Siberian Fire Is a Deadly Postscript to Putin's Election

In 2015, protests following a nightclub fire that killed more than 30 people brought down the government in Romania. But nothing of the kind is going to happen in Russia after at least 64 people, 9 of them children, died in a mall fire in the Siberian city of Kemerovo on Sunday -- even though the tragedy is ultimately the government's fault.

The Zimnyaya Vishnya (Winter Cherry) mall in the center of Kemerovo, which opened in 2013, was part of a powerful business trend. After the Moscow market for large malls became competitive at the beginning of this decade, expansion to the Russian hinterlands became the big play for developers. The international real estate firm Cushman & Wakefield reported late last year that Russia had "the strongest pipeline" in Europe for shopping center openings in 2017 and 2018, amounting to a quarter of the total European pipeline. Only 13 percent of the planned retail space was slated to open in Moscow. Though the Russian e-commerce market has more than doubled since 2013, people, especially in the provinces, where there's little else to do on weekends, flock to malls for entertainment. Winter Cherry laid on all kinds of opportunities to entertain kids; Sunday's fire reportedly started in a top-floor play zone.