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Lake Baikal, Pearl of Siberia: Employees Going Hungry

by sara star | July 3, 2009 at 07:25 am

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Once again, Russian employees are not being paid. And again, the Russians have their own way of dealing with things. 43 people are on a hunger strike, after the Baikal Cellulose and Paper Plant refused to pay $4.3 million in back wages.

In early April, the governor of the Irkutsk Region announced it would stop receiving governmental subsidies, until the plant switched to a closed-loop water cycle to prevent pollution of Lake Baikal, one of the world’s largest fresh water lakes.

Altogether, forty-two former employees have refused to eat, protesting about the policies of the plant,which went bankrupt in March but failed to find enough money to pay its debts, including to employees.

Apart from the hunger strike, the protesters are planning to picket the local government building, as well as the passing by Trans-Siberian Railroad and the major M-53 highway, linking Novosibirsk to Irkutsk.

Lake Baikal is the deepest and biggest (by volume) freshwater lake in the world. It is bigger than the Great Lakes combined.

Due to its age and isolation, Lake Baikal contains some of the most extraordinary flora and fauna in the world. This is of great value to evolutionary science and has given rise to the lakes nickname, The Galapagos of Russia. Baikal is home to nearly 2,000 plant and animal species found nowhere else on the planet, including the Baikal freshwater seal, or nerpa.

In 1957, when the public first heard about plans for a cellulose plant at Baikalsk, people who had mutely obeyed the Soviet government for 40 years finally howled in protest. Local scientists, writers, fishermen, and ordinary citizens banded together to fight the plant, igniting an environmental movement that was a direct forebear of all Soviet activism to come. Their protests were mostly ignored. Yet at a time in the Soviet Union when the fires of free speech were being stamped out wherever they appeared, a small flicker burned fiercely in the Siberian wilderness.
After years of protest, the lake's defender were rewarded in April, 1987, when the Soviet government issued a comprehensive decree protecting Lake Baikal. Among other things, it abolished logging anywhere close to the lake shore and decreed that the cellulose plant be "reprofiled" for activities harmless to the environment by 1993. Exactly what those activities might be has not been decided.

Meanwhile the dumping of industrial waste into Baikal continues, and bilious smoke still rises from the plant 24 hours a day.