Only Misery Flourishes on Land of Russia’s ‘New Serfs’

The only crop in the fields is abandoned tractors rusting in the snow. The workers have not yet been paid the pittance they earned in November. Whole villages have emptied, rotted away or burned.

Whichever way he turns, “Uncle Kolya” Suslov can see only five or six sagging log homesteads, huddled between birch trees, where local people from his former collective farm are still struggling to force a living from the soil.

“Almost everything that we used to have on the farm has been wiped from the face of the Earth,” Suslov says. “And what can we do? Nothing.”

The misery of the vast Volga farm, about 100 miles north of Moscow, is the bitter fruit of post-Soviet agricultural reform begun five years ago by President Boris N. Yeltsin.

To his bewilderment, Suslov finds himself caught up in a giant social experiment. More than half a century after he grew up amid the cruelties of Soviet farm collectivization and the hunger and suffering of World War II, the weathered 68-year-old is now living through “forced decollectivization.”

Agricultural reform’s most visible result has been to create a new underclass of rural poor, tied to the land because they have no money to leave, with little more hope of freedom or well-being than their serf ancestors had more than a century ago.

“Now we have private property and democracy, but they haven’t brought us anything except pain and poverty,” farm director Nikolai D. Zhadkin says.

In one way, the “new serfs” of post-Soviet Russia are even worse off than their forebears, slaves who were tied to their masters’ lands by feudal laws that, until 1861, deprived them of citizenship.

Under the czars, the countryside teemed with villagers, to the point where overcrowding was considered a problem. When the serfs suffered, they suffered in the company of families and friends.

But the survivors of this century’s experimentation are watching the slow death of their agricultural system in increasing isolation. Anyone with the wit, the courage or the cash to escape fled to town long ago.

“There’s no one left to do the work. Everyone’s scattered. All the old folk have died, and city people have bought up half their homes as holiday cottages, and the rest of the houses have burned down. Even my children and grandchildren have all run off,” Suslov says.

There has been no official census since Soviet days, but a U.N. report published in 1994, titled “World Urbanization Prospects,” showed the Russian Federation’s rural population dropping 1.5 million between 1985 and 1990, then shrinking an additional 3.5 million--from 38.5 million to 35 million--between the 1991 Soviet collapse and the report’s projected figure for 1995.

The original idea behind the 1992 farm reform by Yeltsin’s government was to kill off the pernicious Soviet state farming bureaucracy, which was strangling free enterprise in the countryside. Peasants would be given the chance to buy land and become private farmers.

Those who stayed on the giant collective and state farms of old times would see them transformed into modern free-market enterprises in which they would all have a share but that would henceforth be known as joint-stock companies.

But the reform was so badly thought out that it never brought the hoped-for flowering of new rural initiatives.

Loans were hard to come by, farm equipment and fertilizer even more so. Because the law still made it impossible for private farmers to sell any land they took on if they ran into financial trouble, hardly anyone wanted to take the risk of buying--about 95% of farmland in Russia is not in private hands.

Land privatization, a fashionable topic in the early post-Soviet years, has been eclipsed by more pressing problems. Yeltsin did not even mention it in his annual state of the nation address March 6.

Harvests shrink and shrink. Russia’s 1996 grain harvest was 76 million tons, just a touch above 1995’s 69 million--the worst harvest in three decades. In 1994, Russia produced 89 million tons, while back in the Soviet days of 1990, its output was 128 million. Imports of wheat, rye and flour grow every year, and the Russian Academy of Agricultural Sciences issued a report Sunday noting that agricultural operations nationwide posted losses last year of almost $3 billion.

The renamed state farms are in dire straits.

They no longer receive fat Soviet-style state subsidies, equipment or salaries. Thrown back on their own resources, they now pay their workers out of the money they earn from selling their produce to factories.

But the factories are caught in a vicious nationwide cycle of debt, and few of them have the cash to pay farms for their grain, meat and milk.

The Volga farm got its last tractor six years ago. It has been unable to afford new equipment since.

Now its two main clients--milk-products factories in nearby Kimry--are feeling the pinch of Russia’s debt crisis. One factory owes the farm $50,000 for milk supplied this year. The other simply swaps the farm’s milk for factory cheese.

Zhadkin says the farm survives only because of the vacationers from Moscow who have bought up many of the picturesque old log houses as summer cottages, employing residents to do repairs or build saunas: “In the summer, the outsiders swell our local economy by at least a third. There are more of them here in the summer than there are residents.”

In winter, the hardships really hit home. There are 70 local children, but the schoolhouse burned down last year and classes are improvised in people’s apartments. Two of the teachers have taken extended leave, so the only subjects taught are math and Russian grammar.

Shops have closed in most of the 26 villages that once made up the farm, and there is no public transport, so anyone who wants manufactured goods has to catch the traders’ van that comes around only on Mondays. Waste from the electricity plant upstream has emptied the sparkling river of fish.

Although one village store boasts a brave display of cookies and shampoos, Rimma, the rosy-cheeked shopkeeper, admits sadly that the locals can afford to buy only the basics: sugar, flour and vodka.

Of the Volga farm’s 500 regular inhabitants, 350 are pensioners, with only their memories of a better past to sustain them.

“Even during the war, things were better. We didn’t have any machines then, and we were poor, and we worked like dogs, but we’d have a sing-song and a bottle or two--or three--of vodka as we worked. And there were plenty of people to work with,” Suslov says.

He lives with his wife in a little roadside log house. Downstairs is a cow barn. Upstairs, the kitchen and living room are heated by a huge ceramic stove that Suslov’s Uncle Kostya built at the turn of the century and slept on for warmth in traditional Russian peasant style. A corner of the room is devoted to icons and candles, and strings of onions are festooned everywhere else.

“This land is nothing special. It’s all bogs and frogs,” he says.

That’s why the advancing Nazi armies never made it to Syrkino during World War II, he adds with a nostalgic cackle: They couldn’t find their way through the bogs.

“We get by because there are a lot of mushroom places and berries,” he says. “But the land’s flat, and we get biting winds, and suddenly the snow starts flying and the temperature goes down to zero, and your cucumbers shrivel to nothing.”

When their $20-a-month pensions stopped coming last year--another symptom of Russia’s debt crisis--Suslov and his wife bought a cow, a piglet and some chickens. Together with the vegetables they have always grown, the animals provide enough food for them to survive.

“The only thing we buy now is bread. We fend for ourselves,” Suslov says gently. “What else can we do about not getting our pensions? Scream?”

While poverty and passivity chain the elderly to their villages, what keeps the few younger people here is Russia’s other curse--vodka.

Two toothless drunks sit on a bench, grinning vacantly over their bottle, oblivious to the frost. Farther down the icy road, a redheaded man in his 40s limps by, waving his walking stick at a rare passing car.

“That guy had some family tragedy. I don’t remember what,” Suslov says cagily. But Vitya Vasin, a Muscovite who has taken over one of the peasant huts, fills in the gruesome details of a life ruined by drink and disease.

“He got drunk when he was 18 and slashed someone with a knife. He was locked away for four years. When he came back from jail, he got drunk again and shot two of his neighbors, so they locked him up again. When he came back the third time, he killed his father,” Vasin whispers.

“Now he doesn’t drink at all, thank God. But he has advanced tuberculosis, and three children, and he’s not much good at working. How could he hold down a real job anywhere else?” Vasin asks, with a touch of every city Russian’s amused indulgence for what urbanites view as their alcohol-sodden, backward country cousins.

The peasants’ other traditional refuge from a reality too harsh to bear--prayer--is not an option many locals choose.

Although Father Ioann Stelmashuk and his wife, Galya, have restored part of the tumbledown church, only the Moscow vacationers bother to worship in it.

Suslov is too old to walk there and too deaf to hear the services, he says; besides, what’s the point?

“The only thing people care about nowadays is profit, profit, profit,” he adds wearily. “We used to keep rams here, but they say that’s not profitable now. They don’t sow crops anymore, because that’s not profitable either. Nothing seems to be profitable. Even living’s not profitable anymore, and there’s nothing left for us to do but lie down and die.”