Paul Goble
Staunton, Oct. 12 -- Villages across the Russian Federation have long been dying out, but this process has varied widely since 1950 and by ethnic group, with the largest declines in some non-Russian republics taking place a half century ago when industrialization began and among ethnic Russian villages in non-Russian areas declining now more than non-Russian ones.
Official statistics are scanty and often full of errors, specialists say; and even those academic specialists who have looked into the matter in one region or republic have miscounted the number of villages that used to exist but now have disappeared, according to some enthusiasts who are at least trying to record in pictures the passing of this way of life.
One of their number is Ranis Shaydullin, a Tatar who has been visiting those that he has heard about one way or another for several decades and who has published online some of the pictures he has taken (milliard.tatar/news/zabrosennyi-tatarstan-cto-proisxodit-s-derevnyami-v-respublike-6318).
He says that his investigation has shown that the number of Tatarstan villages actually increased in the years after the Bolshevik revolution when Moscow divided up large farms but fell back to about 4300 in the 1930s after collectivization, and fell again with industrialization to 3500 at the end of Soviet times. In recent years, the dying out of villages has accelerated.
The main reason villages die out is that there are no jobs and people leave and/or that there are inadequate roads connecting the individual villages to where the jobs are. What that means, Shaydullin says, is that if infrastructure does improve, it is entirely possible that some dying villages may recover and even that some that have died out will do the same.
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