IN THE fields around the Troitse-Sergieva monastery outside Moscow local peasants may be seen harvesting crops of wheat and potatoes in a scene reminiscent of a bygone age.
Collective farming is making a comeback in Russia as tens of thousands of subsistence farmers are turning to the Orthodox Church to merge their land in exchange for farm produce handed out by the monks.
“It is more profitable for me to work with the monastery than to try to live off my small allotment,” said Sergei, one worker who has merged the piece of land he was given by the State with the monastery farm when the local collective farm was dissolved ten years ago.
This week the Church looked set to become the biggest landowner in Russia after the country’s parliament proposed to restore to it the three million hectares of land seized by the Bolsheviks.
“We pay the workers — and there are tens of thousands of them — in sacks of grain and potatoes,” said Archimandrite Georgi, a senior church accountant at the monastery, who added that his monastery was supporting local communities as it did in Tsarist times.
Thanks to church land reinstated by the State, the monastery has expanded to about 7,000 hectares over the past 15 years.
The monastery farm grows wheat and raises cattle. A bakery produces monastery bread and beehives, honey. Archimandrite Georgy said that the monastery feeds up to 3,000 people a day, and farming provides work for tens of thousands of people a year.
The workforce is almost entirely made up of local peasants and the monastery’s 300 monks oversee the running of the farm.
This newly remodelled collective farming system under the supervision of monasteries is reminiscent of monastery farms in Tsarist times, on which the Bolsheviks later partly based the Kolkhoz model of Soviet collective farming.
The parliament’s proposal outlined a plan in which the Church would expand its farming activities and, in return, would restore stability to the agricultural sector, in disarray since the collapse of communism.
“The agrarian sector needs an effective owner like the Russian Orthodox Church,” a parliamentary spokesman said.
Last week, Patriarch Alexei II, head of the Russian Orthodox Church, met Ivan Starikov, head of the parliamentary committee for agrarian policy.
The proposal came after the recent signing of a new Land Code, that allows the purchase and sale of farmland for the first time since 1917.
The Russian Orthodox Church, however, feared that its interests were not represented in the new code and that unless the proposal that it supports goes through, it may forfeit the 15,000 properties it has regained from the State.