MOSCOW — On Sunday I suggested to my 13-year-old son that he join me on a bike ride. I am an obsessive, possibly excessive, cyclist, and I wanted to take Vova on a respectable 18-mile trip to show him some of the beautiful paths around our country house.
The dacha where we spend weekends and summers is about 12 miles outside of Moscow, on the border of a protected nature reserve and a short distance away from a chain of reservoirs that feed the city’s water supply. Not only construction but even unauthorized foot traffic are banned in the area.
I was planning to take Vova as far as we could go and turn around when we encountered a roadblock. We started out on a dirt road, did a short stretch on heavily pot-holed asphalt and then turned into the woods, where our bikes would get a real workout on pits and tree roots. To my surprise, the road was also open at the last in chain of reservoirs, where I would have expected to have to stop.
Crossing into unknown territory, Vova and I found ourselves on strikingly smooth pavement — a most peculiar occurrence in this part of the woods. The road followed the reservoirs: we could see the water through a line of trees on our left. Every hundred meters or so we also saw signs that said “Restricted Sanitary Zone. No Unauthorized Persons.” With what looked like virgin forest on either side of us — tall century-old pines mixed with lush leafy trees — it was a beautiful ride. It was a scary one, too: cars — Lexuses and Toyota SUVs, as well as one Cadillac — were traveling at absurd speeds, enabled by the quality of the road.
We reached a breathtaking spot where the road crossed a reservoir over a perfectly flat bridge with no barriers or railings that barely rose above the surface of the water. When we reached the middle of the bridge, a female federal officer blocked our way. “This is a restricted zone,” she said.
We turned around obediently and stopped at the entrance of the bridge to take a couple of pictures. As we got back on our bikes, I heard the woman call to us and stopped. She quickly caught up to us.
“You cannot take pictures here.”
“Why not?” I asked, buying time while a picture she would probably make me delete was uploading to Facebook.
“Because it’s a restricted area.” In Russia, those words serve as an explanation for any ban, especially the ban on photography.
“But why do all these cars keep going through?”
“Because they live here,” the officer answered. “Because, you know, everything in our country is for sale.” She gave a quick, bitter laugh.
In other words, many people — from the looks of it, hundreds — have paid to build houses on the banks of what is supposed to be a highly protected fresh-water reservoir.
The officer admonished us never to try taking pictures in the restricted area and sent us on our way.
But before heading home, there was one more thing I wanted to see. A few months earlier, I had noticed that a broad cutting in the forest less than two miles away that had long been blocked off was suddenly being traveled by many large trucks. I worried that a major construction project — perhaps a hotel — might be underway.
As we approached the end of that path, my fears were confirmed. A yellow bulldozer was moving around what looked like mountains of excavated dirt. Whatever was being built, it would be huge.
Vova and I got closer and gasped. This was not a construction site. It was a giant dump, roughly the height of a four-story building and the length of two city blocks. It was probably meant to accommodate overflow from an official city dump about 12 miles away.
Russians have a notoriously short horizon: they smoke, they drink, and they generally act like there is no tomorrow. We often refer to the leaders of the regime as “the temps” because the people running the country and its cities — and its garbage disposal — seem to act as though they themselves were not planning to stick around past tomorrow. There’s even a saying to illustrate this attitude: “After we are gone, there may as well be a flood.”
Still, every so often something emerges that shocks me. A Greenpeace blogger recently reported that every 18 months a river in the Russian north runs black, carrying as much oil into the Arctic Ocean as was spilled during the 2010 BP disaster in the Gulf of Mexico. But seeing a new giant dump so close to Moscow’s source of fresh water shook me even more.
Masha Gessen is a journalist in Moscow. She is the author of “The Man Without a Face,” a biography of Vladimir Putin.
