A idyllic vision of life on the edge of Europe

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

Russia Insider,

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.

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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!