Dead or Reviving: Russian Villages
It may not seem like an exciting topic, but three productions released recently (between April and July 2020) offer an insightful look at Russian villages that you should watch. Varlamov, RussianPlus, and Russian from Russia explore the заброшенные (abandoned), revived, and уснувшими (sleeping) villages, reflecting on the state of the Russian countryside.
Presented in order of release.
Lost
A somber depiction of the потерянное богатство страны, the lost wealth of the nation. ‘How Russia is dying.’ Subtitles available in settings.
Как погибает Россия. Разруха, воровство и смерть в русской деревне
(Varlamov, 16-04-2020, 48 m)
Reviving
A visit to Guzel Sanzhapova in Maly Turysh (Ural region), the Russian village where bees and babushkas reign supreme. A story of how one person can spark and sustain change.
For more on Guzel Sanzhapova’s project, see Run-down Village Revived by Crowdfunded Honey Business (The Moscow Times, 2019), Russia: Rescuing a village (DW, 2019), Honey to save a Russian village (Atlas of the Future), and the Cocco Bello website.
From RussianPlus, you can also watch Challenges of Countryside & Boris Yeltsin’s Hometown (2020, 18 m) and A Day in the Russian Countryside – Let’s See What it’s Like (2019, 17 m).
How to Revive a Russian village – A day in the Russian Countryside
(RussianPlus, 13-07-2020, 31 m)
Alisa Gorshenina
Artist Alisa Gorshenina (Alice Hualice) found another way to stir up action in the Ural region. See Delve into the outlandish universe of Alisa Gorshenina, redefining rural identity in the Russian Urals (Maria Muzdybaeva, The Calvert Journal 2020), Russia’s dying villages inspire a rising star of the art world (Albina Kovalyova, NBC News 2019), Alice Hualice, the Russian Artist Making Surreal Objects From a Remote Town (Anastasiia Fedorova, Another Mag 2020), and Art in Nizhny Tagil: how a generation of young artists is transforming Russia’s decaying heartland (Alexander Kozlov, The Calvert Journal 2017).
Abandoned
A summary, informative and complete with a language lesson. About villages в которых раньше жили люди (where people used to live), а теперь никого нет (and now no one is there) – except maybe in the summer months, visited by дачники (dacha dwellers). +1 for the simple yet poignant title, although it easily evokes melancholy. ‘Here was a village.’
Intermediate Russian Listening: Здесь была деревня
(Russian from Russia, 26-07-2020, 9 m)
More
- Заброшенные Деревни: кладбище автомобилей стоит в глуши 30 лет (Русские тайны, 2019, 15 m)
- Abandoned Russian village where my father was born (Ecoclimax, 2019, 44 m)
- Real Russian Countryside: Why young people don’t want to live in the village (Different Russia, 2018, 10 m)
- Villagers face harsh existence in rural Russia (CNN, 2017, 3 m)
- A Look At One Of Russia’s Thousands Of ‘Ghost Villages’ (NBC Nightly News, 2017, 2 m)
- “Уходящая натура” Была здесь когда-то деревня (ТВ2, 2017, 25 m)
- Vanishing Russian villages (Elena Villarreal, 2014, 8 m)
Reading: Russia’s Villages, and Their Way of Life, Are ‘Melting Away’ (Neil MacFarquhar, The New York Times 2017)
More
Country
The Netherlands holds a unique place in the Russian imagination. This is how our country, and we, are viewed through Russian eyes.
An interview becomes legendary when it gets its own page on
Wikipedia. On February 6, 2024, Tucker Carlson spoke with Vladimir Putin at the Kremlin. The report (127 minutes) offers a good, or at least broad, opportunity to hear the Russian perspective on the war against Ukraine.
What we would call ’tokkies’ or ‘gabbers’, and what elsewhere might be referred to as white trash or hooligans – in Russia, these are called gopniki. Folk culture in a tracksuit.
Since the age of sixteen, Игорь Мухин (1961) has been taking photographs. Armed with a
Смена-8М camera, he started his journey. So, when he found himself among artists and musicians in the 1980s, he already had a trained eye – and a better camera. Mukhin (sometimes Moukhin) witnessed major changes and began documenting them.
Freedom of speech is decreasing everywhere, though the reasons vary by region. Meanwhile, Big Tech’s power is growing, along with its interference. In this new era, a nearly forgotten Soviet answer is reemerging: samizdat, the underground DIY press and distribution network.
Every country has a flag and a coat of arms. The Netherlands has a lion, France has a rooster, New Zealand has a kiwi, and the United States has a bald eagle. In Russia, it’s an eagle with two heads and three crowns, and a man on a horse who has just killed a dragon with a spear.
