The Russia Left Behind
October 16, 2013 2:27 PM   Subscribe

The New York Times' Ellen Barry visits communities along M10, the Russian highway that links Moscow and Saint Petersburg, and finds a number of towns that are withering as the big cities grow.

The M10, which is in generally bad shape outside of the greater Moscow and Saint Petersburg areas, is set to be replaced by a new toll road by 2018.
posted by Halloween Jack (24 comments total) 16 users marked this as a favorite
 
Part of the problem might be the "Date Russian Women" Google-Ad that Metafilter showed to me before I logged in....

But to be fair to Russia, Swedes too - despite strong economic conditions and healthy state revenues - have been abandoning the countryside for the city in droves. It might just be that given the opportunity - and enough coin - most people prefer to live in a city. The abandonment of these podunks should be seen as a positive and not presented as some kind of tragedy. Living in these places was the tragedy.
posted by three blind mice at 3:01 PM on October 16, 2013


When this was getting passed around twitter yesterday people commented you could write the same story about the old rust belt towns here.
posted by The Whelk at 3:02 PM on October 16, 2013


I thought the same thing at first, but really, when you think about it, if New York and LA were separated by only 400-odd miles, you might expect the towns along the way to be doing a bit better. Some of them couldn't be doing worse if they were all the way out in the ass-end of Siberia.
posted by Halloween Jack at 3:05 PM on October 16, 2013


Little noted is how those places are ripe for settlement by people who are having a hard time making it in the city. All it would take is some investment, or a clever and well-run attempt to run going cooperatives. It wouldn't be easy, and in many cases not idyllic, but it's a shot at controlling one's destiny. On the other hand, maybe I'm naive.
posted by Vibrissae at 3:06 PM on October 16, 2013


Little noted is how those places are ripe for settlement by people who are having a hard time making it in the city. All it would take is some investment, or a clever and well-run attempt to run going cooperatives. It wouldn't be easy, and in many cases not idyllic, but it's a shot at controlling one's destiny. On the other hand, maybe I'm naive.

I read this before it popped up, and discussed it with my Russian students. The problem as I see it is that, in contrast to crunchy granola back-to-the-landers in the US, there is no support network for these people to take for granted. If some computer programmers in Cali fail at running an organic farm in Kansas, they can blog about the positives of failure and crash on friends couches until the next round of angel funding. If these villagers can't make ends meet, their best choice is...heading to the city and hoping for the best.
posted by StrikeTheViol at 3:20 PM on October 16, 2013 [1 favorite]


All it would take is some investment, or a clever and well-run attempt to run going cooperatives.

I suspect that the Russian collective consciousness has too many horrible memories of collectives for that to take off again.
posted by Foci for Analysis at 3:23 PM on October 16, 2013 [1 favorite]


All it would take is some investment, or a clever and well-run attempt to run going cooperatives

The article is talking about RUSSIA. Cooperatives were tried for 70 years and no one ever found a "clever and well run" way of making them work.
posted by three blind mice at 3:37 PM on October 16, 2013 [4 favorites]


It might just be that given the opportunity - and enough coin - most people prefer to live in a city. The abandonment of these podunks should be seen as a positive and not presented as some kind of tragedy. Living in these places was the tragedy.

Rural-to-urban is an ecosystem. An important one.

I grew up in an ugly, rural little town, though it was owing to hippy parents wanting to opt out instead of the article's pure accident of birth. I don't romanticize it, and I never looked back when I moved to a place where I can do my errands on foot and be in the center of a major city via public transport in a few minutes.

However, urbanization is relatively modern phenomenon and the culture of cities trickles in from the terroir around it. Beyond providing the actual food that feeds a city, the web of towns and villages outside a regional hub provides the character that makes our cities unique. People need to be free to stay on the fringes of that hub or make their way inward.

Some people can't adapt to urban lifestyles. That's okay-- we need them to stay behind and make sure that the cultural traditions that make every area unique live on. Punishing them for their reluctance creates misery in the individual and homogeny in the urban population.

If you value character and independence, it's important that these little rural nodes continue to make individuals who are free to stay put or move on. Without a constant fresh influx of regionals, one city would quickly be indistinguishable from another, and the end result is some sort of dystopian urban hegemony.

I don't like The Sticks either, but every fresh soul who pushes out is testimony to why governments should keep their promises about infrastructure.
posted by Mayor Curley at 3:38 PM on October 16, 2013 [1 favorite]


When this was getting passed around twitter yesterday people commented you could write the same story about the old rust belt towns here.

I know what you mean, but I think we still pave the major highways near them. When the interstate system went in, we didn't totally abandon the old national highways. Those still get paved and plowed. Shiny I-90 came in (with tolls through all of Massachusetts and New York), but US 20 didn't cease to be serviced. A major snowstorm shut I-90 down in 2007 for 15 hours, not 70, and it was closed and anyone on it was rescued, not abandoned.
posted by maryr at 3:45 PM on October 16, 2013 [2 favorites]


(BTW, I was positively impressed how well this read on a mobile device. You don't get the cool map scrolling, but neither do you have to zoom in and out to see pictures and read text.)
posted by maryr at 3:47 PM on October 16, 2013 [1 favorite]


The article is talking about RUSSIA. Cooperatives were tried for 70 years and no one ever found a "clever and well run" way of making them work.

They tried a few variations of one model of cooperatives for 70 years. But that's beside the point.

This is a well-done story. I agree with Halloween Jack about the significance of such a short distance between two major urban areas. Gravitation towards these two cities is of course a big part of the no-man's land, but the highway ignoring population centers, being in a state of disrepair for a huge stretch in the middle, having a rippling effect on villages farther out in the northwest - it's a pretty volatile thing.
posted by Marisa Stole the Precious Thing at 4:04 PM on October 16, 2013 [1 favorite]


Boston to Washington DC is about 450 miles.
posted by maryr at 5:15 PM on October 16, 2013


All it would take is some investment, or a clever and well-run attempt to run going cooperatives.

A clever and well-run attempt to do anything of the sort would require the cooperation of the Russian government, or at the very least non-interference from the Russian government. The Russian government does not cooperate for free, and these people would have no way to pay. So you're basically saying that it would take a country that isn't Russia to be able to do this, so, I mean I guess you're technically correct.
posted by griphus at 5:16 PM on October 16, 2013 [2 favorites]


Russia Backs Growth of Rural Co-operatives

As farmers, co-operative organisations and unionists gathered for the first ever Pan-Russian Congress of Rural Co-operatives, a letter read out from Dmitry Medvedev said he highly appreciated the role of rural co-operatives and was confident the Congress would open new opportunities for development of the Russian co-operative movement.

In Russia, 18,000 small and medium agricultural organisations, about 280,000 farms and individual entrepreneurs and over two million personal subsidiary farms belong to co-operatives, he said.


I mean, who knows what Putin really wants to do, but the co-operative movement is hardly dead.

Still, the problem here is (at least) threefold -- first, increasing urbanization, something that is a global trend; second, demographic challenges (although Russia has finally recovered its birthrate); and third, continued mechanization of agriculture. In many ways the same thing is happening in the Northern Plains States of the US.

Solutions really can't be magical thinking. There has to be investment, and some sort of wealth generation that will accrue to the locality. I'm in a city that lost a GM factory and its payroll and while we aren't exactly sliding on our asses down into hell, we're not going much better than hanging on for dear life. I think we'll make it in the long run, but we just had a rough go of it with the plant closing and the financial crisis, and of course our state is run by a governor working on the tribal kleptocracy model and the state's overall jobs growth has been pretty abysmal. But to be one of these Russian burgs ... I can't imagine. They're basically already rural ghettoes, neglected for decades, and politically all but forgotten.

By rights, with transit-oriented development centered on the rail route, reinvestment in what should be a major highway link (and would be anywhere else), and (ha ha) policies based on the needs of the people in the region, this area could be something at least just making it like we are, even if actual prosperity isn't an option.
posted by dhartung at 6:02 PM on October 16, 2013 [2 favorites]


Russia isn't a terribly wealthy place. per capita GDP puts it below the eastern European countries and just above Brazil. the fact that it has undeveloped areas isn't terribly surprising. (what's surprising, rather, is that they had development in those areas to begin with!)
posted by jpe at 6:17 PM on October 16, 2013


The abandonment of these podunks should be seen as a positive and not presented as some kind of tragedy. Living in these places was the tragedy.

That seems fairly presumptuous.
posted by AElfwine Evenstar at 7:17 PM on October 16, 2013 [3 favorites]


In Russia, growth of rural cooperatives backs YOU!
posted by MrBadExample at 8:21 PM on October 16, 2013


There is a bright side: Fall of USSR locked up world's largest store of carbon:
The privatisation of land led to one of the biggest land-use changes of the 20th century. Huge tracts of farmland were abandoned when the collectivised farming system introduced by Stalin collapsed, and farmers simply left the land and headed for the cities.
The abandonment of the countryside is what should have happened naturally a long time ago, the countryside was artificially populated by the Soviet collective farm system.
posted by stbalbach at 9:05 PM on October 16, 2013


I think it's presumptuous to assume this stagnation is some kind of great tragedy that must be mourned. Places grow, and places wither all around the globe, often for very good reason. It takes some kind of weird preservationist impulse to think that things must not change, ever.
posted by 2N2222 at 1:05 AM on October 17, 2013 [1 favorite]


The abandonment of the countryside is what should have happened naturally a long time ago, the countryside was artificially populated by the Soviet collective farm system.

There are some exceptions, but that's not generally how farm collectives were established. Basically, the serf system until the early 20th century worked like feudal systems everywhere-- large landowners, known as kulaks, owned swaths of farmland and serfs toiled on the kulaks' land. The Soviets took the farms and combined them into collectives, and the existing serfs and their progeny were then expected to share resources to work these giant farms.

Some folks were surely relocated to join the collectives, but they were for the most part already rural people who lived in areas even more remote than the farms. Some people came in temporarily to help with harvests; that was often the Red Army.

Pre-revolution Russia barely had an urban proletariat, which is the source of Leninism's focus on agricultural workers as well as urban workers-- Lenin knew that Russia wasn't the sort of industrialized state where Marx said that communism would take root. Marx was all about people in factories and goods manufactured under the labor theory of value, and Russia barely had enough industry in the 1910's to be concerned with that.

The net movement of relocation was generally into the cities, to provide labor for growing Soviet industrial economy. Rather than encourage the growth of tiny, rural villages, the Soviets depleted them by intentionally encouraging people to move to population centers-- both larger towns where infrastructure could be centralized and big cities where rural people would turn into factory workers. These little blips on the map are actually, for the most part, ones that survived Soviet central planning rather than being a result of it. The Soviets actively hated remote villages with no obvious purpose-- it looked bad to have people living like medieval serfs, but they didn't have the resources to modernize every little berg.

The fact remains that these rural folks were promised infrastructure by the New Russians, and they've been forgotten. Raw deal, especially with the growing gulf between the rich and poor.
posted by Mayor Curley at 5:42 AM on October 17, 2013 [3 favorites]


In the US, you'd expect to see the area filled with exurbs and fringe suburbs; anonymous strip-mall commuter towns on the very outskirts of what could be considered reasonable distance to a job in the city. Maybe not all the way across a 450-mile gap between two major cities, but at least a good bit of the way there, say 60 miles out from each along a major highway corridor, and then the gap further pocked with 'edge cities' that are themselves destinations for commuters living even further out.

Having not been to Russia, I wonder: is it because there's less of a car-centric culture / less private car ownership? Is public transportation that much better in the cities and near suburbs, so that everyone who works in the cities lives there? Is urban planning just that much different so that there isn't the insane sprawl? Nobody wants to build beyond the limits of the district heating system and other utilities? I can't quite figure it out.

Looking at Moscow on GMaps, I'm impressed by how little continous urbanization there is outside the official city limits and inner ring road, which is only about 10 mi out from the city center. By the time you get to the outer ring it's very discontinuous, with big patches of what appear to be no-shit actual forest. I'm having a hard time finding a city of comparable size in the US that is anything like that: Moscow has an official population that's higher (11M) than New York City's (8M), but lower than the NYC MSA; the obvious reason is that Moscow doesn't seem to have the edge cities and suburbs.
posted by Kadin2048 at 6:44 AM on October 17, 2013 [1 favorite]


The comment that struck me was the truck driver who stated it took him 24 hours to make what should have been a ten hour haul (google maps puts it at 8 hrs on the same highway - me thinks Google is optimistic). A similarly distanced space in the US would be D.C. to Boston, and that's given under 8 hours from Google. It's a glaring sign of the breakdown of national responsibility from the political and cultural capitals of Russia that their neglect of what equate to interstate highways between them has resulted in such horrible conditions. It also implies that the powers that be probably fly or take some alternative means of travel between them. It's like a Potemkin nation, look at our capitals, but not at our people.
posted by Atreides at 7:57 AM on October 17, 2013


Some folks were surely relocated to join the collectives, but they were for the most part already rural people who lived in areas even more remote than the farms.

These people would have migrated to cities a long time ago if they could have. Just as people all over the world have been doing for centuries. Cities offer opportunities and benefits that don't exist in rural places. This is true in every country including the USA. There was a latent demand in Russia for cities that became glaringly apparent after 1991, it was a tragedy they were kept outside of Moscow and other places for so long.
posted by stbalbach at 9:17 AM on October 17, 2013


I'm impressed by how little continous urbanization there is outside the official city limits and inner ring road

Things have changed since 1991, but it is related to the history of Soviet system of Propiska, internal passports allowing travel to different zones. Since it was difficult to migrate into Moscow proper, impromptu edge cities developed at the Moscow border (far beyond the natural city border). I think they tightly controlled where development of Moscow ended and where the zone of Moscow ended, two different things, and who could live where.
posted by stbalbach at 9:59 AM on October 17, 2013


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