Having dedicated his career to studying, planning and lobbying for the construction of roads, Dosenko is a deeply discouraged man.
Russia has about 400,000 miles of general-use road, he says, far short of the roughly 1 million miles most experts think the country needs. The government is planning to build up to 5,000 new miles of road by 2015.
"It's nothing," Dosenko said with a sigh. "I'm ashamed to even mention these figures. And given the financial crisis, I believe that even these totally insufficient plans are in danger."
It's true -- the Russian government has been forced to shave its budget, reallocating money and dipping into the emergency funds set aside during times of plenty. Funding for transportation infrastructure has already been cut by nearly a third.
"It's a huge restraint," said Anton Geidt of GiprodorNII, Russia's largest road and bridge planning company.
In recent years, as oil and natural gas prices swelled, many here seemed to think that Russia would keep getting richer for the foreseeable future. Smart people in Moscow would talk about a tumble in the cost of oil and gas dismissively -- about what effect it might have if it happened, which of course it wouldn't, at least any time soon.
And so there was a sense, critics say, that there was no rush. The money was pouring in, and tomorrow would take care of itself. Roads stayed unpaved or nonexistent. The much-discussed modernization of the military was barely begun, let alone completed. Even infrastructure related to oil and gas was so badly neglected that Russia is now finding itself grappling with falling production numbers.
But the inaction has come at a cost: Shoddy roads are robbing Russia of about 3% of its GDP a year, according to government estimates. Transport costs account for about 20% of the cargo's worth; in other European countries, the cost is between 5% and 7%.
A staggering 30,000 towns and villages are without a year-round road link to the nearest administrative center.
"So in other words, there's no sense developing anything in those places," Dosenko said. "Because there's no way to bring what you produce to market, and no way to be supplied with spare parts and raw materials."
Over the last 20 years, Dosenko has taken a handful of work trips to neighboring China, watching with envy as the government built 600,000 miles of road while Russia fell further behind.
