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...three months, Pikalyovo's citizens had been living in crippling poverty after the town's recession-hit cement and brick factories started closing down. Thousands of workers were laid off, and almost overnight nearly 25% of Pikalyovo's 20,000 residents were unemployed. After making several pleas to their employers for back pay - at one point crashing a 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...
After waiting half an hour in a line of 20 people at the dusty ATM, Eduard Markov finally walks away with his old leather wallet bulging with rubles. Like thousands of others in the northern Russian industrial town of Pikalyovo, the 44-year-old clay-quarry worker had not been paid in three months. But now he at least has enough to buy the basics - meat, vodka, noodles, oil and fruit - from shops that just a few days ago were empty of customers...
...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 of professionalism - or maybe simply your trivial greed," Putin...
...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...
...whose populations are supported by just one factory or one industry. If that factory or industry is wiped out by the global economic downturn - as Pikalyovo's was when the price of cement dropped and Deripaska's company Basic Element put half its workforce on forced leave - the whole town is sent into a tailspin. (See pictures of the global financial crisis...