Send me to Sineria oil transforms a Russian outpost

It's around midnight.and the couples on the dance floor at the palace restaurant are gently swaying to a slow one.Za nas,za neft-To us,to oil,the singer croons.Wherever life sends us,To us,to oil...We fill out glasses to the brim.It is Oilers' Day in the western Siberian province of Khanty-Mansi.This annual holiday,honoring the hard labor of the oil workers,falls early in September,after the worst of the summer mosquito season and before the first snowfall,in October.Hours earlier,as daylight faded,thousands crowded into a huge outdoor sports complex.A stage was framed bt a deep-green backdrop of unbroken forest.Balloon were released,torches were lit,and a troupe belted out a song.


Little wonder Russian are toasting oil.These are boom times.Global oil prices have increased tenfold since 1998,and Russia has pulled ahead of Saudi Arabia as the world's top crude oil producer.The Kremlin's budget now overflows with funds for new schools,roads,and national defense projects,and Moscow's nouveau riche are plunking down millions of dollar for mansion-scale dachas.The pumping heart of the boom is western Siberia's boggy oil fields,which produce around 70 percent of Russian's oil-some seven million barrel a day.For Khanty-Mansi,a territory nearly the size of France,the bonanza provides an unparalleled opportunity to create modern,even desirable living conditions in a region whose very name evokes a harsh,desolate place,Khaty-Mansi's regional capital,scene of the holiday revelries,is being rebuilt with oil-tax proceeds.The new structures include an airport terminal once a wooden shack with an outhouse,an art museum featuring paintings by 19th century Russian masters,and a pair of lavishly equipped boarding schools for children gifted in mathematics and the arts.Even the provincial town of Surgut,a backwater only a few decades ago,is laying out new suburbs and is plagued by traffic jams.



But the opportunity presented by oil could slip through the region's fingers.Despite the remarkable surge in oil price,oil production in western Siberia has leveled off in recent years.Output barely rose from 2004 to 2007-a period when the rulers of the Kremlin,a cold-eyed and control-oriented crew,seized choice fields once held by private oil barons.The oligarchs,as they were known,were rapacious sorts who jousted among themselves for spoils.But they also heavily invested in the fields in order to maximize production and profits.The Kremlin,by contrast,aims to exploit oil not only as a source of national wealth,but also as a political tool for making Russia a great world power once again.Its heavy-handed tactics have made foreign investors wary and could undermine the boom-and with it Khanyy-Mansi's chances for a brighter future.Western Siberia's great oil deposits lie under lands that an exiled Marxist revolutionary,suffering in the gulag,once called the waste places of the earth.But to someone visiting by choice,oil country looks fetchingly wild and pristine.The terrain is dominated by taiga-dense forest of spindly birch,cedar,and pine-and boloto peaty marsh that is frozen for most of the year and in spots bubbles with methane.There are no monutains and few hills,but there are numerous lakes,rivers,and streams.



Oil exploration began in earnest here in the mid-1960s.When geologists reported that large reserves of oil were waiting to be tapped,the Kremlin organized a frenzied military-style invasion of pioneers and bulldozers to ramp up production.Western Siberia,it turned out,had even more black gold than anyone had dreamed.More than 70 billion barrels have been pumped over the past 40 years.In the early days Siberia was all frontier says Khanty-Mansi's govenor,Alexander Filipenko,The governor appears older than his 58 years,with a shock of gary hair,watery eyes,and a mottled nose that has weathered its share of frost.Filipenko arrived in Khanty-Mansi in the early 1970s with orders to lay a bridge over the Ob River,which in the late 19th century was a route for squalid barges transporting prisoners to their final places of banishment.The bridge project took four years of toil under burtal conditions.Yet despite the hardships,the governor looks back at that time the way an old man might recall his first love for a beautiful young woman.




Filipenko is equally passionate about his latest project-the redevelopment of the provincial capital,Khanty-Mansiysk,a town of 60000.He attends to every detail,and he has the funds to remark the capital to his liking.The province's oil industury generates 40 billion dollars in annual tax revenues,4.5 billion dollars of which Khanty-Mansi gets to keep for its own use.The rest goes to Moscow.His party background notwithstanding Filipenko's vision is a distinctly non-Soviet one,The capital's leading architectural symbols include a shopping emporium topped by an enormous green dome in the shape of a chum,the traditional tent used by the region's indigenous people-the Khanty,Mansi,and others who herd reindeer,hunt and fish.That symbolism would have been unthinkable in Soviet times,when the state,with its ideological cult of the worker,denied the very idea of culturally derived identity.When Siberia's oil land came under development,native people were forcibly herded into villages and cut off from their hunting and fishing grounds.Following the breakup of the Soviet Union,the nomads won legal status as aboriginal people,with the right to roam the oil field.In spite of their new status and the architectural homage in the capital,their lot has hardly improved.Their numbers are small,about 30000 in all,their languages are nearly extinct,and they are heavily afflicted by the scourges of contemporary Russia-AIDS,alcoholism,and tuberculosis.Some oil tax money is being invested in medical ships that stop along the river to care for patients.But critics say these floating clinics diagnose disease,then leave patients with no means to get treatment.




Rural Russia is also being depopulated by the flight of young people to Moscow and other cities.To counter these trends,Filipenko has implemented ambitious plans to turn Khanty Mansi into a place young people will choose to live in rather than leave.And this effort,he boasts,is working.He notes that Khanty-Mansi has the third highest birthrate among province in Russia,and unlike the country as a whole,whose population is in decline,Khanty-mansi's has increased 18 percent since 1989,from a combination of births and immigration.Oil composes 90 percent of the capital's economy,which is not surprising given the surge in oil prices.But it points to a problem shared by all resource-dependent economices.At some point the resource will be exhausted,and new sources of prosperity will have to be found.Recognizing the need to develop economic prospects beyond oil,Filipenko persuaded some 80 top researchers from Akademgordok-a famed science and research town in southern Siberia capital to staff a new institute specializing in information technologies.The institute provides consulting servies to oil companies,but it also takes on projects in unrelated fields such as nanotechnology.



It's the start of a Silicon Taiga,says Alexander Sherbakov,a 60 year old mathematician with a gary walrus mustache.As the era of easy oil comes to an end,he say,we're going to grow our own scholars by creating information-age jobs for the younger generation.Unlike investment in oil,investment in science,he says,can guarantee an everlasting bright future for the region's economy and its people.That's undoubtedly an optimistic assessment.For one thing,the touted model,silicon valley,is located in temperate California.In Soviet times the Kremlin could simply order top scientists to move to remote research centers.In post-Soviet times Russia's top researchers can live and work wherever they choose,and most are choosing to living in prosperous cities such as Moscow and St.Peterburg.While the oil boom has yet to make Siberia a magnet for Russia's knowledge class,it is attracting many other newcomers,impoverished immigrants from beyond Russia's borders.Early one morning,in a vacant lot just off the highway to Filipenko's showcase capital,a group of about 15 shabbily dressed men ranging in age from their 20s to their 40s are waiting for offers of work.however menial.A white Nissan pulls up,and several of the men walk over to talk to the driver,who is looking for a few hands to dig potatoes.But his offering price,just under ten dollars a day,isn't enough,and he drives away without any takers.These men are what Russians,borrowing a German word,call gastarbeiters-guest workers.They are nearly everywhere in Khanty-Mansi.Most are Muslims from Tajikistan,the former Soviet republic in Central Asia whose economy was shattered by civil war in the mid-1990s.They come here in spring and return home before winter arrives.It's not every day they find a job,but when they do they can earn about $20 lugging bags of cement for a construction crew or doing household cleaning.They wire funds back to their families,and their employers avoid paying taxes on the wages.The man balk at my request to see their living quarters.One says he is ashamed to show me how he lives.I don't want you to get the wrong idea,he says.We are not bandits,we are civilized people.We just need work.





The men are supposed to obtain registration papers certifying their place of residence,but,as they tell me,they have no authorized place to live,bunking instead in unheated garages illegally rented to them.A work boss- a kind of Mafia figure-obtains papers for them by bribing the registration office,but those documents,listing a false address,leave the gastarbeiters at the mercy of the police.When they are found out ,they're sometimes forced to pay a spot fine read bribe,and repeat offenders may face deportation.Russia's feferal government recently put the burden on employers to register the workers and check their identifications,but such measures are unlikely to stem the tide so long as the oil boom continues.A flood of Russians from economically depressed cities west of the Urals is also swelling the oil towns of western Siberia.Forty years ago Surgut was a collection of wooden hovels,in a place where temperatures can plunge to minus 60 degress Fahrenheit and midwinter darkness lasts for all but a few hours a day.Today Surgut is one of the western Siberia's largest cities.with 300,000 people,The new arrivals are voting with their feet,a sign that Russia's new market economy is actually working.



The polisg and prosperity on view in Surgut were once unthinkable in Russia's hinterlands.A combined day care and preschool the city recently remodeled with 5.2 million dollars largely from oil revenue now has a heated indoor swimming pool and hydromassage whirlpool, an animal collection with rabbits,turtles,and parrot,and a room with a small wooden stage on which colorfully costumed children diligently perform fairy tales.When weather doesn't permit outdoor exercise,the children can ride around in toy cars in a large,glass-enclosed playroom kept at a moderately chilled temperature.And then the toddlers can be soothed by a hot drink from the herbal tea bar.I understand that the foreigner is being shown the finest kindergarten in town,but only so much can be faked.Stuck in Surgut's traffic jams are as many Hondas,Toyotas,and Nissans as inexpensive Russian-made lades.Two-car families are becoming more common with the rise in living standard.The housing stock of a typical Russian city consists of large and ugly multistoried concrete apartment blocks,Surgut boasts a suburban development of single-family town houses, aimed at a new upper middle class of oil company managers,bankers,and entrepreneurs.The red-brick houses,each with its own small plot of land,are being built along a tree-lined stretch of riverfront at an average cost of 400,000.Envious townspeople coined an ironic sobriquet for the elite community.Dolina Nischikh,Valley of the Beggars.