Come in large numbers from Moscow

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

In the Kozelsky district of the Kaluga region, few people will be surprised by the Muscovites who have moved here for permanent residence. Surprisingly, the city dwellers give a head start to the locals in milking goats and cows, raising pigs and sheep, and, finally, they are excellently driving tractors.

After drinking aromatic coffee with goat's milk, whose taste resembled a milk ice cream from childhood, Irina and I go to the other end of the village of Nizhnie Pryski to see 34-year-old Katya, an opera singer, a beauty and a mother of three children. On the way, Irina on her mobile warns several more former Muscovites that we will come to visit them. Looking ahead, I will say that among the newly-minted villagers there will be a former financial director, a TV worker, and a deputy director general of the publishing house.

Irina herself is a third-generation Muscovite who grew up on Maroseyka, one of the central streets of the capital. Her husband Andrei is also a native Muscovite, he remembers life in the capital as a nightmare: “I got up at 6 am, for two hours I drove through traffic jams to the Sheremetyevo airport, where I worked in the advertising department. At six in the evening I started home, where I reached by 9 in the evening, had dinner, went to bed. And so day after day. Like a squirrel in a wheel. And in the village you live every day.

By 9 in the morning you have time to milk the goats, clean the goat's rue, feed the animals, have breakfast, and on the table almost all the products are your own. Recently, even the recipe for French cheese "Crotin de Chavignol" has been mastered. The most difficult thing, as they say at the airport, is routine maintenance: you don't get sick, but you need to milk the goats, and in the summer you need to graze them for 4-6 hours. In this situation, you cannot go on vacation. But it's worth it. Now you can't lure me to Moscow with a roll."

Indigenous Muscovites Irina and Andrey 7 years ago built a house in Nizhniye Pryski, started a farm, and this fall Andrey learned to drive a tractor and plowed a field.

GOAT CHANEL

The owner of the lyric-coloratura soprano Ekaterina, who managed to see both Europe and Japan and found her happiness in the Russian outback, agrees one hundred percent with Andrei. Katya and her children - 3-year-old Nina, 4-year-old Tikhon and 5-year-old Fedor - moved to the village from the capital for permanent residence in the summer of 2014. “In the city, children were often sick,” she says. - Yes, and I myself felt uncomfortable there. Once I looked out the window of a Moscow apartment, and there were all high-rise buildings and not a single tree. Such longing took: will all life in this stone jungle pass?"

As a result, moving from words to deeds, Katya and her husband bought a modest country house with 20 acres. Unlike Irina and Andrei, who sold a summer cottage near Moscow and built a house with all the amenities (gas, running water) in Nizhniye Pryski, their family cannot afford a new dwelling yet and is improving the old one: “In winter, it began to blow heavily from the cracks in the floor. I bought fiberboard and insulation, sealed up the cracks. Spouse Mikhail was on tour at that time, he is a soloist of one famous choir. His earnings are now our main financial support, since the farm does not yet bring the necessary profit."

Katya has no doubts that the idea with the move was correct: “When, after the first two months, we had to go to Moscow for a few days on business, the elder Fyodor would shout:“Mom, just not to Moscow!” The kids love it here. They spend a lot of time outdoors. We are very fond of goat milk, we now have 15 goats and two goats. (Katya shows the farm, calling the goats by name - Chanel, Lira, Belly.) I also keep chickens and ducks. I learned how to make homemade cottage cheese, sour cream, condensed milk. In the summer we eat tomatoes, cucumbers, potatoes from our garden. In winter - sauerkraut, pickled apples."

It has become customary for Katya to get up at half past five in the morning, in an hour she manages to manually milk the goats: "While I learned, I cried more than once." By 8 in the morning he is driving his sons to school in Kozelsk, which is 5 km from their village. “Any trip in the countryside is beauty: bright landscapes outside the window. Not like in Moscow - traffic jams, exhaust gases and a twitching mother at the wheel. In the city, my children had drawings in black and white, and now they are full of bright colors. " The family plans to further develop the farm and build a new comfortable house.

For the sake of the children, Sergey and Vera also moved to the village. For many years Sergey worked on TV in the film crew of the program “What? Where? When?”, Vera worked as the deputy general director of the publishing house. When their eldest son Nikolai was born, they noticed a strange pattern: "In the summer, when the child was in the country, he grew up, and while living in the city, he stopped growing." They sold a city apartment and bought a private house 5 km from Moscow, continuing to commute to work in the city. "We lived like this: went out into the garden and tore what we needed for dinner." However, when Moscow new buildings approached their possession, they sold the house with a plot and acquired a townhouse in the capital.

“When Kolya’s son went out into the yard for the first time and saw that there was no vegetable garden, he asked in surprise:“Dad, what are we going to eat?” - Sergey recalls. By that time, they had two more children in their family, whom they took from the orphanage - 5-year-old Maxim and 9-year-old Ksyusha. “As a result, Vera and I decided to move to the village. The place here is gorgeous - a river full of fish. There are mushrooms and berries in the forest”.

The family acquired a hectare of land and built a house. Children study at an Orthodox gymnasium in Kozelsk, in the same place as Katya's sons. Their parents take them to school. Private vehicles are indispensable here. The family has a large vegetable garden, greenhouses, cows, they make cheese from milk. “Moreover, we ourselves hardly eat our own cheese, because our customers sort it out. We sell for 800 rubles. for 1 kg. One kilogram of natural cheese requires 10 liters of milk,”explains Sergey.

Nadezhda and her husband Alexander moved to the outback, retiring.

STICKS IN WHEELS

Both young families and those who have recently retired are moving to the village. For example, Nadezhda with her husband. Before retiring, she worked as CFO for many years. Over the past 10 years, Nadezhda has had an outlet in her working days with weekend trips to Kozelsk, where her spiritual father, a monk from Optina Pustyn (the monastery is located in the same area), blessed her to acquire land. The couple built a house, set up a vegetable garden, and after retiring and moving here from Moscow, they got goats, pigs, sheep, chickens. “In the city, my husband had a dream to eat real meat,” says Nadezhda. "Finally it came true." (Smiles.) She and her husband provide household products to the family of the eldest son, who has three children in the city. And the youngest, 21-year-old Andrey, lives with his parents.

Irina's son, 34-year-old Mikhail, is also preparing to move to the village. He plans to have a farm: “But the officials are putting a stick in the wheel in the issue of land registration. Whom to tell - they will not believe: for the second year, a young Muscovite is struggling to move him to an abandoned village. We hope that we will manage to cope with this bureaucracy and Putin will not have to write."