After the outages...

...comes the finger-pointing. Looks like for now most of it is in Chubais's direction, which is to be expected. The nationalist political party Rodina has already weighed in:

Rodina faction to demand resignation of UES head in Duma
May 25 2005 5:52PM MSK

MOSCOW. May 25 (Interfax) - The Duma's Rodina faction plans to raise the issue of dismissing Anatoly Chubais from the post of head of Unified Energy Systems (UES) at the Friday meeting of the lower house. "We have been saying for a long time that Chubais is the wrong person to head such a major monopoly and the outages in Moscow today only prove that we are right," said Ivan Kharchenko, faction member and deputy chairman of the Duma property committee. Kharchenko said the faction would have an emergency conference on Thursday over the large-scale energy crisis in Moscow and initiate the ouster of Chubais at the Duma Council.

No doubt the professional pundits will be all over this by the time tomorrow morning's Moscow Times op-ed page goes to press, but I have to wonder when one of these stories about blaming Chubais will mention what an easy political target he is, due to his extreme unpopularity with the Russian electorate. So far, the blame game looks like a way for Rodina to score some easy points with elderly and lower-income people who are bitter about rising power costs; and for Putin to try to cripple Chubais's chances (if he even has any) of mounting a challenge or playing a role in the upcoming 2008 presidential succession battle (I hesitate to use the word "campaign").

What challenges such as Rodina's miss is the fact that changing the management of UES will not change the fact that the country continues to squeeze the last drops out of infrastructure improvements made during Soviet times (in this case, the plant that failed was over 40 years old), without any comprehensive plan to replace these facilities as they age beyond their usable lifespan. While Chubais has to bear some of the responsibility for failing to prevent these outages, he can't possibly be blamed for the overall situation.

Update: In addition to a sincere-sounding apology, Chubais has come out with a couple of comments - one pointing out that the power outages in the US a couple of years ago were much more serious than what happened in Moscow today; and one pointing out that investment in the country's electrical supply infrastructure has been underfunded for decades. These statements will no doubt be criticized in coming days, as the latter one already has - "With the growth of electricity tariffs that we've seen recently, this is a quite a cynical statement," said Andrei Isaev, chairman of the Duma's Labor and Social Policy committee. (all of those links are to brief RIA Novosti wire items in Russian)