France 24 Observers web-site and the Moscow Times newspaper report on the growing civil rights campaign in Russia against officials in cars with flashing blue lights that snarl traffic and have been blamed for a growing number of accidents.
Businessman Andrei Hartley was driving in central Moscow when the black BMW with flashing blue lights started coming straight toward him. Both cars stopped, bumper to bumper. Hartley got out of his car, his digital camera recording a video of the encounter, and politely asked the government official sitting beside the driver to identify himself, writes the Moscow Times. The official peered out of his open door for a moment before slamming it shut.
The BMW's driver, meanwhile, stormed around the car to Hartley and began to manhandle him. The driver of a nearby car quickly intervened to defend Hartley, forcing the BMW's driver to back off and return to his vehicle. The official in the BMW turned out to be Vladimir Shevchenko, an adviser to President Dmitry Medvedev and longtime Kremlin chief of protocol to former President Boris Yeltsin.
Hartley posted the now much-viewed video of the incident on the Internet (see below). His in-your-face example is inspiring drivers to take a stand. The Moscow movement against self-declared VIPs - or bureaucrats who use flashing lights illegally to evade traffic queues - is growing in strength. Last Sunday, two hundred Moscovites took to the streets with blue buckets secured, upside-down, on top of their car roofs, reports France 24. The Union of Car Owners, a public motorists' group, is also printing bumper stickers reading "Servant of the people, take off your flashing lights!" said Sergei Kanayev, head of the organization's Moscow branch. "This is not some kind of 'Fight Against Corruption Month,'" he said. "We need this situation to come to an end."
Overtly this is may seem to be just a motorists' campaign, but underlying is the sense of social injustice shared by many in Russia.
Georgy Satarov, head of the anti-corruption Indem think tank and a leading adviser to Boris Yeltsin, said the public campaign shows a change in citizens' attitude toward officials.
“The middle class, which has a bit of self-respect, is fighting the thuggish behavior of the authorities,” he told The Moscow Times. The early mass popularity of Yeltsin himself was in part due to his refusal to ride in an official limousine. He used instead a small Soviet-made car of a mass-produced model.
According to the Moscow Times, 967 cars in Russia belonging to senior officials are supposed to be equipped with flashing lights under a 2006 government decree. (Incidentally, Russian Orthodox Patriarch Kirill qualified for a flashing light, while the leaders of other faiths do not enjoy this privilege.)
But at least 1,197 cars with flashing lights are driving on Moscow's streets, according to readers' photos submitted to the web sites of Silver Rain radio and Vedomosti newspaper over the past two months.
Last month, Novaya Gazeta published a list of more than a dozen recent traffic accidents involving cars with federal and regional officials and businessmen, some of which resulted in deaths and serious injuries. Perhaps the most notorious took place in Moscow in February, when the Mercedes of LUKoil vice president Anatoly Barkov collided with a car carrying two female doctors, killing both. An investigation into the crash is ongoing.
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