VLADIVOSTOK, Russia -- The communist central planners who designed modern Russia's infrastructure devised a system of boiling water kilometers from where it is needed, running it through aboveground pipes across a region where temperatures can drop as low as minus 40 C -- and expected this to warm the radiators of Russia's drafty apartments.
Now add a heating-oil shortage, accusations that Moscow isn't paying for energy used by the military and charges of stolen fuel. No wonder the Far East is facing its perennial heating crisis.
Here in Russia's Primorye region -- a finger of land flanked by China, North Korea and the Sea of Japan, the capital of which is Vladivostok -- temperatures have already fallen to minus 30 degrees, and hundreds of thousands of people live in apartments with inadequate heat -- or none at all.