Russia’s suspected plague outbreak reveals Putin’s greatest weakness ...Middle East

Has the plague broken out of a laboratory in Siberia? At present it is unclear – but what is evident is that many Russians will believe the rumour mill over Vladimir Putin’s government, underlining a central weakness of a regime that is increasingly built on censorship and lies.

The Kremlin is still being guarded with the facts, apparently wanting to prevent panic. This is a familiar and counter-productive pattern: in practice, gossip and conspiracy theory quickly fill the information vacuum. As a Russian journalist told The i Paper, frustrated that they were not being allowed to cover the story for their state-run newspaper, “people assume silence means a cover-up”.

In this respect, the health scare is a case study of the Putin regime’s growing estrangement from its own people.

Darya Shipilova, a laboratory technician at the Irkutsk Anti-Plague Institute of Siberia and the Far East, died last week. Some reports claim she admitted that she had accidentally smashed a test tube containing the bacterium that causes plague.

The authorities quickly established local quarantine zones, including the hospital where she was being treated, placed 200 people under medical observation and cancelled a city “clean-up day” which would have seen thousands of volunteers out collecting litter and sprucing up their neighbourhoods.

At first, the talk was of pneumonic plague, which is especially dangerous as it can be spread among humans through the air. Alexei Tsydenov, governor of the neighbouring region of Buryatia, initially confirmed this, but then pivoted to saying she “might have died of the plague”.

Meanwhile, in Irkutsk and across Siberia, people were buying up masks and antibiotics, hoteliers were reporting a spate of cancellations and there were calls on social media for travel bans and mask mandates.

The authorities have tried to play down the incident. Igor Kobzev, governor of the Irkutsk region, has reported that none of Shipilova’s quarantined contacts had shown any symptoms, and all initial laboratory tests on them have come back negative.

National public health agency Rospotrebnadzor has claimed that, rather than pneumonic plague, she actually died from an unknown strain of pneumonia. It added that its testing had not detected any pathogens related to her laboratory work and that no infectious disease-related cases have been reported among the institute’s employees over the past ten days.

The crisis looks likely to be quickly contained and addressed. An authoritarian system like Putin’s can rapidly and decisively control situations, and even if there is an outbreak of pneumonic plague, these are not medieval times – it can be combated with antibiotics and appropriate protocols. The last plague case in Russia dates back ten years, and the boy affected was treated and survived. Since then, the experience of Covid has left the Russians much more prepared for outbreaks of respiratory infections.

Given how quickly pneumonic plague can manifest, the apparent lack of new cases suggests either that this was not what killed Shipilova, or the incident was nipped in the bud.

But that has not stopped the rumours and fear. Even the most routine precautions are being taken as “proof” that a crisis is unfolding, but that the government is refusing to admit it. It exposes perhaps the biggest challenge facing Putin’s regime – that an increasingly cynical and disaffected population is less likely to believe even good news, and assumes a lie behind every official statement.

News about the health scare is easily blown up as terrible portents in the public imagination – including when the Investigatory Committee opened a criminal investigation into potential safety violations at the institute and when Dr Anna Popova, head of Rospotrebnadzor and the equivalent of the UK’s Chief Medical Officer, urgently flew to Irkutsk for an extraordinary meeting of the regional sanitary and anti-epidemic commission.

Even branches of government are not immune. At the weekend, the council in the nearby city of Baikalsk urged residents not to travel to Shelekhov, where Shipilova had died, only hurriedly to delete the warning two hours later.

Opinion polling in authoritarian states is notoriously problematic. Nonetheless, surveys by different bodies conducted in different ways have shown a steady decline in trust in Putin’s government that has accelerated this year. With good reason. From generals reporting illusory successes against Ukraine to economists fudging data to paint a more upbeat picture, Putin’s unwillingness to hear bad news and face unpleasant realities trickles down through the whole system.

As one Irkutsk local wrote on social media, “no one likes admitting failures, accidents and oversights. They’d rather pretend everything was fine – and we all pay the price”. This time, it seems no epidemic has broken out, but ordinary Russians are paying the price for this culture of organised deceit, their menfolk dying in over-optimistic attacks in Ukraine and rising prices for everything from food to utilities because Putin will not accept the economic damage of his war. And they know it.

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