With oil prices higher than ever, Russian government coffers are bursting. The stock market is surging and the hard economic times of post-Soviet years are a distant memory.
But dozens of people in a southern coal mining region serve as a grim reminder that Russia's surging economy has left many behind.
Forty-one people here have been on hunger strike since May 31, demanding that their employer, the giant Rostov Ugol (Rostov Coal) conglomerate, pay them backwages from more than a year ago.
"As long as they don't pay all of the arrears, I will not move from here," said Olga Khokhlova, a 50-year-old worker at the Shakhty factory, one of Rostov-Ugol's subsidiaries.
Khokhlova and eight other women, along with six men, have occupied the office and hallway of Shakhty's director.
Twenty-six strikers are inside another subsidiary near the village of Artyom, some 15 kilometre's (nine miles) away.
The last time these people received a salary was in December, for their wages of March 2003. Khokhlova received 2,000 rubles (69 dollars, 56 euros).
"I did not feel well at all yesterday and my blood pressure dropped so low that the doctor on duty wanted me to be taken to a hospital, but I refused," she said, visibly tired but determined.
Three of the hunger strikers have been hospitalised since the start of the action.
Rostov Ugol, a huge conglomerate based in Shakhty, owes its 720 employees 27 million rubles (964,000 dollars).
The firm is in quasi-bankruptcy - a reflection of much of the mining industry, where many businesses have gone under recently.
On Monday, the local administration offered to pay a part of the back wages instead of Rostov Ugol.
But the offer was to reimburse only 10 percent of the total due and the hunger strikers refused, insisting they be paid all of their owed wages.
Inna Tsevardina, an economist with the Shakhty factory, is one of the hunger strikers.
"My husband works for another subsidiary of Rostov Ugol," she said. "They don't get their salaries either. How can we survive in these conditions?"
"My 32-year-old son and my 30-year-old daughter have left to make their living in Moscow," she said. "It's they who have saved us by sending money now and then."
The strikers fear for the future. "Shakhty is a dying town," Khokhlova said. "My son recently came back from army service and works in Rostov. He gives us 2,000 rubles each month so we can survive. But you can imagine what is left for food after paying the water and electricity bills," she said.
The hunger strike here is the latest in a string of such actions across Russia's mining sector over the past several months.
In the Siberian republic of Khakassia, more than 170 miners from the town of Chernogorsk went on a weeks-long hunger strike this spring until the local administration paid them the wages owed by their employer.
"Sadly, the demonstration here at Shakhty is not of the same magnitude as that in Khakassia," said Nikolai Erochenkov, one of the strikers who, like them all, does not want Rostov Ugol to go under.
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