Paul
Goble
Staunton, July 6 – An article of
faith among many commentators on Russia since the Crimean Anschluss is that the
patriotic wave the Kremlin has promoted has swept across the entire country and
is likely to be even stronger in traditional areas than in Moscow and other
major urban centers.
That view in some cases is
reinforced by polling data about urban and rural attitudes, but as so often happens,
grouping the data this way has the effect of suggesting that there is greater
commonality among the latter, which typically includes both mid-sized and small
cities as well as the truly rural villages.
A correction to that perception
about rural Russia as a whole is offered by Denis Blishch, a Belarusian
journalist who visited smaller towns and villages in the Veliky Luky area. He
writes that there is local patriotism, focused on the family and village, but
little beyond that (belaruspartisan.org/opinions/269798/).
For the residents of the dying
villages of northwestern Russia, “somewhere out there are Moscow, nuclear
rockets, and ‘Crimea is Ours;’ but the zone of comfort … is restricted” to no
more than “one’s own home and car.” Otherwise,
“everything is bad with respect to patriotism.” Village Russians simply don’t
think more broadly than that, Blishch suggests.
The Belarusian journalist says that
he takes away from his recent visit to this region five main conclusions. The first is the sense that Russia as a
country faces “an end in the foreseeable future.” Things may be fine in Moscow, large cities
and even oblast centers. But there is a yawning
“gap” between Russians in those places and Russians in the villages.
In the latter, the situation can
only be described as “a hell,” he says.
In another two or three generations,
Blishch continues, “provincial Russia simply won’t exist.” The atlas he used
was about 20 years old, and it showed villages that no longer exist. Where people had lived, houses and barns have
decayed into ruins, and the last time anyone had worked on “90 percent” of the
roads was in Brezhnev’s time.
Throughout the rural areas he
travelled in, there has been “the complete destruction of transport links and
as a result of economic and social ties” as well. That leads to his second conclusion: the
people in the villages are not working anything. They are simply trying to
survive.
His third sense or conclusion is
that villagers have accepted this situation as “normal,” as something to which
there is no alternative. “If someone
tells them “’what poor roads you have,’ the reaction is approximately on the
lines ‘on the other hand, no outsider will be coming.’”
What makes this so striking and so
sad, Blishch says, is that in Belarusian villages, the situation is entirely
different. Belarusians keep their
villages neat and clean, and they hope for a better future for their children
as part of Europe. They are not simply
waiting to die as their Russian counterparts appear to be doing.
Blishch says that he finds it hard
to explain why this should be the case.
And he asks without giving an answer whether the explanation somehow
involved “Asiatic genes.”
His fourth conclusion is that there
has been “a general collapse of the local economy.” Russian stores when they
offer anything offer Belarusian goods, and what is most shocking of all is that
even in these rural areas, one often cannot find milk and meat, neither of
which are absent from the shelves of stores in Belarusian villages.
And his fifth sense, the Belarusian
journalist says, is that Russia is dying as a result of this acceptance of
things as they are as the new “normal,” a reflection of an increasing disposition
among them to “deny reality.”
“Is there life” in Russia beyond
Moscow’s ring road? He asks. The answer is certainly “no.” Russia is “condemned” because it has proved “incapable”
of integrating its “gigantic spaces” but is equally incapable of acknowledging
that reality. Blishch says he hopes he
is wrong but fears that he isn’t.
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