OREKHOVO-ZUYEVO, Russia — The flames, bright orange and menacing, advanced steadily through a field of dried-out reeds, sending up coils of smoke and heading in the general direction of a village that, with its log homes, picket fences and huge gigantic haystacks, seemed to have been laid out by an arsonist.
With calamity perhaps only a few minutes away, all that stood between the flames and the village, Zaprudino, was 58-year-old Vladimir M. Ulyonov, equipped with a shovel and a lot of anger at his government for failing to provide even the most minimal assistance.
In this summer of extreme heat, drought, crop failures and, now, a nationwide eruption of wildfires, the Russian government is facing a rare upwelling of popular anger. More than 3,000 people have been left homeless because of the fires, the government has said, and 52 have been killed.
And as the acres burn and the damage mounts, the government is being tested at all levels and, quite often, found wanting. After decades of institutional inertia and official corruption, opposition figures here say, the government’s capacity to respond to crises has been severely eroded, a fact that has emerged starkly in recent days.
When the wildfires broke out, stoked by the hottest weather here since record-keeping began, more than 130 years, ago, officials and the Russian news media reported that firefighters discovered access roads to the forests were overgrown and in poor repair, that ponds intended to provide water for refilling their tanks were filled with sludge and their fire trucks frequently broken down.
Local officials have also cast blame on a revised 2006 forest code that allowed logging companies to contract out firefighting operations rather than maintaining their own. When the fires broke out, the contractors were woefully unprepared and inadequately equipped, said Viktor N. Sorokhin, a deputy head of administration for the Orekhovo-Zuyevo district, about 50 miles east of Moscow.
The new code also cut the number of foresters in the district by half, he added, to 150 from 300.
As the fire damage mounts, critics have noted that Ilim Pulp, a timber company half owned by International Paper, where President Dmitry Medvedev worked as a corporate lawyer in the 1990s, had lobbied hard for the legislation easing logging regulation.
Whatever the reasons, it was obvious on a recent tour of the area that the Orekhovo-Zoyevo district was in dire need of more equipment and personnel. Beside the M-108 highway, a two-lane ribbon of asphalt carved like a tunnel through a towering birch forest, a fire burned without a single firefighter in sight, smoke wafting onto the road as trucks zoomed past through the haze.
