On power and weakness

I started to respond to a comment, and got so long-winded that I decided to make my response a separate post.

At 5:06 PM, danil said…
hey lyndon where have you been? so much interesting things are going on last time ) khodorkowsky for example and light shutdown in Moscow - btw, did it affect you?

Danil, I was actually unaffected personally by the blackout - I live and work in the northwestern portion of the center (around the Garden Ring), and in our area there were no power outages. I have heard lots of dire prophecies, though, in the past few days, about how this is just the beginning. Mosenergo is supposedly way overextended and does not have the capacity to deal with the increasing power demands of a growing metropolis, and people are saying we will see more blackouts in the future as a result.

Who knows if that's true - back at the beginning of 2003, I seem to recall many people forecasting a "2003 crisis," because that was supposedly the year when deteriorating Russian infrastructure would reach a tipping point and would no longer be able to function without maintenance as it's been doing for over 15 years now (some would say for much longer). That never came to pass, perhaps because Russians are absolutely ingenious when it comes to squeezing the last life out of any piece of equipment that's on its last legs. For example, plenty of cars are on the road here which would be sent to the scrapyard in the US or in Western Europe, held together by baling wire and the figurative equivalent of duct tape, applied by their loving (or perhaps cursing) owners.

I have the utmost respect for the ability of people here to find ways to function under difficult circumstances, but unfortunately that's no way to run a power grid. The problem with always operating on the verge of a crisis and pursuing band-aid solutions instead of making real investments in infrastructure (I leave it up to the pundits - and the courts - to determine if this is the fault of Mosenergo, UES, or the Soviet legacy) is that it eventually catches up with you.

The more immediately disturbing fact which was revealed by the power outage is that many of the "strategic" establishments (e.g., places with nuclear reactors) which we've always been reassured have secondary sources of emergency power were revealed to not have good backup plans in place for an outage. Someone was supposed to buy a generator but pocketed the money instead, or the generator was there but someone had siphoned off the diesel for personal use. I hate to say this, but this underscores how ridiculous it is for people here to say that the US and "the West" are afraid of "a strong Russia." Yes, perhaps there was justifiable fear of the USSR 20 years ago, bolstered by the partial illusion of Soviet military might. But at the moment, I'm afraid the more realistic fear is of Russia's infrastructural weakness and institutional corruption creating environmental or other disasters.

By the way, I may be wrong to reject it out of hand, but I think Basayev's claim of responsibility for the blackout was absurd. He's recently claimed responsibility for some other disaster which was not likely his handiwork (it's escaping me right now what specifically), and I think this is part of a general pattern of him trying to grab the spotlight and show that he's not on the run.

As for your other question ("where have you been"), I'm going to deal with that in a separate post. There have indeed been lots of interesting events here in the past week or so, and the coverage at Siberian Light has been outstanding as usual.