with swagger, allowing the Kremlin to reclaim a place on the world’s stage. But the fast-moving fire on Oct. 2, and the grotesque panorama of desperation, injury and death that accompanied it, underscored the enduring disorder beneath Russia’s partial revival.
Respect for law, safety and public health, and the Russian government’s ability to govern, still lag far behind the Kremlin’s restored sense of self, as evidenced by the scale at which Russia’s population suffers from fires.
True, fire is a major killer in Russia. More than 17,000 Russians died in fires in 2006, about 13 for every 100,000 people. This is a staggering statistic. That’s about 40 people a day. Just to give a comparison, 3,245 people died from fire in the United States in 2006. And sure wildfires have their own designated season here in Southern California, of which the recent blazes are of an example. (For an analysis of fire in SoCal I highly recommend Mike Davis’ “Who Really Set the California Fires?“) But casualties are low. About 7.1 people per million die of fire in California. Property destruction, however, is high, about $11.3 billion in 2006.
Not so in Russia. All one has to do is take a look at some recent stories. The 4 November nursing home fire in Tula took 31 lives. In December 2006, a fire in a Moscow drug rehabilitation clinic took 46 lives. In November 2003, a dorm fire at the Lumumba Friendship of People’s University scorched the lives of 36 students and injured 200. Even Putin himself lost a dacha to an inferno in 1996. I won’t even belabor my experience with fire in Moscow. I was at Cafe Bilingua when it went up in flames in July 2005. Arson, old or faulty electrical wiring, the lack of fire alarms, escapes, and other safety measures account for the high number of casualties. According to the Geneva Association, which monitors fires worldwide, Russia’s fire related deaths have been rising since the collapse of Communism.
Fire is not simply a force of destruction in Russia. It’s also a weapon of resistance. Currently in Nizhny Novgorod, 29 members of a religious sect called the True Russian Orthodox Church have locked themselves in a shelter, threatening to immolate themselves if removed by force. The members’ self cloistering was in response to an investigation of their leader Father Petr Kuznetsov. Fire as religious resistance in Russia is probably as old as fire itself. As Georg Michels shows in his At War with the Church: Religious Dissent in Seventeenth-Century Russia self-immolation was a tactic utilized by peasant sectarians in the 17th century. In one chilling incident in 1690, a letter from voevode Iurii Romanovich Selivanov to the Boyar Duma reported that hundreds of peasant sectarians locked themselves in barns and threatened to immolate themselves to facilitate their passage into the “Kingdom of Heaven.” As military attachments approached the barricaded peasants, the barns went up in flames. When the smoke cleared, 200 men, women, and children were charred to death.
Fire as resistance or accident is a crude form of death no matter how you cut it. But is it a sign of Russia’s backwardness as Chivers and others claim? Is it really a rock to throw at the shiny veneer of Putin’s Russia? This seems far fetched at least, and an utterly strange assertion at most. Between 1991-2001, Estonia and Latvia averaged 14 and 12 fire related deaths per 100,000, yet I don’t recall any articles declaring that these were signs of “enduring disorder.”
I’ve always liked Frierson’s work for finding odd angles on Russian cultural history. Maybe it’s the Americanist in me!
A quick correction: I believe that RUDN dropped the Lumumba part in 1991. It’s still fun to say, but officially, I think RUDN, or the English-variant PFU (sounds too much like PTU to me) is the norm.
Also, before the beginning of the school year, some minister threatened to close down about 1/4 of the nation’s schools since they were not up to standards. I asked a friend if this was a response to any particular incident, since it seemed a little drastic to me, and she went on to list story after story of fire-related travesties. It does seem to grip the imagination.
I haven’t read the article, but do you think Chivers’ subtext here might be the fires in California? I’ve noticed that a lot of US Russia coverage is of the “see there are other places that are worse off than we are” variety, made to console its audience and appeal to its wounded sense of superiority rather than actually being anout Russia.
I’ve noticed that a lot of US Russia coverage is of the “see there are other places that are worse off than we are” variety, made to console its audience and appeal to its wounded sense of superiority rather than actually being anout Russia.
Chris, I have to chuckle at this. Reverse the mentions of “US” and “Russia” in your statement, and you will be left with an accurate summary of the way Vremia and Vesti (and Vzglyad.ru, for that matter) cover the US. Nothing but natural disasters as far as the eye can see, unless there is some think-tank pronouncement about Russia or unless VVP is meeting with Bush, of course, in which case viewers can look forward to 15 minutes about that.
The California fires are tragic, no doubt, but they are for the most part natural disasters and have resulted in property loss and minimal (if any) casualties. More importantly, they may be caused by land misuse or global warming or whatever you wish (or in some cases, by a juvenile arsonist), but they are not caused by systematic decay of infrastructure and general corruption on the part of fire inspection authorities. In Russia, the “fire safety” guys are mostly rent-seekers, and just like having a bunch of uniformed rent-seekers with striped batons patrolling the roads, this leads to less safety for the individual and a higher death rate.
I know that Putin inherited this system, but I have to wonder why reforming the rank-and-file law enforcement has not been more of a priority given that the state would seem to have the resources to do so. The answer, I suspect, is that the rent-seeking taking place within earshot of Putin is no different from the gaishniks or the fire inspectors, just with a few zeroes added onto the end.
In my dealings with the Russian fire inspector who was responsible for the Class A office building (sprinkler system, marked & unblocked exits, etc.) where I worked in Moscow, the guy would show up and invariably find flaws which could only be cured by purchasing expensive fire safety systems from a provider which he helpfully gave me the name of. And whenever we did any office remodeling, we tried to use a guy connected to the fire inspector to do the plans, because part of the architect’s job was to go visit with the fire guy and get him to approve the plans (and I was told by colleagues that this was actually a good fire inspector).
Meanwhile, two abandoned buildings across the street from us went up in flames within the space of one year (this was in the very center of Moscow), one of them with spectacular electric arcing, showing that someone had – totally unsafely – left the power turned on in a building that was essentially open to squatters and the elements.
I have to say that I was pleasantly surprised and encouraged to read that the Tula fire inspectors had actually tried to take the nursing home operators to court to get them to observe safety requirements. The fact that they failed despite their persistence demonstrates that sometimes functioning courts are a nice thing to have.
Between 1991-2001, Estonia and Latvia averaged 14 and 12 fire related deaths per 100,000, yet I don’t recall any articles declaring that these were signs of “enduring disorder.”
One might guess that this was a result of high rates of alcoholism and smoking working in concert with the legacy of the Soviet zhiloi fond and commercial real estate (not to mention Soviet furniture, some of which was made from highly flammable materials, exploding Soviet TV sets – supposedly the cause of half of all domestic fires in Moscow at the end of the ’80s – etc.), all of which was built, maintained and operated with virtually no regard for human health and safety, and no concept of tort law to punish those who put lives in jeopardy (I’m not saying the US legal system works, just that some form of liability is needed). I don’t think I have to remind anyone here of the legendary proportions of the USSR’s (and, historically, Russia’s) disregard for the individual. Collectivism is great until it’s your children who die in an apartment fire (botched hostage rescue attempt, air crash, etc.) and the people responsible are not punished.
I was talking about the subtext of the article — why it was written, why the author took the angle he/she took, why events were given a certain interpretation and presented in a certain way — not the actual state of affairs or the truth value of the interpretation or claims in the article.
The “collapsing Russian space program” genre vanished a few years ago, not because the state of affairs in the Russian space program had suddenly changed, but because the Space Shuttle blew up and US astronauts were then dependent on Russian spacecraft. This may be similar.
I am much in agreement with Lyndon on the state of fire safety in Russia. If this compuslory fire safety course was not just a state-sponsored method of lining somebody’s pocket I don’t know what it was. Fiddling whilst erm, Moscow burns.
Fire safety in Russia does suck.