Word: bibikov
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...bunch. "It was corroded and had holes all over it," says Mikhail Bernstein, an executive at a construction firm that was hired last August to replace the 19-year-old conduit. Local officials don't disagree. "We all know the pipeline should have been repaired," said Vyacheslav Bibikov, Vice President of the Komi republic, in a testy meeting with reporters last week. "There's no money for it." Rather than stop the flow of oil and lose income, Komineft erected earthworks to contain the gathering crude. When the autumn rains came, the makeshift dikes crumbled, and the oil escaped...
...until weeks later, when an American oil-company worker was brought in to consult on the cleanup, that the rest of the world learned what had happened. The U.S., Germany and Denmark have offered to help, but by week's end the Russians had not responded. To hear Bibikov talk, they won't have to. He claims that the oil fouled only a few miles of the nearby Kolva River and that the water has been 90% cleaned up. The remaining oil, he says, covers less than 50 acres of swampland. Most factory workers in the area were . deployed with...
Much of the information coming out of Komi is suspect. A local civilian defense official asserted firmly, for example, that "not one bird, not one animal has died" from the oil. That's highly implausible, even if it were possible to know such a thing. Bibikov insists the Pechora River was unaffected. Yet a spokesman for Greenpeace in Moscow says fishermen almost 300 miles downriver on the Pechora reported large amounts of oil in their nets last week...
...said Vyacheslava Topova, who lives in Kolva, a river town in the region. "Now there are hardly any fish at all, and when we cook them, they smell bad. People here survive, but they are really worried about the future." This spill may be cleaned up by spring, as Bibikov insists. But unless Russia overhauls its aging, corroding pipelines, they will keep springing leaks and spoiling the landscape...
...symbol he is perfect; as a Jew he is wanting. Betrayed by his English accent, he cannot articulate inversions like "Luck I was always short of" without seeming to pronounce the quotation marks around the words. His most effective support comes from Dirk Bogarde as Bibikov, the court-assigned defender of the fixer. Wearing a fine mask of melancholy disdain, he grows gradually more revulsed by the corruption he witnesses in the palace of justice; his actions and his death predict the fall of the Romanovs as surely as any Leninist edict...
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