“Eight miles west of the M10 lies the village of Pochinok, one of hundreds of disappearing settlements. The wilderness is closing in around Nina and Vladimir Kolesnikova and their children.”
In 2013, the New York Times published a memorable article about a 430-mile trip from the port city of St. Petersberg to Moscow on Russia’s M10 road. The article,
The Russia Left Behind: A journey through a heartland on the slow road to ruin, describes the amazing decay of the Russian countryside and the decline of a Russian rural way of life.
The NYT wrote: “As the state’s hand recedes from the hinterlands, people are struggling with choices that belong to past centuries: to heat their homes with a wood stove, which must be fed by hand every three hours, or burn diesel fuel, which costs half a month’s salary? When the road has so deteriorated that ambulances cannot reach their home, is it safe to stay? When their home can’t be sold, can they leave?
‘The people on the top do not know what is happening down here,’ he [a Russian resident along the way] said. ‘They have their own world. They eat differently, they sleep on different sheets, they drive different cars. They don’t know what is going on here. If I needed one word to describe it, I would say it is a swamp, a stagnant swamp. As it was, so it is. Nothing is changing.’”
Along the way, the NYT reporter stopped along the road to see what a ‘furor’ in a village was about. It was a wedding between a 14-year old bride and the 13-year old groom: “Her eyes and skin had the same honey-gold cast, and she was a head taller than most of the men in the village. At some point in the last year it had become clear that she was on the verge of becoming an unusual, startling beauty, and this, a guest whispered, was the reason her family had sped up the wedding. So that, as he put it, ‘she would not start messing around.’ She looked like a neighborhood teenager hired to baby-sit the groom, Ryoma, who was 13. . . . . The tiny groom sat in a chair in the corner, playing video games on his phone.
The past was tugging on all of them. Before the Soviet Union collapsed, the Education Ministry insisted that all children attend school, but not now. Forty percent of the children here do not study at all, said Stephania Kulayeva of St. Petersburg’s Memorial Anti-Discrimination Center. The vacuum has allowed the tradition of child marriage to come roaring back.”
Toward the end of the wedding festivities, one guest commented to another, “We have no gas, we have no water,” she said. “We have nothing.”
Regarding the M10 road, the NYT wrote: “The M10 highway looks normal enough at the southern limits of St. Petersburg, but then, with a jolt, it begins to atrophy. For the next 430 miles the surface of the highway, while paved, varies from corduroy to jaw-rattling patchwork. Sometimes it has four lanes, sometimes two, with few medians and frequently no lane markings at all.
After a snowstorm in November, about 10,000 vehicles got stuck in a traffic jam that extended more than 70 miles, trapping some drivers for three days in subzero temperatures. Valery Voitko, who heads a trade union of long-haul truck drivers, described his drivers that week as ‘not even angry any more, but in a state of dumb despair, that year in and year out the same thing happens.’
Between the great cities are hundreds of disappearing settlements: towns becoming villages, villages becoming forest. The Soviets cut off support for them during efficiency drives in the 1960s and ’70s, which categorized villages as “promising” or “unpromising.”
But the death of a village is a slow process. A geographer, Tatiana Nefyodova, calls them “black holes,” and estimates that they make up 70 to 80 percent of Russia’s northwest, where Moscow and St. Petersburg act as giant vacuum cleaners, sucking people and capital from the rest of the country.
If once animals living in this forest learned to avoid humans, something now tells them not to be afraid. The other day, Ms. Kolesnikova, 42, emerged from her house and found that her dog’s throat had been torn out. She could make out the tracks of three large wolves across the kitchen garden. ‘They have come to where the people are,’ she said. ‘They are not afraid of the dogs. Why should they be afraid of us?’”
A new road, the M11, is scheduled to open in 2018 mostly along the same route as the existing M10 road, so the situation may improve for people along its path once the new road is open. The M11 has been under construction since 2008. A question is what are conditions like for less important roads? St. Petersburg handles most of the shipping traffic of the two main sea ports in eastern Russia. Roads to less commercially important towns, and economic conditions along them, are likely to be similar to the M10.
There are some parallels between what is happening in Russia and the US, but the degree of collapse appears to be more pronounced. Russia seems to be undergoing a rural population shift to urban areas with more economic activity. Rural-urban tensions are a significant factor in the rise of US populism. whether that will translate into civil unrest in Russia is unknowable. Russian law is generally intolerant toward freedom of speech compared to the US.
Given Russia’s politically restrictive legal situation, rural discontent in Russia may not translate into significant political change. In that case, the observations the NYT wrote about in 2013 may still be ongoing, with small town and villages giving way to slowly encroaching forests and nature.
B&B orig: 8/20/18
