How they live in remote settlements of Russia

2024 Author: Seth Attwood | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-16 15:55

Every day, walk tens of kilometers to work, drive several hours to an Internet access point, or spend fabulous money for local flights. Everything is possible in a country with an area of 17.1 million km², of which more than 50% have not been developed by humans.

The daily life of large cities in Russia, especially in its western part, is not much different from life in Europe or the United States. But once you find yourself in a Siberian village or in the Far East, you are amazed at how many obstacles the locals sometimes have to overcome in everyday life.

Save up for a long time on travels in Russia

The airport of the small polar village of Chersky in the northeast of Yakutia with a population of no more than 2.5 thousand people is a two-story concrete box with a bright blue angular extension in the center. The waiting room does not even seat 50 people, the local cafe does not always work, and Wi-Fi at the airport appeared only in 2020.

However, almost no one uses Wi-Fi, and there are almost no queues in the concrete box, and all because of the price - a one-way flight to the nearest city of Yakutsk, located in the same region (distance 2.5 thousand km), is from 35 to 40 thousand rubles (from $ 452 to $ 517).

From Moscow to Yakutsk (distance 8, 2 thousand km) you can fly one way for 10 thousand rubles ($ 129), to Vladivostok (9 thousand km) for 13 thousand rubles ($ 168) at flat rates (a fixed tariff subsidized by the state and does not change throughout the year - the number of places for them is limited).

“The last time I flew on vacation was a year ago to Gelendzhik (a resort in the South of Russia) with my family. One-way tickets for one person cost 100 thousand rubles ($ 1, 3 thousand), and my salary is several times less,”said Karina Khan-Chi-Ik, an employee of the local administration.

Karina would like to fly more often, but according to the law, the employer pays all residents of the village for a flight only once every two years, she herself could not save up for vacation.

The salary of another local resident, Victoria Sleptsova, does not allow booking hotels in a Russian resort, so she spends her vacation in Yakutsk.

“Southern hotels are too expensive for me, especially in summer, and the planes are inconvenient, and for a 4-hour flight they only provide food and water,” complains Sleptsova.

Not all Muscovites can afford to travel around Russia. Natalya Popova, author of a travel blog, has traveled 43 countries in 5 years and visited 23 regions of Russia (85 in total), but some places in Russia are still financially inaccessible to her.

“I started traveling around Russia precisely during the pandemic, as there was no choice. From Moscow, you can fly inexpensively to nearby or the most popular cities such as Kazan, St. Petersburg, Rostov-on-Don, Yekaterinburg or Samara. But the most beautiful places in Russia, such as Baikal, Kamchatka, Sakhalin, are expensive, and I still cannot afford them,”Popova explains.

The traveler and blogger Maria Belokovylskaya agrees with her. When I corresponded with her, she was in Dikson, one of the northernmost villages in Russia.

“This is a tiny village in the Arctic desert with a population of 300 people. A one-way flight there cost me 70 thousand rubles ($ 905), for the same money you can get to Botswana in Africa. I do not regret the choice, but for Russians, tickets even to the most remote points in Russia should be cheaper,”Belokovylskaya is sure.

Travel long distances to school

“Sanya, hold on!”, A woman shouts, filming a man with a phone camera, who doesn’t break the ice with a shovel in order to swim a little more forward on the boat. Thus, Leonid Khvatov, a resident of the village of Pakhtalka in the Vologda region (527 km from Moscow), sees off his two sons every year to the nearest school - first by boat across the river, and then 2 km on foot across the field. The local administration is not building the bridge due to lack of finances; the family was also denied a school bus due to the lack of a road.

“In spring and autumn, children walk waist-deep in mud, and in winter they often walk waist-deep in snow, because the so-called road goes right through the field. Children cross the river twice a day.

In winter, on an ice crossing, in autumn and spring, my wife or I transport them by boat. At certain times of the year, because of this, we cannot receive medical or other assistance,”Leonid Khvatov told the local edition of NewsVo.

Such situations are more the rule than the exception for Russia. Every autumn and spring, the children of one or another Russian village cannot go to school, and news about this appears in the media every year.

So, during the spring coronavirus pandemic, primary school teacher Svetlana Dementyeva from the Kursk region (524 km from Moscow) walked 7-8 km to carry homework to children living in houses without the Internet and on self-isolation.

Children from the village of Krasnaya Gora in the Tver Region (614 km from Moscow) also faced a difficult road to school, a man with the nickname Olgard said at one of the Russian forums (he did not want to disclose his real name).

“I walked to school for four years, 8 km there, 8 km back. Nothing, only in winter I had to dive from wolves, and in autumn and early spring to wade through the mud. I used to ride a bike in winter, 15 times on the road I could fuck [fall] - it was slippery,”the man recalled.

According to him, sometimes schoolchildren were brought up on a collective farm UAZ or a bus, which often broke down on the way. In high school, the father began to provide a tractor so that his son could get to school, and a little later, the children began to be transported on buses.

“Now there are even more animals there, so it’s really dangerous to let the children go. But the places are very beautiful,”says the man.

Live without mobile communications and the Internet

In 2020, sending a meme to a friend, finding the information you want, or watching a movie is all just a few clicks away. But 43-year-old Alexander Guryev, a resident of the village of Bolshiye Sanniki of the Khabarovsk Territory (8, 9 thousand km from Moscow) with a population of no more than 400 people, has to go a long way to these clicks.

Every time Guryev was going to surf the Internet, he got dressed, got into the car and drove about 700 km (this is 8-12 hours of travel) to the nearest city of Khabarovsk, where the mobile Internet worked. This was the case until the fall of 2020, until the wired Internet was installed in his village.

“I wasn’t very sick with the Internet, but I couldn’t, like an ordinary Russian, sign up for a polyclinic via the Internet, it strained. At home I was just bored, I was fishing, picking mushrooms, and the neighbors were drinking too much. Now I can even sit on VK (a popular Russian social network - ed.),”Says Guryev.

In the village of Salba of the Krasnoyarsk Territory (4, 2 thousand km from Moscow, the population is no more than 200 people), until March 2020, there was no Internet or mobile communication. Marina (the name was changed at the request of the heroine), a local resident, claims that the village was fine without him.

“Do you have any idea of life in the village? We have practically no rest, we just work. The Internet and communication are needed almost only in order to communicate with relatives. So now we are doing well,”says Marina.

In 2019, residents of more than 25 thousand Russian settlements with a population of 100 to 250 people did without telephone and Internet communications. How much the number of such places has decreased in 2020 is still unknown.

To be abroad more often than in Moscow

Get in the car, don't forget your passport with a Schengen visa and go to Poland or Germany for shopping or a walk - this is how an ordinary weekend looked for Ekaterina Sinelshchikova, author of Russia Beyond, who lives in Kaliningrad.

“Before the sanctions of 2014 (in 2014, Russia introduced a food embargo), we regularly traveled to Poland - we crossed the border, drove to the nearest supermarket a couple of kilometers from the border zone and purchased food.

It all came out cheaper, even taking into account gasoline. After that they did not stop driving, though less often, but I personally hid the Polish carbonate in my handbag,”Sinelshchikova recalls.

According to her, it was faster and easier to get to Europe than to Moscow - everyone traveled to Europe for the New Year holidays or vacations; short-term tours for 2-3 days to European castles and water parks were especially popular. At the same time, according to her, many still dreamed of life in the capital and dreamed of breaking out of a small and provincial town, albeit close to Europe.

“But having lived in Moscow, you just begin to see the pluses of the former“minuses”of Kaliningrad. Many of my acquaintances eventually came back. You begin to appreciate the local forests, the sea - this space has never been enough in Moscow, "says Ekaterina. “Besides, there is always a company here - you just come to a local bar and there will definitely be someone from your acquaintances, former classmates, friends or colleagues. You don't have to make plans in a week, everything is simpler."

Dmitry Chalov, 55, a resident of Vladivostok, a former diver on rescue ships, has also spent most of his life in various cities in China and Japan. He first came to China in 1995, when he worked as an ordinary seaman engaged in towing ships to China and Japan for sale.

“I was 30 years old, I had never seen a city of this scale, and the most attractive for us (sailors) was the shopping street, which was either 7 or 17 km long. All goods, cafes with frogs and snakes for sale, equipment for us from there was like from outer space,”recalls Chalov.

Later, he annually began to vacation in China, Japan, Thailand and Vietnam, according to him, travel was paid by the state, since he worked in the rescue service.

“We have the sea, nature, and foreign countries, which are already closer to our capital. And Moscow is like Moscow … a stone sack, no more,”says Chalov.