> Hell, practically everybody in Russia grows their own food at least in
> part.
Really? Even in the cities? Or is Russia that rural?
Michael
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Even in the cities. Most urban families in Russia own, in addition to their city apartment, a summer home (dacha) and plot of land in the country at various distances outside of town, built for them by the Soviet government. Dacha gardening is a national pastime. Old people grow food at their dachas, eat it themselves and sell it in open-air markets in the city.
It is dacha season right now in fact, espacially because in June, at least in Moscow, the government starts shutting off people's hot water so they can do maintenance of the pipe system. Why they have to do this I don't know, but they do, and it is very annoying, so of course everybody goes off to their dachas. You really notice the difference -- all the bars that were full a month ago on the weekends are empty.
Nobody was going to starve in 1991-92. Friends of mine got by by harvesting food at their dachas or just gathering food in the forest, where there is a LOT of food in the form of mushrooms, game and fruit trees. A friend of mine was a little girl at the time and says her family lived on mushrooms and potatoes for months. Mushrooms, mushrooms, mushrooms. Tedious but hardly life-threatening, especially if, like she does, you like mushrooms. Hell, in the impoverished rural areas like in Siberia, people hunt or herd reindeer. The natives eat whales. (BTW, there are so many mammoths frozen under ice in northern Siberia that the native languages contain words for "mammoth meat." It is considered a delicacy.)
The guy that wrote the piece below is the same peron whose comments on social mobility in the USSR and Brezhnev-era anti-Semitism I posted a while ago.
Chris Doss The Russia Journal ------------------ This article was published in The Russia Journal ISSUE No.22 (165), DATE: 2002-06-14
---------------------------------------------------------------------------- ---- A satisfying harvest
By ALEXANDER KONDORSKY / The Russia Journal I think it is no exaggeration to say that at least one-third of Russia’s urban residents have something to do with agriculture. City dwellers love to entertain colleagues with lengthy (and often extremely boring) lectures about crop rotation, potatoes, onions, radishes and so on – what they like to grow at their dachas.
This is not at all surprising given that Russia has been an agrarian country for ages and most of its people have peasant roots, though some may not be aware of it. Many Russians are experts on such issues as plant compatibility, the best times and approaches to planting a certain crop, which pesticides, herbicides and fertilizers to use and when to weed and cultivate. This knowledge is indispensable because summers are short in Russia, and variable weather poses many dangers for crops. "The month of June feeds the country," goes the Russian proverb.
Even more than 70 years of Soviet rule could not kill the primordial drive toward the soil imbued in almost every Russian’s heart.
In the late 1970s, aware of the faltering collective-farm system, the Soviet government decided to stimulate private farming. Of course, it was not quite private farming, and it was done on a very small scale. Beginning in the late ’70s, Soviet authorities launched a program to stimulate dacha building and part-time farming. People were offered land patches of 600 sq. meters for free, on the condition that they cultivate the land. The campaign generated active public response and gave rise to tracts in the hinterlands of cities around the country.
During the Soviet era, there was no shortage of guidebooks on farming, as well as newspapers and magazines focusing on this activity. Of course, today the choice of information is much wider.
Some analysts tend to view the amount of crops planted by people at their dachas as a barometer of the populace’s economic and political confidence in the government. This year, for example, people are tending to plant less: For the first time in years, they have some confidence in their future. President Vladimir Putin has restored some degree of stability in the country. It’s fairly reasonable to conclude that veggie cultivation could tell you more about the economy than any state statistics or World Bank forecasts.
Running a part-time farm at one’s dacha may be rather expensive, and sometimes the costs may even exceed the market price of the fruits and vegetables grown. But what can be more delighting, pleasing and rewarding to the Russian heart and soul than having fresh, self-grown food on the table, not to mention the unsurpassed feeling of independence?
Now, age-old Russian dreams of owning land are about to come true, as the State Duma has adopted the law on agricultural land sale in its first reading. There is a chance that the law will go through by the end of this year.