| Russian Regions Desperate As Winter Bites Early December 3, 1998 Reuters As if financial and political turmoil were not brutal enough, Russia's winter has arrived early and fierce, with fuel shortages causing desperation in some regions. This November was the coldest in Moscow and other parts of European Russia since complete records were first kept in 1879, a spokesman for the federal weather centre said on Thursday. But worse than the bitter record temperatures are shortages of fuel in far-flung parts of the world's largest country. Few places have been worse hit than the Kamchatka peninsula in the Pacific. The peninsula's capital, Petropavlovsk, is no remote arctic outpost, but a major city of a quarter of a million people. Its electricity has been out for days. On Thursday, Alexander Ivanov, a Kamchatka regional legislator, said he was going on a hunger strike until fuel arrived. He told Itar-Tass news agency the government had failed to deliver the supplies Emergencies Minister Sergei Shoigu promised after visiting Petropavlovsk last month. "It is not just my personal decision. Behind me stand 15,000 voters who do not want to struggle through existence in such wild conditions," he said. The city's mayor told residents on Wednesday to take to their cellars and cover the radiators in their apartments with blankets to save the heating system from total collapse. Like most Russian cities, Petropavlovsk depends on central heating produced at huge plants that also generate electricity. Anatoly Chubais, head of Unified Energy System, Russia's huge state-monopoly power grid, is to visit the Far East later this week to discuss the energy crisis. But with winter just beginning, the woes may spread. In Vladivostok, Russia's main Pacific Ocean port, a weatherman told television viewers a cold spell that has already brought daytime temperatures to minus 25 Celsius (minus 13 Fahrenheit) will be the longest in any December since 1941. Coal reserves at a power station that provides the city's central heating now stand at 80,000 tonnes, compared to 250,000 tonnes at the same time last year. A spokesman for the local electricity company said that if the next delivery of fuel is held up at all, the heat will have to be shut off. Seventeen frozen apartment blocks had to be abandoned in the town of Alapayevsk near Yekaterinburg in the Ural Mountains because fuel was late in arriving at the town. In the remote Arctic outpost of Cape Schmidt opposite Alaska, vanishing fuel supplies forced 190 families to abandon their frozen apartments and relocate to military barracks or move in with relatives. A spokeswoman for the Emergencies Ministry in Moscow said officials hoped to send 8,000 tonnes of emergency fuel next week to the outpost by truck over ice and snow.
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