Russian Truckers, Irate Over New Tolls, Block Roads Near Moscow
By NEIL MacFARQUHAR

MOSCOW — Hundreds of long-distance truckers blocked a lengthy section of the ring road circling the capital on Friday to protest a new national toll, in the first sign that Russia’s economic woes might be eroding the broad support for President Vladimir V. Putin’s government.

The direct object of their ire was Igor Rotenberg, the scion of a billionaire oligarch clan close to Mr. Putin, who owns half of a new, GPS-based system that, when fully operational, will charge truckers fees on all federal highways.

Their larger anger, however, was reserved for what they called the government’s failure to alleviate the devastating effects of inflation and recession over the past year, prompted by the steep drop in oil prices, sanctions the West imposed over Ukraine and retaliatory sanctions the Kremlin imposed on Western food imports.

“There is no economic program at all — where is all the money?” said Vladimir Romanov, 65, the part-owner of a small Moscow trucking firm with three 18-wheelers. “The country is very rich, yet we live like hell.”

The Russian economy is deeply troubled and shows few signs of escaping from its rut, at least as long as prices for oil and other commodities remain depressed. Inflation is running at 15.6 percent and the economy has shrunk nearly 4 percent in the last year. The ruble has lost about half its value against the dollar, and foreign reserves were hovering around $366 billion, compared with $419 billion a year ago.

While that should mean hard times for everyone, some analysts say something else is at work. Given the shrinking oil revenue and the economy, they say, the Russian elite is seeking new revenue streams even at the expense of the middle class.

“At a time when the pie is shrinking, the clans are trying to keep their portion or even expand it,” said Nikolai Petrov, a professor at Moscow’s Higher School of Economics. The privatized toll system creates a new income source, he noted, but it will cause friction.

The truckers are widely dispersed and hence difficult to control, and their sentiments reflect those of the entire middle class, Mr. Petrov said. “They feel that the government is trying to fix budgetary problems by increasing taxes and taking money out of their pockets,” he said.

Under the new system, drivers must buy a tracking device and pay according to their mileage. An 800-mile round trip between Moscow and St. Petersburg costs an extra $33 at current exchange rates and will rise to $66 next March.

Truckers said that the new toll amounted to about 10 percent of their revenue for each trip, and that it came on top of other hefty transportation taxes, sharply reducing their monthly wages of around $500 to $600.

The government argues that the trucks cause significant road wear and says the tolls will generate more than $700 million a year to pay for maintenance. “This is how a transportation system functions worldwide,” Maxim Y. Sokolov, the transportation minister, told state television this week.

Truckers mocked the idea that the toll money would end up being invested in Russia’s notoriously poor roads.

“They have already increased taxes on fuel and promised to cancel the transportation tax, but they have only increased it,” said Vladimir Deryugin, 51, whose truck sat among roughly 20 lined up in an Ikea parking lot in Khimki, a small city on the northern edge of Moscow. A few bore signs saying “No to Platon!” — the Russian acronym for the system. Police cars had blocked all entrances and exits to the lot.

The demonstrations-on-wheels are the closest thing to large-scale political protests that Russia has seen since the professional classes took to the streets of Moscow in 2011 and 2012 to oppose the way Mr. Putin returned to the presidency for a third term. That movement was centered in the narrow world of the Moscow and St. Petersburg intelligentsia.

The truck drivers are the kind of bedrock Russians for whom Mr. Putin has long been a hero. And even as they railed about the new tolls and the economy, they retained a certain reluctance to criticize the man himself.

“Our president was duped,” Mr. Romanov said. “He signed without thinking. His friends duped him. The son studied in Britain, then he came back. He needs to earn money. So Rotenberg comes to the president and tells him: let the son earn money.”

The new toll system is operational only in the Moscow region for now, but since that is such a national hub it has already elicited protests across the country, including in the Dagestan republic, in the cities of Vologda, Nizhny Novgorod, Bryansk, in Smolensk in eastern Russia, in Yekaterinburg in the central Urals, and in St. Petersburg.

One trucker from distant Vladivostok commented on social media that he wanted to join the demonstrations but that the roads were so bad it would take him 12 days to make the cross-country trip.

Some analysts consider the protests proof that what is widely called the “television” — government propaganda about Russia’s rising status in the world — is losing its edge over the “fridge,” or economic problems.

“The reserves are not limitless,” said Alexander Auzan, the economics dean at Moscow State University, speaking on Dozhd television. “What we see now, the situation with the truckers, is the first rumble of thunder somewhere far away.”

The government evidently hopes to ride out the protests, which went unreported on the main state-run television news channel.

The police were the first line of defense, establishing checkpoints on the outer reaches of the capital to block access to the MKAD, the major ring road circling the city. If that becomes paralyzed, traffic backs up all across Moscow.

The police tried a number of strategies to thwart the protesters. They declared some drivers drunk, truckers said, allowing them to suspend their licenses for 24 hours. Sometimes the police “discovered” a mechanical problem making the vehicle unfit to drive. Some drivers were forced to sign pledges that they would not join any protest. Eventually the police settled for corralling the trucks into one six-mile section of the road and diverting other traffic.

The city of Moscow announced on Friday that it would have to limit traffic the city center in December to prepare for the Victory Day parade — which is held in May. The state Duma, or Parliament, has tried to mollify the protesters, lowering the fines for noncompliance and limiting the penalty to one fine per day.

The Putin administration itself repeatedly offered dialogue and compromise in the form of graduated tariffs, but the truckers are demanding the tolls be scrapped entirely. Mr. Putin himself has not commented publicly on the protests.

His spokesman, Dmitri S. Peskov, told reporters that it was not a presidential matter but an issue for the ministry of transportation.

Truckers like Mr. Romanov said that support for Mr. Putin — whose approval ratings have been above 80 percent ever since he annexed Crimea in March 2014 — has dropped universally among drivers forced to pay the new tax. There has been some online chatter and some public discussion about whether the anger was enough to spark a Maidan, the protests in central Kiev that brought down the government of neighboring Ukraine in early 2014.

Mr. Romanov said that the drivers had no such thing in mind, and that they only wanted to earn a living.

“We don’t need a Maidan here, we don’t need any extremism,” he said. “We are normal people without political demands. We just don’t want the government to get into our pockets.”

Some of those watching had other ideas. All across Moscow, the movement of the trucks circling the city was being monitored on various social media, inspiring a lively stream of criticism and support.

“Why only the ring road?” said one, “Why not Red Square?”

卡車司機之怒 逼俄國會急轉彎

為安撫群情激憤的卡車司機，俄羅斯國會4日決定放寬根據一項新版公路法案而開徵的公路使用費及罰款，同時表示準備進一步退讓。

許多俄國卡車司機擁有並使用自己的車輛，4日以新制長途運輸的道路使用費偏高為由，開著卡車在莫斯科市中心集體抗議。他們還說，公路使用費的收費系統規畫不良，而且幾乎無法使用。他們也對公路使用費是否真的會如當局承諾，用於維護公路表示懷疑。

卡車司機的此次抗爭是俄國近年來能見度最高的社會抗爭，不但震動呈靜止狀態的俄國政界，也對克里姆林宮構成挑戰。警方稍早封鎖莫斯科環城快速道路的六個線道，以免卡車造成交通堵塞。

俄國國會下議院4日以壓倒性的表決結果，決定將卡車司機未繳付新制路費的罰款由原訂的45萬盧布（約台幣21.6萬元），降為5000到1萬盧布（台幣2400至4800元）。

全案將轉交俄國國會上議院討論並表決，再轉由俄國總統普亭簽署始能成立。一般認為，這些程序只是形式。

俄國國會議員4日稍早會晤部分卡車司機時說，他們打算繼續讓步。下議院運輸委員會主席莫斯維奇尤夫說，他希望俄國國會下周表決，使卡車司機得豁免於一項適用於全體俄國汽車駕駛人的運輸稅。

普亭發言人裴斯科夫說，他認為，卡車司機應該能夠與主管官員達成共識。

原文參照：
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/12/05/world/europe/russian-truckers-protest-tolls.html

Video：Russian truck drivers protested new road tolls by driving to Moscow and threatening to block a belt road around the Russian capital.
http://www.nytimes.com/video/world/europe/100000004074964/russian-truckers-protest-new-fees.html

2015-12-05．聯合晚報．B3．國際財經．編譯陳世欽