By ANDREW E. KRAMER
c.2010 New York Times News Service
OREKHOVO-ZUYEVO, Russia – The flames, bright orange and menacing, advanced steadily through a field of dried-out reeds, sending up coils of smoke and heading in the general direction of a village that, with its log homes, picket fences and huge gigantic haystacks, seemed to have been laid out by an arsonist.
All that stood between the flames and the village, Zaprudino, was 58-year-old Vladimir M. Ulyonov, equipped with a shovel and a lot of anger at his government for failing to provide even the most minimal assistance.
In this summer of extreme heat, drought, crop failures and, now, a nationwide eruption of wildfires, the Russian government is facing a rare upwelling of popular anger. More than 3,000 people have been left homeless because of the fires, the government has said, and 52 have been killed.
And as the acres burn and the damage mounts, the government is being tested at all levels and, quite often, found wanting. After decades of institutional inertia and official corruption, opposition figures here say, the government’s capacity to respond to crises has been severely eroded, a fact that has emerged starkly in recent days.
When the wildfires broke out, stoked by the hottest weather here since record-keeping began, more than 130 years, ago, officials and the Russian news media reported that firefighters discovered access roads to the forests were overgrown and in poor repair, that ponds intended to provide water for refilling their tanks were filled with sludge and their fire trucks frequently broken down.
Local officials have also cast blame on a revised 2006 forest code that allowed logging companies to contract out firefighting operations rather than maintaining their own. When the fires broke out, the contractors were woefully unprepared and inadequately equipped, said Viktor N. Sorokhin, a deputy head of administration for the Orekhovo-Zuyevo district, about 50 miles east of Moscow.
Critics have noted that Ilim Pulp, a timber company half owned by International Paper, where President Dmitry Medvedev worked as a corporate lawyer in the 1990s, had lobbied hard for the legislation easing logging regulation.
To deflect mounting criticism, Prime Minister Vladimir V. Putin has been meeting fire victims and giving generous handouts to those who lost homes. On Thursday, he banned grain exports to dampen concern of shortages or rising prices.
Medvedev, meanwhile, said he had established a private charitable fund for wildfire victims with an initial donation of 350,000 rubles, or about $11,740 dollars, of his own money.
Russia, and Russians, typically suffer far more from fires and fire damage than people in most developed countries. In 2006, for example, more than 17,000 people died in fires here, nearly 13 for every 100,000 people – more than 10 times the rates in Western Europe and the United States.