Postcard from Moscow Uproar in the Dacha Belt http://service.spiegel.de/cache/international/spiegel/0,1518,druck-430206,00.html
A planned new freeway around Moscow may displace some dacha owners -- but not the richest ones.
By four every afternoon -- around rush hour -- Moscow falls silent; three million cars bring the streets to a standstill. Drivers who can afford it curve around the traffic chaos with blue police lights on their cars -- bought on the black market -- while everyone else curses and sweats.
Now a fourth freeway in Moscow is supposed to solve these traffic problems. City officials want to lay 500 kilometers of asphalt around the metropolis for nearly €7.8 billion, but the project has caused an uproar in the countryside. Dacha owners -- summer or weekend home owners -- have complained that a new highway will increase gas emissions and depress real-estate prices.
The real problem, though, is that hundreds of dachas will have to be razed for the freeway, and most of them -- modest wood houses with small vegetable gardens -- belong to average citizens or poor retirees. It seems the planners of the project made sure the freeway would miss the dachas of most Russian oligarchs, the new rich.
Boris Gromov, a former Soviet general who now serves as governor of the Moscow region, said he would be "as attentive as possible" to residents' needs. But the country folk don't believe him.
They're afraid corrupt bureaucrats will cheat them out of fair compensation. "The people are panicking," said Lydia Krawtschuk, leader of Union, a group of the affected dacha ówners south of the city. The people more likely to profit from the project are government officials and their friends in the building industry.
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