ABSTRACT
It was already a record hot summer day in 2010 when my friend Gregory Asmolov woke up to dubious news that the fires ravaging across Russia had been contained. He didn’t buy it. As typically happens during such disasters, Vladimir Putin was duly preoccupied with the important job of covering up the true scale of the disaster. Meanwhile, hundreds in Moscow were dying due to the resulting smog.1 The Kremlin’s response was particularly effective: neither the government nor the mass media provided any real-time information to the public. “State-controlled television revealed as little information as possible to the public about the fires and smog.”2 And while the government claimed to have the situation under control, the vast majority of towns that were in the line of fire never had a fighting chance. In some cases, word of villages being engulfed by the flames would reach the general public in Moscow weeks after the fact.3 Decades of corruption meant that little to no investments had been made in disaster preparedness or response since the Cold War. Fire trucks were either missing or had long fallen into disrepair, and the few paid firefighters that bravely fought the dangerous flames did so with little to no equipment, prompting many citizens to buy them masks, fire hoses, and other supplies.4
