WAS TROTSKY THE FORESTRY COMMISSAR? During the Cold War, Trotskyist factions of the old Socialist International used to twist themselves into pretzels to distinguish their hopes for true socialism from the reality in the Evil Empire. With no Stalinist bureaucracies to denounce, the story changes.

The city’s vast working class and impoverished elderly population, who live without air-conditioning and have neither the financial means to leave nor anywhere to go, have been left to suffocate.

Had the Communist Party been in power, this description of the effects of the smoke of the nearby forest fires in Moscow would no doubt have been occasion to denounce the state-capitalists of the Stalinist usurpers. The state capitalists, however, act more like crony capitalists these days.

In the Moscow area, burning peat bogs are the cause of the suffocating smoke in the city. These swampy areas were drained during the Soviet era in order that the peat could be used as fuel and the land turned over to agriculture. Since the collapse of the USSR, however, the peat bogs have not been maintained and are no longer monitored for fire danger. Once peat ignites, it is difficult to extinguish because the substance smolders underground for long periods of time.

According to a group of Russian scientists who recently published a sharply critical assessment of the government’s forest policy and its response to the wildfires, even flooding the area with water is not a guaranteed solution because as much as 25 percent of peat is bitumen coal. This substance absorbs water and continues burning.

Are we seeing a substitution of oil for peat? In the forests, however, there's a clear breakdown of responsibility.

The wildfires and the severe public health crisis they have created in Russia’s capital are a direct product of government policy. In 2007, at the behest of then President Vladimir Putin acting on the behalf of powerful logging and manufacturing interests, a law was passed that disbanded Russia’s 70,000-strong forestry service and semi-privatized the country’s forestland.

Under the new forest code, responsibility for maintaining the forest—including fire protection—is transferred to private entities holding the land under lease. These companies, solely interested in making as much money as possible, do nothing to maintain forest roads, monitor fire danger, or provide resources in case a wildfire breaks out. While on paper the companies are subject to government oversight, in reality officials are bought off and look the other way.

Those forestlands not under lease are technically the responsibility of regional governments, which also do nothing to maintain and protect forestland.

What we are seeing, dear reader, is an imprecise definition of property rights. Logging companies with full ownership of tree plantations understand that maintaining firebreaks and fire-fighting equipment and training loggers as firefighters is cheap insurance. (To the best of my knowledge, wildfires in the western U.S. generally start on public lands, not on tree farms.)

As the present wildfire disaster has unfolded, there have been various news reports of firefighters encountering impassable fire roads, water supplies choked with weeds, and broken down emergency response vehicles.

Sounds like more than a few big cities in the U.S. What's the Russian phrase for ward-heeler?

During the Soviet period, there existed a developed system for monitoring forestlands and preventing wildfires that consisted of thousands of local observation stations manned by workers specially trained to identify fires and immediately alert authorities. The principle under which the system worked, which demanded enormous manpower given the enormity of Russia’s forests, was that the sooner a fire could be identified, the smaller it would be and the greater the likelihood of containment.

Perhaps so, but given the pollution of Lake Baikal and the draining of the Aral Sea and the productivity follies that led to Chernobyl, I wonder if there isn't a false consciousness in the Fourth International.