Shiyes station. Image: Viktor Kokarev. The railway station in Shiyes, on the border between Arkhangelsk Region and the Komi Republic in Russia’s far north, used to be part of a village of the same name. But no one has lived here since the timber camp was closed down in 1974. Occasionally, hunters or foresters get off the train here. And it was two hunters from the neighbouring village of Urdoma, Nikolai Vorontsov and his brother, who noticed at the end of July that there were felled trees, foundation trenches and building equipment around the station. The brothers spread the information on social media and wrote to the local Lensk district council, asking what was going on. The officials there had no idea, so the residents of Urdoma set up a small committee and set off for Shiyes.
“The foresters told us straight away that they had been ordered to clear five hectares of forest for industrial development,” Nikolai Viktorov, a member of the Clean Urdoma public campaign tells me. “I talked to them. They were in shock at the very idea that such a large area of forest had to be cleared in a short time — every tree has to be marked for felling, after all. We then discovered the scale of the project: millions of cubic metres of domestic rubbish were due to be transported here for dumping. The builders were quite open about it, they told us that yes, there would be a landfill site and Moscow’s rubbish would end up here.”
In early August, there were already 80 workers and 40 pieces of equipment at the station, and by October nearly three times as many people were at work there. In August, protest meetings began to be organised at a number of places in the area, and one action in Urdoma at the end of the month attracted about 1,500 protesters, over a third of the population of the village. By mid-October, local activists had sent 82 letters to numerous addresses, including those of Russia’s Prosecutor General and the Presidential Administration.
