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Homestead.org in the Former Soviet Union continued, page 8

I suppose, as I said earlier, that the villages must be a little like those in America in the 1800’s, before the automobile, but there was something almost eerie about the weedy, unused appearance of the only access road.  The houses were obviously occupied because you could see long, well-tended rows of potatoes and other vegetables on each plot, which I’d guess were about two acres or a hectare each, as well as hay stacks, compost piles and all manner of flowers, fruit trees and small livestock.  There was also the very occasional scrap of plastic or paper on the ground, but precious little of anything that hadn’t grown there.

As we made our way through the village, we approached a group of people.  It appeared to me that we were going to have another silent passing as with the bee-guard, so we, or I, continued the conversation that had been going on up to now.  As we passed, I heard one of the men say something and Olia responded to him. 

When we were out of earshot, I asked her what he’d said.

He’d heard me speaking English and asked her, “Where do these people come from?”

 To answer, she’d reinvented a game she developed back home in Missouri. 

After getting a little weary of being asked “where’d you come from” when store clerks or such folk hear her Russian accent she says, “Willow Springs”.

So to answer his question, she said - in Russian, of course - “from the dachas”. 

She said he seemed a little dumb-founded and asked, “Rusky, da?” (Russian, yes?) but by then we were past and she just smiled.

I wish I'd been able to visit one of the homes in the village, perhaps that will happen on our next trip.

I'm still very curious about what life is like there, and when you start to ask questions, you begin to see more differences between East and West than are apparent just visiting the cities of Eastern Europe. 

First, I wondered why there are so few people living in rural settings.  I assumed that it was because the government owned all the land and wished to control the population in other directions, but the answer is more complicated than that, and to gain a full appreciation, it helps to know a little Russian history and geography.

The former Soviet Union is a truly enormous place spanning ten time zones from Poland to the Pacific Ocean.   It encompasses one sixth the world's land-mass and yet the population is less than 200 million people, so land is far from being a rarity. 

So, on the face of it, this would seem to be an ideal place for homesteaders using any definition of the word.  If you are a citizen of Belarus and you want some land to farm you can make application for it and have some expectation of getting it if the powers that be find no reason to deny you.  You will be given a plot where you may build a home and buildings, make a garden and tend a farm. All you need to do is pay modest  taxes on the land.  During the Soviet era, the government wanted to promote everyone moving from the rural areas into the cities to work, but now they actually encourage migration back to the country.  The problem arises because while the national government may want people on the land for the opportunity to tax them, the local governments are fraught with red tape and corruption, and local bureaucrats have absolutely no incentive to be helpful. 

To the contrary, most citizens learn that their every project can be buried in a blizzard of restrictions and qualifications that can only be bypassed by bribery.

To make matters worse, physical security is virtually non-existent in the rural areas, so people are loath to develop any sort of improvements that would catch the eye of thieves or vandals.

And so my tale draws to an end.   Two days later, Tanya and Tolya were seeing us off as we boarded the train to Minsk where we'd take a Belavia jet to Warsaw for a couple of days in the relative luxury of a western hotel before catching our plane back home.

I hugged Tanya, shook Tolya's hand and asked Olia to tell him that I hoped by the time we returned he'll have learned to speak at least a little English, then I jumped on the train and disappeared before he could lodge his protest.

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