Los Angeles Times
August 25, 2000
Russia: Market reforms have prompted an exodus to cities, fueling the rural
settlements' demise.
By ROBYN DIXON, Times Staff Writer
TYUTCHEVO, Russia--When the last inhabitant of Tyutchevo village dies,
the electricity authorities will snip the wire leading to the last house and
roll it up before the thieves get to it.
The flowers and grasses will thicken over the track to the village
until
it is lost.
Tyutchevo, once a settlement of about 73 houses, has shrunk to a single
person in a crooked wood-and-clay cottage: Maria Lyovina, age 82. She is cut
off by road for seven months of the year, when, depending on conditions
underfoot, the cross-country trek through mud or deep snow can take visitors
anything from 30 minutes to an hour and a half.
Her situation reflects a long-term contraction in Russia's rural
population, a trend that experts believe is likely to accelerate in coming
years, with huge upheavals predicted in the agricultural sector.
Three villages nearby have died in the last 20 years, and four others
are clinging on with seven to 15 elderly people left.
"There were so many tractors here and so many combine harvesters," said
Lyovina, whom the locals from Vednoye village, seven miles away,
affectionately call Baba Manya.
Vladimir Syomin, 48, head of Vednoye village administration, knows the
frail pulse of each of the small villages scattered nearby like a broken
string of pearls. He follows the uncertain health of all the surrounding
cooperative farms, which were known as collective farms in the Soviet era.
Through the Vednoye administration, Syomin is responsible for many
other
villages of 100 people or fewer. "Those little ones are fated to die," he
said.
In Vednoye, people fear that their own village of 367 people will
shrink--and eventually disappear and have its name erased by Moscow
cartographers.
In 1913, the Vednoye district had 1,900 people. Today, there are 698.
With the near collapse of the local cooperative farm, the young are moving
away and no one wants to learn how to maintain the temperamental machinery
at
the farm or to learn the old songs or the harmonica.
"So much has been lost in Russia already. What's a few more songs?"
Syomin, who longs to pass on his harmonica skills, said wistfully.
To get to Baba Manya's, visitors pass a sprawling graveyard of skeletal
farm machinery and wend through the fields, taking the fainter track when
the
road forks.
Her house seems devoid of any right angle. The kitchen smells of earth,
as if the ground is impatient to swallow up the place.
Faded candy wrappers serve as the wallpaper on one side. On another
wall
are two old tin clocks, one rusted into silence, the other ticking on
importantly. Two turkey chicks fuss in a box near the window.
People keep pressuring Baba Manya to leave, but she shrugs them off.
"A man came and offered me a place in a nursing home. I said, 'Are you
crazy? As long as I can walk I'll be here.' "
She rises each day and milks her goat. She usually brings water from
the
well, feeds her turkeys, tends her bees, and in summer, she collects the
wild
herbal grasses that she makes into tea. She scythes grass for her goats.
When
she loses a button on her blue cardigan, she finds a safety pin to do the
job.
Relatives and visitors come twice or more a week, to help tend the
vegetables, cut grass and carry water.
Village of Her Birth No Longer Exists
Baba Manya's voice is bright and plucky, but her words are about loss.
The village where she was born, Likhorevshina, no longer exists. How far
away
it was she cannot tell.
"I don't know about kilometers. I just know you walk by the pond and
it's there."
Her mother had eight children, but they scattered to the ends of
Russia.
Two of Baba Manya's grown children live in nearby villages or towns, and one
lives in Moscow. A fourth died.
"Everyone is just gone," she said. "They just gradually left."
Her husband was a tractor driver at the collective farm. He died 42
years ago.
Baba Manya's father, a God-fearing man who read the Bible every day,
was
jailed for three years in Soviet times because he cursed under his breath
when Communists destroyed the local church.
She remembers the famine after World War II, when local people cooked
grass to eat and her family was saved from starvation by a Moscow uncle.
She remembers collectivization, when Danil Ivanovich, the shopkeeper
from the next village, was jailed and the shop was turned into a
cooperative.
Her family had no property to collectivize but gave their milk and eggs to
the state.
"We just accepted our lot," she said. "We used to pay huge taxes, and
we
always paid on time."
Standing by the well, Baba Manya gestures at the tall summer grass
swaying all around.
"Look, so much grass! It is all being wasted! No one is cutting it.
Everything is drying out, and the trees are dying.
"There are no spare parts for the combine harvesters. There's nothing
left. When will there be such things again? When we're dead, probably," she
scolded.
New Settlers Didn't Stay Long
There have been some efforts to try to save the dying villages. In the
1980s, after an article in an agricultural magazine about Baba Manya and
Tyutchevo--even then she was the only resident--a few enthusiasts moved to
settle here. But none lasted much more than a week.
"Maybe they were afraid of the isolation," said Syomin, the local
administration chief.
Maria Lyovina's 60-year-old son, Victor, blames the fate of Tyutchevo
on
the policy changes in the Boris N. Yeltsin era, which led to a salary
crisis.
Under Yeltsin, collective-farm workers got symbolic shares of their farms,
but the relationship between managers and workers didn't change. Demand
collapsed, and there was no incentive because there was no pay.
"We didn't think there would be all these senseless reforms and the
village would disappear. Everyone started to leave for the cities because
there was no salary," Victor Lyovin said.
When he thinks about the future of Vednoye, Syomin feels a clenching
fear. If the struggling cooperative farms in the region collapse, then, he
believes, the villages themselves will convulse and die and no one in Russia
will even notice.
Vednoye's collective farm used to run 20,000 sheep and 10,000 tons of
grain a year in Soviet times. No sheep are left, and grain production is a
third of what it was then. One bad harvest could break it, Syomin fears.
Higher electricity prices could kill it in two or three years.
"If the cooperatives collapse, the whole infrastructure will collapse.
The machinery will fall into ruin, and everything will be left abandoned.
The
people will be left to help themselves," Syomin said. "We're totally
dependent on the cooperative."
Valery Patsiorkovsky, a professor at the Institute of Socioeconomic and
Population Issues in Moscow, predicts major upheavals that will lead to a
sharp contraction in the rural population, a change that he sees as
necessary
and inevitable for the sake of agricultural efficiency.
"Young people watch TV and have access to computers, so they know
there's another life outside the village. They also know they'd have to work
very hard if they stayed in the village," he said. "We are in the
Information
Age, and the young people know it. I think in the Information Age we don't
need millions of people in rural areas."
There has been no census since 1989, but according to a 1997
demographic
report by the State Committee of Statistics, about 27% of Russia's 147
million population live in rural areas compared with 73% in 1939. Seventeen
percent of Russia's population work in agriculture compared with 4% in the
U.S.
Patsiorkovsky argues that villages will inevitably suck up all the
resources of collective farms, until the farms collapse. Eventually a new
farming system will emerge, with each farm under a single owner and a dozen
workers instead of 200 to 250 employees.
In a study from 1993 to 1997, Patsiorkovsky examined the differences
between villagers in Russia and farm families in Missouri.
The striking difference, posted in bar charts on his wall, was their
outlook. In the Russian villages, 65% suffered feelings of deep fear or
depression, compared with 26% in Missouri. The most optimistic in Russia
felt
sadder and more pessimistic than the most depressed people in Missouri.
In Missouri, the level of stress and depression was fairly constant
through all age groups, except for higher levels among people in their 40s.
In Russia, the numbers of village people who felt depressed or afraid grew
steadily the older they got.
Ask Baba Manya about her happy memories, and she pauses, considers and
shrugs. Ask her about her regrets, and she says that she lost some bees
recently and that her body aches nowadays.
In her youth, she loved to dance, but her husband was "serious and
strict."
To a patient listener, she releases the ancient secrets of her heart.
It
is not a happy story--her mother forced her to marry a tractor driver, whom
she never loved, because his family was well-off.
Her one true love, remembered to this day, was a boy called Misha whose
family was poor. "He was handsome, he was interesting. We were deeply in
love," she said. "But we had to face facts."
In the early 1960s, after her husband's death, Lyovina chose a spot
above the pond to set her house and hired men to build it, imagining that
her
family would always be here.
"I'm just thinking whom I built all this for," she said, standing
outside the crumbling front wall of her house. "I built it for no one."
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