A Russian Tragedy

In the morning I visit Tolstoy’s estate. The main house is relatively modest compared to the country homes of the New Russians. One of the few homes not destroyed during the Bolshevik Revolution or its awful aftermath, it is full of books. “Tolstoy was a horoshi muzhik, normalni, a regular guy, salt of the earth,” the Armenian told me last night. In his declining years, in the first decade of the twentieth century, Tolstoy dressed like a peasant, with a scraggly beard and a linen roubashka. He lamented the rural exodus that began as Russia industrialized, observing that “millions of people — men, women, and children — working ten, twelve, or fifteen hours a day, are being transformed into machines and perishing in factories that manufacture unnecessary and harmful gadgets, while more and more of the villages become deserted.” The dying of Russia’s villages is nothing new. But this latest die-off could be terminal.

The current rural exodus was already under way when I revisited my paternal grandmother’s estate in Ukraine in 1995. Photographs from the 1890s show that there was a village of several hundred thatched khati, small white-washed stucco cottages below the old Tartar ramparts where the big, columned house (blown to smithereens in the civil war) stood. When I first visited in 1982, Shideyevo, as the estate was called, had become the Maxim Gorky Collective Farm, and there were only a few dozen khati in the village. The collective farm collapsed with Communism and the Soviet empire in 1991, and four years later there were only a few old people left. Today, most of the villages in Poltava, the oblast in Ukraine where Shideyevo was, lie empty. Even Dikanka, the village made famous by Nikolai Gogol in Evenings on a Farm near Dikanka, is deserted.

I catch a marshrutka to Shchekino and negotiate with the taxi men at the bus stop for a round trip to Lipki, striking a deal with a man in a yellow skull-cap named Victor Orlov. “Orlov — that’s a famous name,” I say as we head out of town. “Wasn’t one of Catherine the Great’s lovers an Orlov?”

“My people were counts long ago,” Victor tells me. “But I only know three generations. My father worked in the shakti [the mines], and so did his father. My great-grandfather worked for a church on the Tolstoy estate.”

The stretch between Shchekino and Lipki is a particularly grim rural dead zone. We pass a pile of rubble that Victor says was a railroad station. “Perestroika destroyed everything,” he complains. “Where is this democracy? It stops at the outer ring of Moscow.”

We continue through the little village of Socialisticheski, whose Communist-era Palace of Culture is in ruins. It wasn’t destroyed like the country homes of the nobles, it just wasn’t kept up. Most of the houses along the road are abandoned or falling down. They are built mainly of brick and are architecturally and aesthetically uninteresting, unlike the centuries-old izbi (long log houses) in the villages I passed through last summer in the oblast of Ryazan, 240 kilometres to the east. Those villages, too, were down to a few old babushkas.

The landscape on either side of the road is flat and open and blighted with discoloured khaki slag heaps. Down in a lovely valley is a huge, abandoned coal plant, a fantastic maze of rusting pipes, conveyor belts, and smokestacks. Another monumental feat of mechanical engineering is decomposing on a hilltop. There are monstrous, toxic industrial ruins and abandoned townlets, where the workers lived, all over the former ussr. Armenia is full of them, as is the sliver of the Black Sea coast that still belongs to Russia.

We drive through several acres of garbage — bottles, old tires, all manner of refuse. “Welcome to Lipki,” Victor says. “There is a dump, but the people are too lazy to take their trash to it. They just throw it anyhow on the edge of town, because there is no order.”

Lipki is a grid of mouldering stuccoed brick barracks built in the fifties to house coal miners and their families. The streets are lined with lindens, mitigating its grimness, but only slightly. We stop at the town hall to talk to the mayor. Several sunken-eyed men in filthy parkas, looking like homeless winos, are standing around on one side of the building. The mayor, a large, gracious woman named Gaena Patileeva, tells us that Lipki once had a population of 20,000. Now there are 9,000. “The air here still has a radioactivity from Chernobyl [560 kilometres to the south]. Life was good in Lipki until the mines closed. There was work, a technical college, people were happy. We need investment, we need a factory here. Then there will be housing for young people, and children will come.”

In front of the town hall a young mother wheels a pram containing her second child. Her husband owns a store in town. I ask her why she has children when so many of her peers don’t. “Anybody who wants to can,” she says. “They just don’t want to. Many young women want to be free.” So it is not just that they don’t want to bring children into a world that is so horrible. Russia’s at a stage when most of the young women who can are opting for a career or are emigrating. Raising families is the furthest thing from their minds. And what happens to a society that loses its upwardly mobile women and its mothers? Does it revert to the barbarism that Russians know so well?