In Crimea, a Disputed Beach Is a Symbol of Corruption

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In Crimea, a Disputed Beach Is a Symbol of Corruption


By NEIL MacFARQUHARAUG. 13, 2015

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Sunbathers at Gurovskiye Kamni beach on the Black Sea in Gurzuf, on the southern coast of Crimea. Access to the beach has become a matter of dispute, with the nearby Kremlin-backed children's camp of Artek seeking to take the beach for its visitors and local residents fighting to keep it open to the public. CreditJames Hill for The New York Times

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• Russia’s president, Vladimir V. Putin, tried to speak over the din created by about 100 jostling residents all yelling at him simultaneously. An occasional voice soared above the rest to hurl abuse like: “There were scoundrels in Ukraine, there are scoundrels in Russia. They all stay here!”
  
  Mr. Aksyonov pleaded repeatedly for calm and for time, trying to reassure everyone that Russia’s annexation of Crimea last year would improve matters eventually, but that nothing would change overnight. “I am not a magician who can make everybody happy in a few minutes,” he said.
  
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  Seventeen months after Mr. Putin deployed Special Forces troops to seize Crimea from Ukraine, prompting the deepest confrontation with the West since the Cold War, life on this Black Sea peninsula remains in disarray.
  
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  The Crimean prime minister, Sergei Aksyonov, right, met with residents on the contested beach in July. He tried to reassure them that Russia’s annexation of Crimea last year would decrease government corruption and incompetence. CreditJames Hill for The New York Times
  Freedoms of speech and assembly have largely evaporated, as has a free and independent news media, but that is not what upsets people here. It is the familiar demons, government corruption, venality and incompetence, that have infuriated many.
  
  A half-dozen cabinet members and other senior officials have been either arrested on corruption charges or fired for incompetence in recent months, and a Kremlin audit released in June found a huge chunk of highway funds missing. Two nights before his beach appearance, Mr. Aksyonov spent more than three hours answering a battery of questions live on television, a rare event, trying to explain it all.
  
  Aside from the political shambles, Crimea has been isolated from the outside world by Western sanctions. Credit cards from abroad do not work. Cellphone signals drop constantly, and app stores are often inaccessible. Many mainstream web services like Gmail are frequently blocked, too.
  
  University degrees issued here are no longer recognized in the West, prompting an exodus of thousands of foreign students. Even minor international travel links remain suspended. The Turkish government stopped a ferry service across the Black Sea, as well as an attempt by a Chechen airline to fly from Simferopol, the Crimean capital, to Istanbul with a pit stop in southern Russian.
  
  “We have ersatz education, ersatz mobile phones, ersatz banks. As a result, we live in a kind of isolation here,” said Vladimir P. Kazarin, a university professor. “Even other Russian systems perceive us as something foreign. We are not entirely integrated as part of Russia.”
  
  In opposing annexation, Mr. Kazarin has been in the minority. The standard refrain among the majority, who voted in the hasty March 2014 referendum to join Russia, is that despite the chaos, Crimea avoided a war like that in southeastern Ukraine that has claimed more than 6,400 lives.
  
  “We feel safe now,” said Yuri Skorik, a history teacher here in Gurzuf who led protests against the seizure of a public beach. “I would say that, on balance, security is worth all these problems.”
  
  During the prime minister’s televised town hall meeting, Mr. Aksyonov blamed most of the problems on either the sanctions or the lack of competent government officials.
  
  In recent weeks, however, the Federal Security Service or F.S.B., the successor agency to the K.G.B., arrested the minister of industrial policy and two senior officials on various corruption charges. Three ministers were also dismissed, and one of them is under criminal investigation as well.
  
  In response, Mr. Aksyonov announced that he was forming a Commission for the Protection of the Rights of Officials. No sooner had he announced it than he backtracked, saying it contradicted federal law.
  
  Analysts in the Russian news media have suggested the root problem is the fight to control the river of Russian government money flowing into Crimea, with about 700 billion rubles, currently valued at about $10 billion, pledged by 2020. For example, Kremlin auditors announced in June that two-thirds of the funds that Moscow had allocated for road construction in 2014 could not be accounted for.
  
  Mr. Aksyonov denied any friction with Moscow, but some political allies admitted to strains.
  
  “There are certain tensions with federal ministries and other organizations,” said Alexander N. Formanchuk, a veteran political operative and Aksyonov ally. News reports from Moscow said the Kremlin was planning to appoint all deputy ministers.
  
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  Yuri Skorik, a history teacher, has led protests against the seizure of the public beach.CreditJames Hill for The New York Times
  Some Russian political commentators have concluded that the F.S.B. is determined to thwart any attempt by Mr. Aksyonov to become anotherRamzan A. Kadyrov, the pugnacious Chechen leader who used federal largess to build a war chest and potent security force outside F.S.B. control.
  
  Mr. Aksyonov, 42, has long denied reports that he was a gangster before becoming the politician who led the fight to join Russia, but he looks the part with his heavyweight boxer build and graying brush cut.
  
  The real problems in Crimea stemmed more from mistakes than venality, he said, with officials confused by the many contradictions between Ukrainian and Russian law. “We work in unique conditions,” he said, forced to micromanage problems like beach access and construction permits. “Every day I face five to 10 problems that are not covered by any Crimean or federal laws.”
  
  Various residents who wanted to speak to Mr. Aksyonov expressed disappointment that life in Russia was not the idyll they imagined after 23 years of Ukrainian rule. “We hoped so much that we would become part of Russia,” said Tamara Gregoriyan, 75, a 47-year Gurzuf resident wearing a white straw hat. “We hoped that everything would change for the better, but it went from bad to worse.”
  
  In Simferopol, Leonid Kuzmin, a 24-year-old teacher, learned the limits on freedom in Russia when he helped organize a rally to commemorate the 201st birthday of Taras Shevchenko, a beloved Ukrainian poet, in March.
  
  After some protesters showed up bearing Ukrainian flags and a banner reading “Crimea is Ukraine,” he was arrested, fined some $200 and fired from his teaching job. “Freedoms we got used to over the past 23 years, like freedom of speech, are practically all gone,” he said over tea in a cafe.
  
  Gurzuf emerged in the early 19th century as an elite summer resort. After a short visit, Aleksandr Pushkin, the forefather of Russian literature, wrote, “If I am to travel far from the eternal light, where happiness lasts forever, I hope my soul will fly to Gurzuf.”
  
  Nearly a century later, in 1900, Chekhov bought a summer retreat, a four-room Tatar farmhouse hidden in a cove, and started writing “The Three Sisters.” Other artists also settled in the charming village, where wooden balconies still overhang cobblestone streets, and a rich Moscow entrepreneur built a grand hotel.
  
  Nationalized after the Russian Revolution, the hotel’s 30 leafy acres became a Ministry of Defense sanitarium. Gurzuf residents have rarely been allowed to set foot in the heart of their own town ever since, and now the land officially belongs to the Russian presidency.
  
  Across town the other big landlord is Artek, the famous Pioneers children’s camp of Soviet times that the Kremlin seeks to resurrect. At more than 500 forested acres, it is slightly larger than Monaco.
  
  The management set off protests by announcing plans to annex 25 acres the camp already surrounded, including one of just two public beaches in Gurzuf. Mr. Skorik, a handsome 54-year-old given to bright Hawaiian shirts, decided to fight Artek despite its Kremlin pedigree. The protest movement filed a lawsuit, staged marches and released a video appealing to Mr. Putin to halt the transfer.
  
  In an interview, Mr. Skorik said Gurzuf residents had tired of the fact that in both Ukraine and now seemingly in Russia, citizens came last.
  
  From a breezy seaside restaurant he pointed to the abandoned concrete skeleton of a hotel that Igor V. Kolomoisky, a Ukrainian oligarch, had been building at the tip of the bay, marring the view and privatizing yet another beach. Ukrainian law barred construction within 100 meters of the shoreline, but countless tyc00ns bribed their way to building permits, Mr. Skorik said.
  
  “If you lived in Ukraine, and now in Russia, there are private organizations that have taken over public land,” he said, “and little by little they have become inaccessible to the people in Gurzuf.”
  
  
• http://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/14/w...-of-corruption.html?smid=fb-nytimes&smtyp=cur

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