There is hope that this village will be reborn. Revival of the village

Why is the village dying and how to revive it? Expert opinion. “Orthodox View” about ways to revive the village.

Hegumen Sergius (Rybko),

abbot of the Russian Orthodox Church, famous missionary, rector of the Church of the Descent of the Holy Spirit on the Apostles at the Lazarevskoye cemetery in Moscow

The village was destroyed during Soviet times. Temples were closed, cultural centers could not satisfy the needs of the people, no one wanted to work from morning to evening for workdays that were not even paid, so people fled from villages to cities where they could get an education and make a life. Now the process is reversed. People, especially wealthy people, began to understand that the village is life in nature. Settlements begin to be founded around cities, in which churches are built, and Russian national life is built around the churches. This is how a real Russian community begins to emerge. Many are now beginning to take steps to revive the village, opening companies or a common Orthodox household. This is the future. I was in Finland and saw how people live in villages and study and work in cities. Their agriculture is highly developed, albeit mechanized. There are no traffic jams. The villages have supermarkets and restaurants, excellent roads, kindergartens, and interest clubs. We also need to gradually create this, and there should be temples everywhere.

Archpriest Viktor Gorbach,

rector of the parish of St. Innocent of Moscow in Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk, head of the Youth Department of the Yuzhno-Sakhalin and Kuril diocese

In the 20th century we experienced industrialization and most of our society became city dwellers. For food security, we must grow all agricultural products in Russia. Sanctions have been beneficial in this sense. Community, and the Russian village has always been community, is based on Orthodoxy, on the understanding that all people are brothers and sisters, one family. Today, unfortunately, we have largely lost this understanding. People living in cities may not know their neighbors next door and may never communicate with them. With such a worldview it is difficult to do anything in the village. I cannot make predictions, but I can say that where a strong church community appears: either a monastery, or believers, for example, Orthodox entrepreneurs, life changes for the better. I see the only salvation for the village in the development of church life there. And the development of church life cannot be imagined without school. But today they don’t even allow the cultural studies subject “Fundamentals of Orthodox Culture” into schools; in fact, there is a boycott of this subject in some regions. I know of cases where the choice of children and parents was ignored and children were forced to study secular ethics. This is a terrible crime that education officials are committing. Without Orthodoxy, not only will the village not be reborn, but nothing at all will be reborn. Orthodoxy is deeply connected with the village, and with the city, and with our life, with our works, because ardent anti-church works are based on people’s ignorance.

Priest Dimitry Nenarokov,

Assistant Ataman of the Central Cossack Army

In Russia, certain forces in society are fighting against abortion. With the revolution of 1917, state recognition of abortion began, when the murder of unborn children was legally permitted. This initiative has taken such deep roots that these days it can be difficult to convince a decent woman to refuse an abortion. It's the same with the village. We are now reaping the fruits of the revolution. The problem of the village is a problem of our society and is very similar to the problem of the Cossacks. It exists, but it is not there, because there are no Cossacks left. There is a rural society, but it is not there, because there are no peasants left.

The Soviet government cut down the village and ruined it. Collective farms are a caricature of rural communities that have completely enslaved the rural population. Collective farmers were not issued passports; they were in an unequal position with townspeople and workers, so they were forced to flee to the cities. Writers such as Vasily Belov, Fyodor Abramov, Viktor Astafiev, Valentin Rasputin wrote about this.

Russia has a huge amount of land, agriculture needs to be revived, but traditions and foundations have been undermined. I was born and raised in the city, although I lived in the village for many years. Even now I can take any piece of land, but what will I do with this land? We have destroyed the peasant community, and it is very difficult to recreate it again. The urban romantics of the 80s and 90s, who ran to the village to organize farms and private households, returned because the village did not accept them. This process is longer than it seems. It is necessary not to drive people from cities to the countryside, but to make the countryside attractive for life and, above all, from a spiritual point of view. Now in the village people are mostly non-believers, and if they are believers, then they are nominal. They are aggressive towards all visitors. Drunkenness, sloppiness and laziness flourish in the village. First of all, prohibition must be established in the village.

It is necessary to provide interest-free loans for the purchase of land, agricultural equipment and real estate. We need to give land to refugees and give them the opportunity to build housing on it. It is necessary to strictly punish for using land for other purposes. The land needs to be given to people, but this must be done taking into account realities. If we give the Far East or Siberia to the Chinese, then we will get Chinese Siberia and the Chinese Far East, so this issue requires a wise and balanced approach from our leaders.

Dmitry Adoniev, head of the missionary department of the Dobrinsky Central Church, psalm-reader of the St. Nicholas Church in the village of Dobrinka, website administrator

According to statistics, since the 2000s, the population of villages began to decline. Students stay in cities forever. Even a job with a high salary does not attract anyone to live in the village. The reason is not even work or money. We must remember the laws of economic development! Money is where there is culture! First, we must focus on the development of non-profit organizations.

Non-profit organizations occupy a special place in a market economy. They form a separate sector called the “third sector” (the other sectors are the government and commercial organizations).
Non-profit organizations are a subject and an integral element of a normally functioning market economy, which is responsible for the creation and sale of public goods and services. As the experience of leading developed countries shows, the state in a market economy is not able to cope with the solution of many social problems. To solve problems in the areas of health and education, politics and spiritual education, sports and culture, nature conservation, charity and a number of others, non-profit organizations are created.
Non-profit organizations are formed by uniting individuals to solve a certain range of problems common to them. As a rule, these are problems related to supporting socially vulnerable segments of the population, defending the rights and interests of various groups of the population, organizing leisure, education, culture, education, medical care, improving the ecology of the region, etc. This range of problems is either not solved at all by government organizations (due to lack of funds) and commercial organizations (due to the unprofitability of these operations), or is far from being solved fully.

One of the first economic works to consider culture as an independent factor was a study conducted by the famous American scientist and specialist in the field of public administration, Edward Banfield in 1958. He argued that the low rates of development of certain economies can be explained by the cultural systems that have developed in various countries. Banfield showed that the weakness of the economy in the south of Italy (as opposed to the industrialized north of the country) can be explained by local cultural traditions. American political scientist Robert Putnam put forward a hypothesis in 1993 according to which the more “altruistic” a society is, the higher the quality of the political and government structures operating in it. Historian and economist David Landes has proven the existence of a direct relationship between the prosperity of a national economy and such qualities of its citizens as economy and frugality, hard work, perseverance, honesty and tolerance. Qualities such as xenophobia, religious intolerance, and corruption guarantee poverty among the broad masses of the population and slow economic development. Italian economist Guido Tabellini analyzed the level of education and the quality of political institutions in 69 European regions. His conclusion: GDP volume and economic growth rates are higher in those regions where mutual trust, faith in individual initiative and respect for the law flourish.

So, we can conclude that culture undoubtedly has a certain impact on economic success. However, culture is influenced by religious, historical, geographical and other factors that are subject to change. Consequently, culture itself is subject to change. In my opinion, it is appropriate to talk about the existence of a “common culture of economic success”, when the same values in the field of economic behavior provide progress under political and geographical conditions. But again, all these conditions can also be influenced! The most important thing is to involve experienced specialists in this matter of “village revival”. Here it should also be taken into account that the way the world is conducted by different generations of people is too different. Currently, spiritual values have been replaced. But everyone knows that undeniable truths are contained in the Gospel. A great task rests on the shoulders of the Church. Therefore, priests will have to work hard in missionary terms!

The main focus must be placed on youth. The deanery departments of the Dobrinsky church district have long been cooperating with the authorities of the Dobrinsky district for the benefit of society and the state. The vision of the world of the head of the Dobrinsky district administration, Valery Vasilyevich Tonkikh, coincides with the truths of the Gospel! This person is supported by his colleagues, employees, and subordinates. Therefore, clergy easily have access to and preach the gospel truths in kindergartens, schools, vocational technical schools, medical and other institutions. If you look at the history of the parish of the St. Nicholas Church in the village of Dobrinka over the past 15 years, you will see cooperation with the department of culture and social development, mutual holding of cultural events with them aimed at strengthening morality and patriotic spirit among the population!

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- Father Kirill, do you have village roots?

- I was born in the mining village of Artyomovsk in the Donbass. My father is a native of the village of Perezdnoye, Voronezh region, and my mother is from the village of Staroye Melovoe, Belgorod region. As a child, I often visited these villages, especially Perezdny.

In the Pavlovsky district, where Pereezdnoye is located, there were two functioning churches, but many churches were destroyed after the revolution. In the village of Rassypnoye, neighboring Pereezdny, I saw many bullet marks on the dome of the bell tower. One day, a priest from there came to Perezdnoye to bless Easter cakes and eggs on Holy Saturday, and drunken men locked him in a barn, where he sat all night. The Easter service was disrupted... Several decades after the mass closure of churches in these places, the servant of God Theodore, Fedor Kipriyanovich, baptized children and performed funeral services for the dead. I was told that he was a fearless man who suffered a lot for his faith. It used to be that after the next christening, the local authorities would scold him, take him to a field away from the village, and the next morning he would pray for the deceased in another village. I never lost heart.

- When did you begin to take care of villages as a priest?

- Since the summer of 1991, then I decided to come to Pereezdnoye to prayerfully remember my grandmother - my father’s mother - on the day of the 20th anniversary of her death.

- How did you see the village then?

- I remember the conversation with the milkmaid. She complained about the extremely low cost of milk; this completely devalued her work. Then resellers appeared in the village, buying animals for pennies. Refugees flocked from the republics of the former Union. Theft began to flourish.

I talked to many leaders. They said about the same thing: high fuel prices make peasant labor meaningless, young people are leaving the village, people are drinking themselves to death. The head of the farm in the village of Leskovo - I consecrated his house and the building where the board was located there - told how not long before he fired milkmaids - for drunkenness (!). The latest news from there is disappointing: the farm in Leskovo completely collapsed, all the livestock in Perezdnoye was slaughtered.

- Is there really nothing that can be done to stop this evil?

- The same leader said: everyone knows in which houses in the village they distill moonshine or sell low-quality alcohol. And the police are inactive - the inviolability of a private home! Drugs have appeared in the village... After the disco near the club, syringes are lying on the ground. I am absolutely sure that people are being deliberately soldered. The mortality rate is horrifying.

- Why did you install several worship crosses in rural areas, what do you see as the meaning of their appearance in these places?

- Worship crosses in villages have become the center of spiritual life. In total, we installed twelve such crosses in the Voronezh region. They organized small communities and provided people with liturgical books. Thus, by gathering at the crosses on Sundays and holidays, the residents of these villages will not be cut off from the common congregational prayer of our people.

- Have you also been involved in the restoration of rural churches?

- More precisely, they gave impetus to their revival. They came to some village where the temple lay in ruins, hung bells on a tree, and began to ring. At first people did not understand anything, then they gathered to church. A prayer service was served, then a sermon, and a common meal. Then we invite everyone to a labor hour. There were real miracles. After our appearance in the village of Eryshevka, a month and a half later I received a letter. Local residents report that they have already covered the roof, laid the floors, installed windows and even planted flower beds around the church.

- What are you going to do next?

- I remember how in the village of Seryakovo the first service was performed on the throne day for the Beheading of St. John the Baptist, and people asked us: “When will you open the temple for us?” And we say: “We have already opened this service.” They: “What’s next?” - “And then within a few days we will carry out a general cleaning here and build an iconostasis. You come here every Saturday and Sunday and, after praying, reading the prayers according to the charter, wipe the window sill, put a jar of flowers, and then do the same with the next one.” window sill. That is, we are sure that thanks to regular prayer, people will begin to be drawn to the temple. This often happens. Obviously, you need to start not with drawing up huge estimates, but with prayer. Prayer works wonders.

- Where do you work now?

- In the Tver region. Here the community has several houses. We have installed a dozen worship crosses, we are digging through the ruins of several temples in endangered villages. Here the situation is even worse. The magazine "Russian House" wrote that every year about 40 villages disappear from the map of the Tver region. One disappeared before our eyes - Raiki in the Likhoslavsky district. One can still understand the temporary suspension of the emergence of new settlements, but when those where people have lived for centuries disappear, it’s terrible! The main reason for degradation and extinction is horrific drunkenness and unemployment. There are a lot of abandoned villages. This winter many southerners came. Land shares are being bought for next to nothing. On paper, there are more than one and a half hundred farmers in the region, but in reality there are three people, but everyone received subsidies and benefits.

Drunkenness is rampant. A local resident, a 50-year-old man, said that half of his classmates had already died from burnt vodka. I say: “Well, wait here for a couple of thousand Chinese who will populate your land.” “Oh, don’t,” he objects. “Then why do you become an alcoholic and not have children?” I ask him. But the answer is obvious: out of despair.

- What to do? You painted everything so dark...

- It’s difficult to give comprehensive recommendations. But... we must finally begin systematic work to limit drunkenness; do not choke the remaining rural Mohicans with taxes, but subsidize them only for the fact that they still live on the earth. Look what happens: from one endangered village to another there are several tens of kilometers. The village is our rear, a reserve, in view of the inevitable future cataclysms. We wrote off Mongolia's debt of $6 billion, Iraq's $23 billion, and we are allocating $1 billion for a national agricultural development project. Absurd!

The energy supply controller talked about how grandmothers in the villages, who suffered hardships in the war, worked on collective farms for several decades, receive a pension of 1800 rubles, and they are also forced to purchase new meters for 600 rubles!

The village needs serious material support. It is urgent to carry out emergency work in collapsing rural churches, rural schools, post offices, and libraries. If they don’t exist, the village will die out by leaps and bounds. Targeted financial assistance is needed. It is important to unite people. I believe in the power of the influence of Orthodox village communities, in the fact that they are able to heal any festering wounds...

Interviewed by Vladimir Aleksandrovich FROLOV

http://www.russdom.ru/2007/200712i/20071233.shtml

In our troubled time of change, where every news is negative, I came across an interesting video about the modern revival of the Russian village and about the person who is doing it. I highly recommend it to everyone. It’s great that the process has begun and many people have had positive results in rebuilding villages. Such villages are perhaps the hope for salvation. Gleb Tyurin came up with the idea of reviving northern villages by organizing TOSs in them - Societies of Territorial-Public Self-Government. What Tyurin did in 4 years in the godforsaken outback of Arkhangelsk has no precedents. The expert community cannot understand how he succeeds: Tyurin’s social model is applicable in an absolutely marginal environment and is not expensive. In Western countries, similar projects would cost orders of magnitude more. Amazed foreigners vying with each other to invite the Arkhangelsk resident to share his experience in all kinds of forums - in Germany, Luxembourg, Finland, Austria, the USA. Tyurin spoke in Lyon at the World Summit of Local Communities, and is actively interested in his experience. How did this all happen?

Gleb began to travel to bearish corners to find out what people there could do for themselves. Conducted dozens of village meetings. “Local citizens looked at me as if I had fallen from the moon. But in any society there is a healthy part that is capable of being responsible for something.” Gleb Tyurin believes that today it is necessary not so much to argue about theories as to think about the realities of life. Therefore, he tried to reproduce the traditions of the Russian zemstvo in modern conditions. Here's how it happened and what came out of it.

– We began to travel to villages and gather people for meetings, organize clubs, seminars, business games and God knows what else. They tried to stir up people who were depressed, believing that everyone had forgotten about them, that no one needed them, and that nothing could work out for them. We have developed technologies that sometimes allow us to quickly inspire people and help them look at themselves and their situation differently.

The Pomeranians begin to think, and it turns out that they have a lot of things: forest, land, real estate, and other resources. Many of which are ownerless and dying. For example, a closed school or kindergarten is immediately plundered. Who? Yes, the local population itself. Because everyone is for themselves and strives to snatch at least something for themselves. But they destroy a valuable asset that can be preserved and made the basis for the survival of a given territory. We tried to explain at peasant gatherings: the territory can only be preserved together. We found within this disillusioned rural community a group of people charged with positivity. They created a kind of creative bureau out of them, taught them to work with ideas and projects. This can be called a social consulting system: we trained people in development technologies. As a result, over 4 years, the population of local villages implemented 54 projects worth 1 million 750 thousand rubles, which gave an economic effect of almost 30 million rubles. This is a level of capitalization that neither the Japanese nor the Americans have, given their advanced technologies.

Principle of efficiency

“What makes up a multiple increase in assets? Due to synergy, due to the transformation of scattered and helpless individuals into a self-organizing system. Society represents a set of vectors. If some of them were combined into one, then this vector is stronger and larger than the arithmetic sum of the vectors from which it is composed...”

The villagers receive a small investment, write the project themselves and become the subject of the action. Previously, a person from the regional center pointed his finger at the map: this is where we will build a cowshed. Now they themselves are discussing where and what they will do, and they are looking for the cheapest solution, because they have very little money. The coach is next to them. His task is to lead them to a clear understanding of what they are doing and why, how to create that project, which, in turn, will lead to the next one. And so that each new project makes them economically more and more self-sufficient. In most cases, these are not business projects in a competitive environment, but a stage of acquiring resource management skills. To begin with, very modest. But those who have passed through this stage can already move on.

In general, this is some form of change in consciousness. The population, which begins to become aware of itself, creates a certain capable body within itself and gives it a mandate of trust. What is called the body of Territorial Public Self-Government - TOS. Essentially, this is the same zemstvo, although somewhat different than it was in the 19th century. Then the zemstvo was caste - merchants, commoners. But the meaning is the same: a self-organizing system that is tied to the territory and is responsible for its development. People are beginning to understand that they are not just solving the problem of water or heat supply, roads or lighting: they are creating the future of their village. The main products of their activities are a new community and new relationships, a development perspective. TOS in its village creates and tries to expand the zone of well-being. A certain number of successful projects in one locality builds up a critical mass of positive things, which changes the whole picture in the area as a whole. So the streams merge into one big full-flowing river...

Before the revolution of 17, Russia, as they say in textbooks, was an agricultural country. Peasants made up the absolute majority of the population and fed the entire empire. After the revolution, dispossession, collectivization, industrialization and other delights began. As a result, there were collective farms and state farms are a kind of socialist serfdom. The peasants never received the land. But the right to work, work and work for pennies remains.

Many people now criticize Soviet collective farms. Deservedly. The collective farm system had a lot of shortcomings. Meager wages. Lack of prospects - an ordinary collective farmer and his children were doomed to hard work until their graves. It was difficult to get out into the public or go to the city, especially during Stalin’s time. The collective farm killed any personal initiative and accustomed people to the idea that they they don’t decide anything, their job is to obey orders from above.

Nevertheless, at the very least, this system worked. The collective farm was a social-forming factor and created the infrastructure necessary for survival: it built houses, roads, a school, a hospital, roads, a kindergarten, etc. Wittingly or unwittingly, the collective farm leadership took care of the needs of the local population. Let the collective farmer bend his back to the collective farm for pennies. But the collective farm helped the peasant to survive. If it was necessary to plow the garden, the collective farm provided a horse. The collective farm provided grain, firewood, and hay. As throughout the USSR, petty theft flourished in the village, which was considered not a crime, but a common practice. The foreman stole a car of beets, an ordinary collective farmer stole a bag of potatoes. But this bag helped the family survive the winter. The collective farm developed the economy in all directions: there were fields, cowsheds, poultry houses, apiaries, gardens, workshops. The collective farm provided work for the entire village. Thanks to collective farms and state farms, the Russian village may not have flourished, but it remained viable.

When the Soviet Union collapsed, the collective farm system collapsed, and with it agriculture. Some statistics. During the years of agrarian reforms, 27,000 collective farms and 23,000 state farms disappeared. In 2011, only 90 tons of grain were collected. This is slightly more than half of the pre-reform amount. Livestock farming fell into decline. The number of cows decreased by 21 million heads to 12, pigs - from 33 to 9 (!), sheep and goats - from 67 to 10 million heads. A Russian cow produces milk almost three times less than an American cow and almost 4 times less than an Israeli cow. The average annual grain yield on Russian non-chernozems is 4 times less than on Swedish soils, and almost 4 and a half times less than in defeated Germany.
Agriculture is on its last legs. Paradoxical but true: up to 70% of our country’s food needs are covered by imports. And the point is not even that Russia, famous for the fertile black soils of the Kuban, is not able to feed itself. And the fact is that engage in agriculture rationally and economically, as did the kulaks expelled in the 20s or the smart collective farm chairmen, unprofitable. In the pre-crisis years, a liter of diesel fuel in the village cost more than a liter of milk. Who would risk keeping a cow in such conditions? Collective farms were destroyed and nothing was created in return. There is no work in the village. The young people leave, those who remain slowly become drunkards. The village is deteriorating. In once prosperous villages, decrepit old women and alcoholics are living out their lives.

Villages, towns and cities of the Russian periphery are rapidly emptying. If you look at a map of Russia, it is easy to see that most people live in and around cities. The population is concentrated in a triangle, the corners of which are St. Petersburg in the north, Sochi in the south and Irkustk in the east. The farther from the city, the more deserted it is. The country is slowly turning into an archipelago. The Far East and Far North suffered the most. Over the past 10 years, the population in the Far East has decreased by 40%. In the Far North - by 60%. In Siberia, 11,000 villages and 290 cities disappeared. If during the Soviet era these regions survived thanks to state subsidies, now everyone who is able to move is fleeing from there closer to Moscow, St. Petersburg, Sochi and Krasnodar.
A new type of tourism has become fashionable: stalking in abandoned villages. Here is a link to the project “Disappearing Villages of Russia”. The list, of course, is far from complete, but very instructive:

http://letopisi.ru/index.php/%D0%9F%D1%80%D0%BE%D0%B5%D0%BA%D1%82_%D0%98%D1%81%D1%87%D0 %B5%D0%B7%D0%BD%D1%83%D0%B2%D1%88%D0%B8%D0%B5_%D0%B4%D0%B5%D1%80%D0%B5%D0%B2 %D0%BD%D0%B8_%D0%A0%D0%BE%D1%81%D1%81%D0%B8%D0%B8
An entire class, with its own way of life, culture and mentality, is rapidly disappearing. Now the main task of parents in villages is not to raise a worker, but to find a place for their child in the city at any cost. The most important, villagers often no longer want to work. Farm work is hellishly hard. Why work hard from morning to evening in a cowshed or in a field, when you can get a job as a security guard in the city and get the same money (or even more) while sitting quietly in a chair? It turns out to be a vicious circle. On the one hand, people in the village have no work. On the other hand, no one wants to work as a milkmaid or tractor driver anymore. Together with the village, the type of zealous and sober peasant who fed Russia before and after the revolution is dying out. People have forgotten what to do in the village. Now they have a TV and vodka - the best means to distract themselves from their problems.

After the 1998 crisis, the situation changed. Big business has paid attention to the village. Not because patriotic feelings suddenly surged within the oligarchs. Giant raw materials and financial structures realized that The most reliable investment is not gold or even real estate. This is the earth. And agrarian empires began to be created. At one time, Gazprom owned land the size of the Tula region. Deripaska bought up the fertile black soils of the Kuban. The chairmen of collective and state farms were paid substantial compensation, and for this they received land, property and power in the former collective farm. The oligarchs bought forests cheaply for hunting and land for gigantic dachas. A new class of so-called latifundists began to emerge in Russia.

A huge structure is being created - an agricultural holding, the owner of which becomes the real power in the village. It is not profitable for an agricultural holding to develop infrastructure and generally support life in the countryside. This is a business, not a charity. It is easier for an agricultural holding to hire cheap Tajiks than to deal with the local, always inebriated population. Moreover, not all agricultural holdings are of domestic origin. Of the 700 Russian large agricultural holdings, about 70 belong to foreign owners . Russian legislation prohibits them from buying land. But the law is easy to circumvent. A foreign company creates a subsidiary, which, in turn, gives birth to a “granddaughter”, and the “granddaughter” already with full right buys Russian land. Of course, corruption among officials managing land and former collective farm chairmen plays a huge role. Often they don’t care who owns the plot, even the devil himself, as long as they pay the money. The ends - who actually owns the land - can no longer be found.

Experts believe that the most profitable agricultural holdings belong to offshore companies. Basically, this is Cyprus. It is impossible to say that Russia has already been sold out. But the process is underway, especially in the Kuban, where the main agricultural wealth of Russia is concentrated - black soil. Land in the Moscow region is also being actively purchased by foreign companies. There are no statistics on this issue.
Farmers could save the Russian village and agriculture. Development of small farms along with large ones. Money from the budget for the revival and development of the Russian village is allocated from the state budget. For example, the national project “Development of the agro-industrial complex”. There are a lot of beautiful words in the project. This includes stimulating the development of small-scale farming (farmers) and providing housing for young professionals, and both. But alas! In practice It is not profitable for officials to tinker with small farms. There are a lot of hemorrhoids, but the result will not be visible immediately. It’s easier to give budget money to an agricultural holding that promises to build cowsheds, bring modern equipment to the fields, and most importantly, bad kickbacks.

Only people with iron self-control risk becoming farmers in Russia. Firstly, running your own household is an expensive business. Feed is expensive, gas and electricity tariffs are constantly rising. Good workers (at least sober ones) are difficult to find. Finding a good market is difficult. Even if the farmer manages to solve these problems, another practically insoluble one arises. This is a system. A farmer is absolutely defenseless and powerless before an agricultural holding and any management in general. Officials are actively taking advantage of this. For example, without permission from veterinary supervision, he does not have the right to export his products outside the region for sale. And not because the quality of the products is low, but because the supervisory official wants to earn extra money. And so on. Without a piece of paper, a farmer can't even spit. And every piece of paper costs money.

Now Russia is fed mainly by agricultural holdings. Farmers produce about 7-9% of production. And part of the population feeds itself, without waiting for help from the state. These are small private summer residents who grow potatoes and cucumbers for pickling in their gardens.

Is it possible to revive the former, sober and economic peasantry in Russia? Opinions vary. Some say it is possible if it will be possible to revive the former spirit of peasant self-government. There is a lot of talk on the Internet about the experience of Gleb Tyurin, a former stock broker, now director of the Institute of Public and Humanitarian Initiatives (Arkhangelsk). The main thing, according to Tyurin, is to restore people’s faith in their own strengths and give them real power. Tyurin visited 40 dying Arkhangelsk villages, talked with residents and created TOS (territorial self-government bodies). For a short time, the villages came to life, but then most of them fell into decay again. For various reasons: the regional government changed and got rid of an inconvenient competitor in the person of TOS, the enthusiasm of the residents faded. To many villagers don’t need drastic changes.
Others say that there is no need to revive the peasantry at all. The development of economics, agronomy and technology finally killed the village that we saw in Soviet films. The future belongs to large agricultural holdings that produce, process and sell themselves. . In essence, these are the same collective farms, only with a capitalist face.

The question is, who will own Russian land in a couple of decades? Is it Russia?

In our troubled time of change, where every news is negative, it is very great that the process of restoring villages has begun and there is a positive result. Such villages are perhaps the hope for the salvation of Russia.

Gleb Tyurin came up with the idea of reviving northern villages by organizing TOSs in them - territorial bodies of self-government. What Tyurin did in 4 years in the godforsaken outback of Arkhangelsk has no precedents. The expert community cannot understand how he succeeds: Tyurin’s social model is applicable in an absolutely marginal environment and is not expensive. In Western countries, similar projects would cost orders of magnitude more. Amazed foreigners vying with each other to invite the Arkhangelsk resident to share his experience in all kinds of forums - in Germany, Luxembourg, Finland, Austria, the USA. Tyurin spoke in Lyon at the World Summit of Local Communities, and the World Bank is actively interested in his experience. How did this all happen?

Gleb Tyurin believes that today it is necessary not so much to argue about theories as to think about the realities of life. Therefore, he tried to reproduce the traditions of the Russian zemstvo in modern conditions.

Here's how it happened and what came of it.

We began to travel around villages and gather people for meetings, organize clubs, seminars, business games and God knows what else. They tried to stir up people who were depressed, believing that everyone had forgotten about them, that no one needed them, and that nothing could work out for them. We have developed technologies that sometimes allow us to quickly inspire people and help them look at themselves and their situation differently.

We found within this disillusioned rural community a group of people charged with positivity. They created a kind of creative bureau out of them, taught them to work with ideas and projects. This can be called a social consulting system: we trained people in development technologies. As a result, over 4 years, the population of local villages implemented 54 projects worth 1 million 750 thousand rubles, which gave an economic effect of almost 30 million rubles. This is a level of capitalization that neither the Japanese nor the Americans have, given their advanced technologies.

Principle of efficiency

“What makes up a multiple increase in assets? Through synergy, through the transformation of isolated and helpless individuals into a self-organizing system.

Society represents a set of vectors. If some of them were combined into one, then this vector is stronger and larger than the arithmetic sum of the vectors from which it is composed.”

The villagers receive a small investment, write the project themselves and become the subject of the action. Previously, a person from the regional center pointed his finger at the map: this is where we will build a cowshed. Now they themselves are discussing where and what they will do, and they are looking for the cheapest solution, because they have very little money. The coach is next to them. His task is to lead them to a clear understanding of what they are doing and why, how to create that project, which in turn will lead to the next one. And so that each new project makes them economically more and more self-sufficient.

In most cases, these are not business projects in a competitive environment, but a stage of acquiring resource management skills. To begin with, very modest. But those who have passed through this stage can already move on.

In general, this is some form of change in consciousness. The population, which begins to become aware of itself, creates within itself a certain capable body and gives it a mandate of trust. What is called a body of territorial public self-government, TOS. Essentially, this is the same zemstvo, although somewhat different than it was in the 19th century. Then the zemstvo was caste - merchants, commoners. But the meaning is the same: a self-organizing system that is tied to the territory and is responsible for its development.

People are beginning to understand that they are not just solving the problem of water or heat supply, roads or lighting: they are creating the future of their village. The main products of their activities are a new community and new relationships, a development perspective. TOS in its village creates and tries to expand the zone of well-being. A certain number of successful projects in one locality builds up a critical mass of positive things, which changes the whole picture in the area as a whole. So the streams merge into one big full-flowing river.

The village is the cradle of Russian civilization

Russian civilization developed under certain natural and climatic conditions. The cradle of Russian civilization, its matrix (matrix is the mother, matitsa is the main beam in the house, the support of the structure), which over the centuries has constantly reproduced the Russian national type of character, is precisely the village.

The village, like the grain of Russian civilization, is unusually harmoniously built into the universe. It demonstrates extraordinary resilience, despite all natural and social disasters. In fact, the village way of life and its basic material elements have not changed for centuries. The conservatism of the village and adherence to traditional values always irritated revolutionaries and reformers, but ensured the survival of the people.

Life on earth is simple and understandable, it is directly related to the results of labor. Man is constantly in communication with God, nature, and lives in a natural daily and annual rhythm. Culture is created by man as a ritual of communication with the Creator. (Culture - the cult of Ra, the sun god. In Christian times - the cult of God the Father. Without the cult of God, culture gives birth to monsters, as we are all witnesses to today). The Russian world is a peasant world. A peasant is a Christian. Through culture, man interacts with nature from birth to death. Everything in village culture, each element of it, has a sacred meaning of communication with the Creator, ensuring a harmonious existence on this particular land, in this natural area. That is why the cultures of all nations are so diverse.

Highly urbanized (living mainly in cities) peoples quickly lose their identity and become dependent on completely mythical values: virtual electronic money, created under the influence of human passions and cultural vices. Their life rhythm is disrupted. Night turns into day and vice versa. Fleeting transfers in time and space using modern means of transport give the illusion of freedom...

“A nation is created on earth, but in cities it is burned. Large cities are contraindicated for Russian people... Only land, freedom and a hut in the middle of their people serve as the support of the nation, strengthening its family, memory, culture of life in all its diversity.” (V. Lichutin).

As long as the village is alive, the Russian spirit is alive, Russia is invincible. Capitalism, and after it socialism, laid down a utilitarian, purely consumer attitude towards the village, as a sphere of agricultural production and nothing more. As a secondary, detrimental living space in relation to the city.

But a village is not only a populated area. This is, first of all, the way of life of a Russian person, a certain way of all cultural, social and economic relations. The famous economist of the 20s, Chayanov, very accurately grasped the difference between rural Russian civilization and the pragmatic and Protestant in its spirit urban civilization: “The basis of peasant culture is a different principle of profitability than in technological civilization, a different assessment of the profitability of the economy. By “profitability” was meant the preservation of a way of life that was not a means to achieving greater well-being, but was itself an end.

The “profitability” of a peasant farm was determined by its connection with nature, with peasant religion, with peasant art, with peasant ethics, and not just with the harvest obtained.”

This is the key concept that leaders who grew up in the political economy of socialism still cannot grasp! It is not the production of agricultural products that should be the main point of application of efforts for the revival of the village, but the restoration of the traditional way of life of Russian people that has developed over centuries. It is the way of life that is the primary value. But when it recovers, then we can forget about production. A spiritually revived village will do everything itself.

We are not talking about bast shoes and kvass, although we are talking about them too. Technology does not deny tradition, tradition does not deny the development of technology. We are talking about the revival of precisely the spiritual traditions of a person’s relationship with the earth, with the surrounding nature, with the community, with another person.

In peacetime, without war, Russians today are retreating from their rural ancestral home to cities corrupted by civilization. Right before our eyes, rural Atlantis is plunging somewhere faster, somewhere slower into oblivion. There is a lot of tragedy in this process, but also a lot of fairness. Fair according to the laws of spiritual retribution. In Orthodoxy - the law of retribution. Descendants are responsible for the sins of their ancestors. But in order for sin not to multiply and be interrupted, descendants must make every effort and live a clean life.

The earth is tired of carrying this careless tribe, tormenting it with drunken plows and thoughtless land reclamation, cutting down forests and polluting rivers and lakes with the waste of their activities. The earth throws it off its body, the Lord does not give continuation of the race. Empty arable lands and hayfields are overgrown with alder - a green healing plaster. The earth is waiting for a real owner to be reborn to a new life.

Today in the village there are two processes moving towards each other. The life cycle of the village lumpen has come to its logical end, through extinction. In terrible drunken torment, leaving no offspring fit for reproduction, the heirs of those who, having violated all human and higher laws, set their sights on someone else's property eighty years ago, raised their hand against their brother, and desecrated sacred things, are disappearing into oblivion. He is being met by the process of reviving the traditional village way of life through people who have repented of the sins committed by their ancestors, through those who every day, in word and deed, connect the broken thread of times, reviving traditions.

We Russian people, some earlier, some later, left the village. Some were seduced by the city's prosperity, some to avoid repression, some to give their children an education. This means that the responsibility for the revival of the village lies with all of us. Whoever can, in whom the Russian and Christian spirit is alive, must, must, stop the satanic wheel of rural destruction, destroying Russian space, devouring the future of the nation.

The revival of the village is the revival of Russia. Orthodoxy and the countryside are the front lines of defense for Russian identity. Let's revive the village - let's revive the root that nourishes the spirit and body of the nation.

A stern peasant grandfather with a thick beard looks at me from the photograph - my great-grandfather Mikhail. His children also left the earth once in search of a better life... It’s time to go back to square one.