Word: lyudinovo
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...Lyudinovo is no stranger to unemployment: it suffered a bad bout in the early 1990s, when several of the town's factories closed and 4,000 workers lost their jobs. But by October, after a run of good years, the number of unemployed people had fallen to just 320. That number doubled in November, and for this year, all bets are off. "This is just the beginning," says Pronin, the newspaper editor, with worry...
Even if it has to remain buried, anger is not far from the surface. A young woman standing outside the Lyudinovo emporium rocks her infant son's stroller and, looking around nervously, vents her worries. Prices keep going up, she complains, and she had to pay a $200 bribe to get her son into a local nursery. "You tell that to Putin and Medvedev," she fumes and then worries that she'll get into trouble for talking to foreigners...
...recent Wednesday, 432 people have called in. Nadezhda Kumyiny is one of them. She's phoning from a small village in the Kursk region, southeast of Lyudinovo. She wants to borrow 30,000 rubles--just over $1,000. The woman taking her call fills in the details on a screen. Experienced workers can process a request and grant preapproval in under six minutes, but Kumyiny can't remember her postal code, which slows everything down. Watching over the process is deputy operations director Viktoriya Selezneva, who says the economic crisis has yet to arrive. "The volume of calls hasn...
Such optimism can be found elsewhere. The Kaluga region, to which Lyudinovo belongs, continues to draw in foreign investors, including automakers. Volkswagen has invested about $350 million in an assembly plant and is producing about 320 cars per day. Peugeot is not far behind. Dietmar Korzekwa, VW's group representative for Russia, says the automaker is continuing with its current growth plans. In part, VW is betting that if the Kremlin raises import taxes on autos, as it has suggested it might, it will become more advantageous to manufacture in Russia...
...Back in Lyudinovo, snow is falling heavily. Andrei Petrov, the biggest retailer in town, owns many of the stores, including the new emporium, and also runs a wholesale-distribution business to supply them. Getting in to see him is hard. A security guard wants to know whether we are American spies. Petrov's deputy, Viktor Denisov, nervously locks his office door when he crosses the corridor to see his boss. Petrov is deliberately cagey about business prospects. Yes, an economic crisis is now raging, "but this is not the first time we've had one," he says. Indeed, back...