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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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