How Vladimir Putin first visited Chukotka

Vladimir Putin visited Chukotka for the first time on Wednesday. His first trip in 2024 was of an emphatically working nature: neither Mr. Putin nor his interlocutors, with whom he communicated precisely as the current president, and not as a candidate, remembered the March elections. But the main election themes were very clearly present in these conversations. Vladimir Putin spoke with the residents of Chukotka about supporting families and about Russia as a whole as one big family, promising to solve all the remaining problems of the participants in the special military operation and recognizing the superiority of Soviet cartoons over American ones. Before the meeting with the public, the president had the opportunity to make sure that Chukotka constantly faces logistics problems, but local cucumbers are hard, and the tomatoes turned out well.

The Chukotka Autonomous Okrug and its capital, Anadyr, to some extent personify all the problems of Russian northern cities, taken to the extreme. Anyone who is in the city for a short time will certainly be delighted by the harsh but beautiful winter landscapes – such as the endless snowy desert on the way from the airport. For the same 47.8 thousand people who live permanently in Chukotka (13 thousand of them in Anadyr), life consists of daily overcoming many difficulties, including those related to logistics.

For example, from the same airport to the capital of the district in winter you can only drive along the frozen Anadyr Estuary. When the estuary is not covered with ice, it is crossed by special hovercraft or ferry. Those accompanying the president made this journey on the Predator snow and swamp all-terrain vehicle. Chukotka officials readily emphasized that the all-terrain vehicle was made in Russia, but presidential press secretary Dmitry Peskov later criticized the Predator: according to him, manufacturers should “bring the car to mind.” The driver of the Predator “told Mr. Peskov that he improved it with a file, tightened it himself, and so on”: “The steering wheel doesn’t work well, the gearbox doesn’t work well. The engine runs very well, but it turned out that the engine was imported.” Dmitry Peskov suggested that manufacturers are hampered by the lack of competition.

Residents of Chukotka are probably helped to put up with harsh natural conditions and technical disadvantages by relatively high average salaries (according to statistics, the average per capita monthly income is more than 113 thousand rubles). But with these salaries coexist high, by the standards of central Russia, prices in stores, especially for vegetables and fruits: garlic for 900 rubles. for 1 kg, beets for 100 rubles, carrots for 115, cabbage for 100, tangerines for 540 rubles. “Before moving here, I was used to tomatoes and cucumbers. And I was very upset about the prices,” one of the residents of Anadyr admitted to Kommersant. Getting to Chukotka is not easy for food either.

Vladimir Putin was in Chukotka for the first time: now, as Mr. Peskov later explained to journalists, “one can say that he has seen all of Russia.”

The trip to Anadyr became the president’s first regional trip after self-nomination for a new term (except for participation in the pre-New Year CIS summit in St. Petersburg). However, earlier Dmitry Peskov called not to separate the head of state’s trips into work and election ones, and this fully applied to Chukotka. On the one hand, Mr. Putin’s visit was of a purely business nature: the head of state got acquainted with the life of the region and listened to the requests of its residents. On the other hand, it was not much different from the classic communication between a presidential candidate and voters.

The visit began with a “vegetable” theme: Vladimir Putin visited the year-round greenhouse complex of the Makatrov family. According to official data, this enterprise now supplies almost 21% of the demand for vegetables in the district, but at the same time faces a number of problems such as high utility tariffs and the cost of delivering agricultural materials. “Here we have an onion… You see, such a good, hard cucumber. But we got tomatoes for the first time,” entrepreneur Natalya Makatrova told the guest. Mr. Putin listened attentively to the explanations and eagerly felt the results of the greenhouse work.

The main event of the trip was the meeting of the President with the public of Chukotka.

Of the officials, only Governor Vladislav Kuznetsov, presidential envoy to the Far Eastern Federal District Yuri Trutnev and presidential assistant Maxim Oreshkin were present. They were silent for most of the meeting, allowing ordinary citizens to speak.

The citizens did not disappoint. The first block of questions concerned the problems of the family, whose support, as Kommersant previously reported, is one of the main accents of Vladimir Putin’s presidential campaign. This topic was raised by several people at once, talking about new benefits for parents with many children. Answering their questions and suggestions, Mr. Putin agreed that such families in Chukotka should receive 1 million rubles. to repay the mortgage (currently federal benefits imply repayment of only 450 thousand rubles). “But in this case, it seems to me, then it is necessary to extend this measure not only to Chukotka, but also to other regions of the Far East, in which the birth rate is still lower than in the region as a whole. I won’t list them now, it’s easy to calculate, these are counting indicators,” Vladimir Putin immediately expanded the scope of the mortgage benefit.

But the president did not want to expand the scope of use of maternity capital by allowing it to be spent on purchasing a car. “I am always afraid that as soon as we begin to allow this maternity capital to be spent in a variety of directions—I will now say a simple but very direct thing—we will ultimately not be able to guarantee the interests of children,” he explained. But in return, he promised to instruct the government to work on the issue of preferential lending and subsidizing the purchase of cars outside the framework of maternity capital.

To conclude the family theme, Mr. Putin turned to the concept of Russia as a “family of families.” Answering a question from one of the fathers of many children, how the head of state copes with the leadership of a “large multimillion-dollar country” and whether he has “some secret,” the president said that when he looks at the successes of young Russians in science, culture, sports, he feels, “as if these are my children, these are our family.”

Three members of the SVO were also present at the meeting, but only one spoke for everyone, touching on several problems of his comrades. They talked, in particular, about delays in payments for injuries, about difficulties with passing military medical commissions after recovery, etc. Vladimir Putin noted that for the most part such flaws have already been eliminated, and he promised to correct the rest and asked for accurate information about people who are having problems. Following the meeting, he also stated that those who participated in the hostilities in Donbass before the start of the Northern Military District will also receive the status of combat veterans. “All people who defend Russia with arms in their hands must be placed on equal terms. We will definitely finalize this,” the president assured.

There were also some purely local issues.

Even at the beginning of the meeting, Mr. Putin expressed surprise that it was necessary to travel from the airport to Anadyr along a winter road. “It’s strange, how did this happen?” – he was perplexed. “There was a military airfield there. And the city was built on the other side (of the estuary.— “Kommersant”) for the safety of its residents,” explained a resident of Anadyr, asking to somehow simplify this route for a more comfortable journey – for example, by increasing the number of hovercraft. Vladimir Putin forwarded the question to the governor. “You gave an order to purchase five airboats,” recalled Vladislav Kuznetsov. “117 million (rubles— “Kommersant”),” the president confirmed. But there is another way to radically solve the problem – with the help of “engineering and technical construction across the Anadyr estuary,” the head of Chukotka added. “How many billions?” — Vladimir Putin asked in a businesslike manner. “Vladimir Vladimirovich, a lot,” the governor honestly admitted. “What about the ferry? Is there a ferry? – Mr. Putin seemed to continue to look for other options. The ferry is not available at all times of the year, his interlocutors stated, not without regret.

A number of issues related to the protection of the languages ​​of the indigenous peoples of Chukotka. Vladimir Putin expressed his readiness to deal with this problem: “This is one of the greatest assets of Russia – the diversity of its culture. And the diversity of culture without language is no longer a full-fledged culture, it’s already some kind of fragments of culture.”

Finally, some of the questions, as often happens when Mr. Putin communicates with the people, turned out to be personal.

He was asked whether he had time to play sports, what was the last museum he visited and which one was his favorite, what professions he had. I manage to do sports in the mornings for 2.5 hours a day, my favorite museum is the Hermitage, I received the grade of carpenter in the student detachment, the president reported. “You need to love what you do,” he concluded.

The meeting ended, on the one hand, quite unexpectedly, and on the other hand, quite logically, based on current ideological realities. The last question concerned the Soviet past, which, according to the participants of the event, has many advantages over some trends of the present that came to Russia from abroad. One of the residents of Anadyr proposed to restore Soviet cartoons so that they would be available to all Russian families: in his opinion, with proper processing they would be much better than Western products. “You watch modern Western-made cartoons, everything shoots, jumps, runs, and after half an hour your head falls off from this film. How can children stand this? Our Soviet cartoons, of course, are of a completely different quality: they have a completely different emotional and aesthetic impact on the developing person,” Vladimir Putin readily agreed, promising to talk about this with the Minister of Culture Olga Lyubimova.

After the meeting, a Kommersant correspondent asked some of its participants why they did not raise issues of high food prices. “Yes, we are used to it. This is a surprise for you, from the mainland,” the northerners modestly answered. Dmitry Peskov, later commenting to reporters on the topic of Chukotka prices, confirmed that due to complex logistics, the problem does not have a simple solution, and the only hope for reducing prices is the further development of greenhouse farms like the one the president visited at the beginning of his visit.

Andrey Vinokurov, Anadyr