Cheers Ken Hanly
Financial Times (UK) 8 September 2001 Peasants meet the modern world by John Thornhill
Mikhail Golub dips his finger into a glass of home-distilled vodka and sets fire to its vapour with a lighter. As the blue flames swirl around his plump digit, Golub looks up and grins. "Not bad," he says, flashing his gold teeth at his guests.
As the cheery pensioner explains, the true test of samogon is how well it burns. On that measure, Golub's distillation is clearly a winner, a true finger-burner among moonshines, guaranteed to addle the brains and sear the insides of anyone rash enough to drink it.
But Golub's vodka says as much about his powers of survival as it does about his thirst for intoxication.
Almost every dish that Golub and his wife lay out on the table in their cosy kitchen contains products cultivated by their own hands. The Golubs' garden, like many others in the Privolnaya village in the Kuban district of southern Russia, is a veritable farmyard in miniature, with vines, hens, pigs and nutria (small beavers, much prized for their fur).
Most of the blue and green wooden cottages in the village boast cherry trees in their front gardens or small net pens containing geese, ducks and even the odd turkey - the whole resembling a strange pastiche of a 19th century rural idyll.
But speaking in the strong Kuban dialect that replaces the Russian guttural "g" with a husky "h", Golub complains that the forces of capitalism are destroying the collective spirit of the Cossack village, or stanitsa, which was founded 120 years ago and is still home to 7,000 peasants.
Even the more prosperous farm workers are struggling to survive on an official wage of less than $1 a day.
Golub fears that modernisation has brought about the spiritual - as well as the material - impoverishment of the village and speaks fondly of communist times (which seems astonishing in a region that suffered so terribly during Stalin's farm collectivisation drive and subsequent famine in the late 1920s).
He claims the arrival of the television era means he now knows more about events in Moscow - or the UK - than in the rest of the stanitsa. And he says Russian channels have stopped showing positive news about the opening of new factories, record harvests, and the achievements of the Soviet space programme and instead dwell obsessively on the criminality and bloodshed that has accompanied Russia's collapse.
"In the 1950s people were very poor but they used to sing as they milked the cows. But now people have forgotten how to sing," he says. "No one even celebrates birthdays any more. We only celebrate funerals."
Privolnaya's strong Cossack heritage and its fecund "Black Earth" soil may make the village distinctive. But the story its peas ants tell is common to thousands of villages across Russia that are slowly slipping back into a cashless and semi-feudal subsistence.
Alexander Nikulin, an earnest, young sociologist who has studied village life for several years, says a battle is now raging between the positive and negative tendencies in the Russian countryside.
On the plus side, the Kuban has a high level of education, a more sober and energetic workforce than in many other parts of Russia, and some appeal for investors.
But he fears the village's potential is being blighted by the declining population, oppressive local bureaucracy, and growing social differentiation which is leading to "the formation of a closed economic world" for the wealthy.
"Marx said that the anatomy of man is the key to understanding the anatomy of mankind. In the same way I think that the social structure of a Kuban village is the key to understanding the rural society of Russia," he says.
But Golub's tale of disillusion and decay contrasts with the upbeat mood in the refurbished offices of the local farm, where Anatoly Kochegura rules the roost. The big-bellied, gimlet-eyed director, who has run the farm for almost 30 years, talks enthusiastically about how he can increase the productivity of his workforce by introducing modern management and foreign technology. The Privolnaya enterprise ranks 25th out of Kuban's 700 farms in terms of productivity.
Having travelled extensively abroad, Kochegura is familiar with the latest farming techniques and is keen to apply them at home. In particular, he admires the accomplishments of eastern German farmers "who went to sleep as socialists and woke up as capitalists".
The former Communist party boss appears to have undergone a similar transformation during his slumbers. Like some Soviet-style apparatchik, Kochegura deals brusquely with the petitioners who stream into his office but he talks excitedly about the possibilities created by the free market.
"I am like Yeltsin," he says, comparing himself with Russia's first president. "I cannot live peacefully. I need to have constant fights."
Kochegura is typical of thousands of members of the old Communist nomenklatura who have parlayed political influence into economic wealth and mouth the rhetoric of the market rather than Marx.
"There are drivers who are shareholders in the farm who do not think about the effectiveness of work. They simply want to keep their jobs," he snorts. "But everything should now be done according to economics."
Kochegura has already reduced the number of farm workers from 2,000 to 820 as he has changed working practices and bought several Massey Ferguson combine harvesters. But he wants to cut the workforce still further in line with increases in productivity. "In my lifetime I think we can catch up with the Europeans," he says.
"We should not listen to those who say we should go back to the past or overturn what Yeltsin has done. But we should be talking about changing the course of reform," he says, dutifully echoing President Vladimir Putin's rhetoric. "We need to correct Yeltsin's mistakes and have an effective system of power. We need to have proper laws and fair rules of the game."
The real pride of Kochegura's empire is a joint venture private farm, called Lojim, which he founded in 1995 with an American farmer who was visiting the Kuban. The farm is intended to be a pilot project, showing what it is possible to achieve in Russian conditions.
Blessed with the best land, resources and workers, Lojim is flourishing and is supplying meat to the McDonald's fast food chain. Kochegura says he will soon install a computerised milking system, which will enable cows to be fed individually according to their specific needs and thereby increasing lactation.
But the venture is facing an unexpected obstacle: a shortage of willing labour. In spite of paying each of its 19 workers Rbs4,000 a month - or almost five times the wage on the main farm - the Lojim enterprise does not have a crowd of eager workers queueing to join. Many potential workers are deterred by having to work too many hours, leaving them too little time to look after their own private money-making schemes, whether it is raising chickens, distilling vodka, or poaching fish in the rich inlets which lead into the Azov Sea.
Nikulin, the sociologist, says the village's flourishing informal economy provides a lifeline for most families. "Official incomes are only 20 per cent of many families' total income," he says, basing his estimate on his analyses of several families' budgets.
"Villagers say that in Soviet times there was strong order and it was difficult to have a large informal economy. But now it is only local society that controls the informal economy without any state control or state repression. The village can survive without the state."
Some signs of a new prosperity are popping up in the village. Several two-storey, red-brick houses are sprouting up between the gaily painted peasant cottages. A few foreign cars are also to be seen speeding along Privolnaya's asphalt roads, increasing the risks of accidents at the village's crossroads, where there are no traffic signs.
But these few hints of private affluence contrast with the public squalor of those institutions still dependent on the state.
At the local school, the headmistress, Lyubov Suprunenko, is in near despair at the lack of funding. She says the younger teachers in her school are earning just Rbs375 a month, hardly enough to buy a pair of shoes.
The federal government pays the salaries and electricity bills but almost nothing else, leaving the school to raise funds by whatever means it can to buy new books, repair classrooms, and find new furniture. Even during school holidays, Suprunenko was supervising a team of staff and schoolchildren repainting the front of the school vermilion red - in striking contrast with her ginger hair and scarlet lipstick.
"When our schools are in such a catastrophic state then everything depends on the initiative of the individuals," she says, extolling the dedication of her staff. "But sometimes I do not understand how we live."
For as long as she can remember the school has had four new classes at the start of every school year containing about 26 children apiece. But she says the falling birth rate in the village means there are only likely to be three classes this year and she can foresee the day when this will fall to two.
"As soon as the number of children falls then the schools decline and society degenerates. Until our government changes its policies I do not know what will happen to our country."
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