The ancient city of Volokolamsk, 75 miles west of Moscow, is celebrated as the place where troops under general Ivan Panfilov resisted a Nazi tank division in 1941, a battle mythologised in Soviet propaganda and a 2016 Russian blockbuster.
Today people in Volokolamsk are taking on a different kind of “tank”: That’s what they’ve nicknamed the lorries that bring rubbish from the capital to the sprawling dump here, a lucrative business in which friends of Vladimir Putin and relatives of top officials are involved.
The size of the landfill was once commensurate with the population of 23,000 in this scenic city of white churches.
But as the economy boomed in the 2000s and the capital ballooned to…
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