Word: putin
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...meeting at the mayor's office to demand their jobs back - the workers turned to desperate measures. On June 2, they staged a strike along a major highway linking the city of Vologda to St. Petersburg, blocking the route for hours. Finally Moscow took notice, and Prime Minister Vladimir Putin flew in by helicopter to force local politicians and factory owners to pay the town's workers the money owed them. Now Pikalyovo's shops, cafés and banks are doing good business again, but as the recession sweeps across Russia, small single-industry towns all over the country...
...situation was so bleak that according to Russian media, people in Pikalyovo were forced to eat wild plants, while the city's hot water was shut off after residents couldn't pay their bills. When Putin came in to save the day, he saw p.r. potential in Pikalyovo's distress. During a nationally televised meeting in the town, the Prime Minister scolded local officials and factory owners, including billionaire tycoon Oleg Deripaska, a onetime Kremlin favorite whose investment company Basic Element owns the town's BaselCement factory. "You have made thousands of people hostage to your ambitions, your lack...
...even Putin's harsh words and the disbursal of pay have not put an end to the feeling here that the crisis will continue. "It's unlikely the situation will change. Receiving our pay was a small gesture, a short-term solution," says Denis Yershov, a former employee at the local electricity plant who helped block the road last week. "I'll be happy when we have work again. I'll be happy when we have stability and I'm able to feed my family...
...Yershov's sentiments - and those of nearly everyone else TIME spoke to in Pikalyovo - are playing out at checkout counters in shops all over town. "People are only buying the cheapest brands. It's like they don't believe the change will last," says Oksana Gavrilova, a staunch Putin supporter who had worked at the EuroCement factory for eight years before she was laid off. Leaning down into a nearly empty cooler to grab a kielbasa, she says, "Without the factories, Pikalyovo is nothing...
After serving in Chechnya, Shamanov was decorated a Hero of Russia, while Prime Minister Vladimir Putin has said he "deserve[s] the deepest respect" for his "great contribution to the success of [the] counterterrorist operation [in Chechnya]." Part of that contribution came during operations in the village of Alkhan-Yurt in 1999. In its report, the HRW says that during fighting in the area, "Russian troops under Shamanov's command committed at least 14 killings that amounted to extrajudicial executions...