In
the midst of so much decay, hatred and war – and ugliness – it is
nice to see something beautiful!
I personally relished the photos of the horses in the snow.
Insanity has come even to the places I love. We are in drought here in New Zealand and the grass is dying off. In the midst of this the person (engineer, not farmer) seems to have taken it into his head to spray with Roundup all the plants that grow along the stream - the wonderful, edible plants our horses love to eat.
Yesterday, they wouldn't even go into the stream. They knew something was wrong before we did.
So, it's nice to dream.
The
Beauty of Rural Life in Russia's Southern Urals
A
visit to Asikei in the Ural Mountains, where Europe merges with Asia
Jon
Hellevig
17
February, 2015
Too
often when we read about rural Russia we are served with accounts of
gloom and doom. Both the domestic Russian as well as Western critics
of the country habitually counter any data about progress in the
Russian economy and social life by saying that all life ends 20
kilometers beyond the Moscow outer ring road. There we would
supposedly find the dismal truth about a poverty-stricken and sad
Russia. With this in mind, I am sharing this account from my trip to
the village Asikei in the Urals Mountains. I am sure Asikei is not
the sole exception of a life -asserting experience; rather, this is
Russia.
The
village Asikei is cradled in a valley in the middle of the Southern
Ural Mountain range, precisely where East meets West, where Europe
merges with Asia. Eastward from these mountains we enter the
vast expanses of Siberia and to the west there is European Russia. We
made the trip in three hours from Ufa, the capital of Russia’s
Bashkortostan, a bustling modern city with contemporary high-rise
buildings and a population of more than one million. But it was only
in 1984 that they built the 250-kilometer long road winding through
the foothills of the Urals from Ufa to Beloretsk. Before the
road was built the villagers made the trip to the district center
Beloretsk, with its 70 thousand inhabitants, on horse and carriage or
sleigh, the latter being the only option for half of the year when
the whole area is covered in a thick layer of snow. We entered Asikei
twelve kilometers before the road reaches Beloretsk.
Asikei
is cradled in a valley in the middle of the Southern Ural Mountain
range
I
had joined a Moscow-based Russian-Bashkir family travelling to their
native village for the extended New Year’s holidays. This was my
third trip back, having been there once earlier in the winter and
once in the summer. The place fascinates me by its merger of forms of
life that have not changed much in the last few hundred years,
perhaps five hundred, and a gradually progressing modernity. Before
the road of 1984, the village had been electrified by the Soviet
government and people already had televisions. In the Soviet times,
the village had operated a collective farm with one thousand cattle,
making use of some of the basic technology of the period, but apart
from that there was not much modernity around.
Peak
time traffic in Asikei
Now
things are changing rapidly. Gas heating was introduced in 1993; in
2006 the village was connected to the fixed line telephone system
which also brought cable Internet. In 2013, one of Russia’s main
mobile operators, Beeline, set up a base station in Asikei, bringing
mobile phone access to its 400 inhabitants and all the data
transmission features that come with it.
All
the modern technology and communication devices provide a startling
contrast to the traditional way of life the villagers lead. The
villagers produce the majority of all food they consume. Most
households run their own animal husbandry, keeping horses for work
and meat, lambs, chicken, geese, and cows for meat, milk, cheese, and
various other fermented dairy products, cheeses, qatiq,
their brand of yogurt and kurut,
a dried qatiq for
long preservation. They grow all their own potatoes and vegetables,
including tomatoes, cabbage, cucumbers, garlic and a fantastic sort
of sweet onion. The tomatoes, cabbage and cucumbers appear on the
table in pickled or salted form all through the winter. Several sorts
of berries are collected in the summer and autumn and are preserved
as jam or simply naturally frozen. People usually bake their own
bread, so very little will have to be bought from stores. Flour
is bought for sure, for the bread and the dough for wrapping minced
meat in pelmeni dumplings,
which are staple festive food throughout Russia, or the grander
variety called manti, popular
in the cuisines of most Turkic peoples. What else? Salt, sugar, tea,
rice, some condiments. Even the animal feed is provided courtesy of
the Ural Mountains.
The
animals feed on the natural grass of the Urals even in the winter
The
people of Asikei are ethnic Bashkirs. According to credible sources,
their genetic heritance would stem from a mixture of Turkic people
and common ancestors to blond Finnish type people -with a later
addition of Mongoloid types stemming from the Turko-Mongol warriors
from the heirs of Genghis Khan to Tamerlane during the period of the
Golden Horde of the 13th to 15th centuries.
Interestingly,
in the genetic lottery all of these types appear from generation to
generation even in the same family lines. Some of the children are
blond as Scandinavians in their early childhood and become darker
when approaching ten years.
Precisely
these Ural Mountains are considered the legendary home of the
Finno-Ugric peoples. And although that has in the last decades been
cast in doubt by Finnish scientists – no doubt due to political
considerations that seek to anchor Finns in the European mainstream –
I am convinced that people who have spoken a Finno-Ugric ur-language
have lived in those territories. Be that as it may, I felt that I had
returned to my roots, the first Finn getting back there since Marshal
Mannerheim.
Riding
in the Urals Mountains, I had a brief feeling of the presence of the
illustrious Finnish general, Marshal Mannerheim
Finns
also share with the Bashkirs and Russians a love for the sauna, the
hot steam cabins. I was initially amazed that all households in the
village had their own sauna, precisely as people in the Finnish
countryside do. I was the more amazed when I noticed that there is no
difference between them. Finns want to pride themselves on having
invented the sauna but that is certainly not the case. I am sure that
the invention would not have travelled all the way from Finland to
the Bashkir people in the Urals, so clearly there is another common
denominator. Russians think there is a difference between a Finnish
sauna and the Russian variant they refer to as banya,
but the original bath cabin in the villages is exactly the same in
both countries. What confuses people is the electric version that has
spread to hotels and health clubs around the globe. This one is
referred to as a Finnish sauna, although it is only a bland urban
convenience modelled from the original.
The
Bashkirs adhere to the Muslim faith, but seem to live quite
secularly, rather like most European are Christians without a
traveler detecting conspicuous manifestations of it in their public
behavior. Whereas we would have a church in a village, Asikei has a
mosque, and whereas many of our names are derived from the saints of
the Church, Bashkirs commonly have names with Islamic or Arabic
roots.
The
village mosque surrounded by the patriotic symbols of Russia and
Bashkortostan
The
people are extremely hospitable. Anybody is welcome at any time of
day and night. You may have a vague notion of agreeing on a reunion
but that serves merely as a general idea, and whatever time you pop
in and without regard to how many guests are with you, everyone is
treated to a full Bashkir feast. If you are not familiar with the
traditions, you must watch out because more and more food keeps
coming, like on a Cypriot meze.
Most
meals started with some boiled horse meat or beef or both. Sometimes
the meats would appear oven-cooked, or barbequed in the summer. The
taste of these meats is very different from what we are used to in
Europe, as the cattle is totally free range raised and eat nothing
but the mountain grass and weeds they come across in their roaming or
are provided for in the cold winter days. You would also have on the
table sour cabbage and all other sorts of pickled vegetables. Having
over indulged yourself with the meats you are treated to freshly
cooked pelmeni or manti
– sometimes
both.
One
of our many hostesses, Alhu Mustafina catering for us in the kitchen.
She is also the part time village librarian.
Irresistible.
But that’s not all. Just as you thought you are done with dinner,
in front of you appears a lamb stew or some other meaty soup or broth
with noodles or potatoes.
Next,
you absolutely must also try the plov,
the Uzbek version of a risotto or paella. The rice of the plov is
slightly drenched in lamb fat which makes it especially appealing on
a cold winter day with temperatures of minus 20 or lower.
On
one of the many meals
The
most exciting foods for me were the various homemade, totally natural
sausages of horse, beef and lamb. Sampling the sausages, I really
felt I was brought back to a time long since lost for modern
Europeans who are fed low-quality artificial toxic faux-sausages
consisting of soybean flour, refuse parts of the animal, chemicals,
preservatives and colorings. I felt truly sorry for the EU Euroids
when I was eating the all-natural liver and pluck sausages, or the
100% whole meat lamb sausage. At the same meal I got to taste four or
five variants of these savory sausages and as I write I cannot
remember which was my favorite as each one that pops into my mind
momentarily takes first place. Now I am thinking of the kazy, a horse
meat sausage seasoned with pepper, garlic and oriental spices and the
sister variant kazylyk,
which sometimes was so fat as to remind one of the
Ukrainian salo (salted
pork fat or lard), but this is of horse. So tasty.
By
the time we came to the desserts, I had already truly given up and
mustered my courage to politely say I was full, although that was a
hard decision, again looking at all the freshly baked treats and
chocolates.
It
occurred to me that with all this natural food people probably did
not suffer allergies. Asking to verify this, I got the reply that
they had read about such a phenomenon.
In
between every second bite a toast was proposed consisting of ice cold
vodka shots. Although, I must admit that I vastly preferred the
homemade moonshine variant, which is distilled from bal,
a slightly inebriating homebrewed fermented drink, which is very
tasty in itself. The problem here is that you must make the
rounds from house to house; one day I counted six such full festive
meals at different places. Polite as I am, I tried to please each
host with trying everything at every house. Fortunately, I learned to
become a bit tougher as the days passed.
All
the small things are meticulously maintained in Asikei, here a neatly
painted covered well and a bus stop
Most
households have a member that works in the nearby town and thus
supplies the cash needed for whatever must be bought. Salaries in the
area are low indeed but so is the cost of living, and considering the
self-sufficiency provided by subsistence farming and animal
husbandry, the general standard of living is reasonably good.
Interestingly, retired persons in rural Russia are generally better
off than their city dwelling peers, because the pensions are the same
across the country, but cost of living in the countryside is a
fraction of the cost of living in the city. I actually came across
retired people who said they don’t have any need for money as they
continue to live in their traditional ways. It even seems that these
pension contributions are a source for investment in the education of
grandchildren.
And
educate themselves they do. The family I stayed with had one son who,
having finished his lower level legal degree and was working as a
court bailiff, was studying for the higher diploma. The younger son
was enrolled in a prestigious paid boarding school in the regional
capital Ufa (regular schools are free of charge). A cousin staying
over for the holidays was just about to finish one of the most
respected engineering universities of the country, the Ufa State
Petroleum Technological University, having already secured an entry
level job at one of the major oil corporations.
Azamat
Mustafin (furthest left) is finishing his engineering degree in Ufa,
his cousin Fedan Mustafin goes to a boarding school in Ufa, their
cousin Evgeny Isaev is a lawyer and general manager for a law firm in
Moscow, Dayan Mustafin (furthest right) brother of Fedan is studying
in Beloretsk for his higher law degree. Picture taken in a pizzeria
on the road back from Abzakovo ski center, half an hour from Asikei
In
general, the village provides ample evidence of the opportunities of
upward social mobility in Russia with several of its sons working as
judges, doctors and businessmen in the capital Ufa.
The
Bashkirs are bilingual in the Bashkir language and Russian, and
throughout Bashkortostan you see street and other official signs in
Bashkir and Russian, the Bashkir first. This strikes me as
extraordinary in the face of the Western narrative that Russia is
supposedly suppressing its ethnic minorities. It is doubly
interesting in view of the fact that the Bashkirs actually make up
only 29.5% of the total population of Bashkortostan (2010 census),
less than ethnic Russians, which form 36%. A further 25.4% consists
of Tatars. In the post-Soviet period, Bashkirs have also been most
prominently represented in the Government of the republic, its
present and former presidents being ethnic Bashkirs. What a contrast
with Ukraine, which has conducted an extreme nationalist policy of
suppressing the Russian language even in territories with an
overwhelming majority of Russian speakers.
Me
with Fedan and his great uncle and aunt Muzavir Mustafin and Fagilya
Mustafina in front of their fairy tale house
Inside
the gate of the Mustafins’ house there was a whole household or
farm of the kind I associate with movies depicting life 500 years
ago. Typically this would be the case in the village behind the well
lined ornamental walls
The
Russian way of mutual respect for different ethnic nationalities of
the country seems to be the correct model, as I clearly sensed that
the Bashkirs feel a Russian national identity on top of their Bashkir
entity. It was common to spot the symbol of Russian patriotism, the
St. George Ribbon, in cars or in houses. People talked about
defending Russia and even about a wish to join as volunteers to
protect the oppressed people of Donbass.
The
picturesque houses reminds a Westerner about a setting from Dr.
Zhivago. Hollywood could not do it better
There
is the village post office
Fedan
in the village library
The
capital of Bashkortostan, Ufa, will host the combined summit of the
military political, economic and military organizations BRICS and the
Shanghai Cooperation Organization . What more symbolically
appropriate place than Ufa could one possibly find for these events
where Europe meets Asia!
Do
svidaniya, Asikei!
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