Russian truck drivers protest crippling tax

Bobylev Sergei/TASS via ZUMA Press

Hundreds of long-haul truck drivers from across Russia have converged on Moscow to protest crippling new highway tolls that threaten their livelihood. Police stopped many from reaching the capital, but some made it onto the main beltway around the city Dec. 4, in what they call the “snail” — driving slowly and tying up traffic.

For weeks, convoys of truckers have held protests, from Dagestan to Novosibirsk in Russia’s Far East, demanding cancellation of the 1.5-ruble-per-kilometer tax on trucks weighing more than 12 tons. Drivers say the tax, which took effect in mid-November, amounts to 10 percent of their income from each trip. It is scheduled to double next March. Adding insult to injury, the collection system has been turned over to a private company owned by the son of a close associate of President Vladimir Putin.

“We’re protesting because we need to feed our families,” Alexander Lushavin, one of the protest organizers, told the London Telegraph Nov. 30.

“They have already increased taxes on fuel and promised to cancel the transportation tax, but they have only increased it,” Vladimir Deryugin told the New York Times as he and 20 other truckers sat in an Ikea parking lot near Moscow where police had blocked them in Dec. 4.

Drivers in Novosibirsk held up their underwear, saying the government is robbing them of everything.

The protests take place in the context of a deepening economic contraction, made worse by falling oil prices and the effects of sanctions by Washington and other imperialist powers against Moscow. “The drivers’ protest is massive,” said Pyotr Bizyukov of the Center for Social and Labor Rights in Moscow. He told the Wall Street Journal that protest activity in Russia hit a seven-year high in 2015.

— NAOMI CRAINE