Pinega. Bread, water and biscuits

“Will you have dinner?”  Rimma Petrovna asks, running past me to the kitchen. It's about 11 o'clock in the morning. Half an hour ago the dawn broke. In the silence of a winter morning, her bare steps on the wooden floorboards echo loudly.

I wouldn't dare to call her an “old woman” or mark her age in any other way. In her youth, this girl used to fly around, and she continues to fly around as much as her health allows her. Pinega women, especially the elderly, always call each other "girls". They never get a chance to get old. They buried their husbands long ago, they need to chop firewood, carry water buckets, heat furnaces, clear snowdrifts, go to the forest, all on their own. 

I have no idea when Rimma Petrovna takes her time to cook, but from the Russian stove a cast-iron pan with solonina (fried potatoes with pickled mushrooms) comes up, the table gets filled with musyonka (flour porridge), some jams, pickles, steamed turnip, moistened radish, wilted tea prepared in a French press (“we collected it in the summer with my daughter and lined with it entire floor in the house when it was drying” comments Rimma), and then comes the king of the table, a rare product — "Jubilee" biscuits brought by someone from a city. This biscuit box is almost the only thing bought for money, all the rest is grown, collected, salted, preserved by Rimma herself. “Take more biscuits, don't hesitate, come on!” — Rimma Petrovna pushes me to the valuable delicacy. 

How in the world has a "Jubilee" biscuit become a luxury? How has bread become a luxury? How, after all, in a village located next to Pinega river, has water become a luxury?

I remember this grocery store in Cheshegora. It is now closed for good, but back in 2011 it still worked. One hour a week. Its shelves were dreary, as in USSR of the late eighties. Still, the villagers regularly came to this store. After all, they could buy here some bread delivered from across the river!

An hour later, people flock from all corners of the village. There are about ten of them living in Cheshegora, and all are well over sixty. They walk slowly to the village center, where the grocery used to be, and where the last remaining light pole still illuminates a tiny circle around itself at nights. They walk past abandoned huts, dozens of courtyards covered with untouched snow, a shiny red payphone installed recently by the authorities and never used by anyone. They drag handmade sledges, old cradles from baby carriages — whatever one can use to pack the food and bring it home.

You need to buy more, because the “merchants” come only once a week, and they don't come when it storms. Cookies, bread, butter, frozen fish, wine ("wine" is for vodka here), tea, flour, milk, matches, some kind of sausages. What else. Oh, eggs. Well, that's enough. We will last a week.

It's January. The frost is harsh, -35 degrees Celsius (-31 Fahrenheit). The saleswoman in the back of the grocery truck is bending over a calculator and a cashier, counting money with her frozen fingers. People line up and close their faces with mittens to escape the cold.

A discussion is going on in the line:

- Petrovna, did you call Mishka? Why didn't he show up yet?
- He's drunk, can't walk really.
- What a fool, he gonna drink until he dies.

So, Mishka's left without food for a week.

The route of the mobile grocery is fifty kilometers long. The truck stops in five villages which have no groceries. In Kurga village lives one person. In Turiya village there is one person as well. Shasta has two. Cheshegora has ten. Kusogora is an exception, there are a couple of dozens of residents, and not all of them are pensioners. With this number of clients, the owner of the Karpogory store gets no profit from the mobile shop project. Even taking into account mad food prices, this looks more like a charity, and no one knows if the goodwill of merchant Viktor Bogdanov will last long.

The grocery truck doesn't enter Kochmogora anymore: the village is empty.

In Shasta, right next to the highway hunter Nikolai lives with his wife, and no one else. Thirty years ago, about two hundred families lived in this village.

The last stop of the mobile grocery in Kusogora village is the longest one. The village is located on a hill high above Pinega river. The truck driver, Nickolay, a hefty good-natured person, walks away from the truck and stares intently across the river, then turns to me. “There it is, my village, Chakola. I come from there. I can even see my house. Ah, but I'm not visiting Chakola anymore. I just stand here and look from afar. It's a pity…"

Something's wrong with the water in Cheshegora village. No one knows exactly what happened, but, according to the locals, “feces got into the water”, and for last several years it is unsuitable for drinking.

Mikhail doesn't believe in the rumors about water. He checks its quality with a nut on a rope. If the nut makes circles as it moves, it's safe to drink it. If the nut goes across, just don't drink.

Mikhail was born and spent his childhood in Cheshegora, then he moved across the river to Pyrinem village, and recently retired and returned to Cheshegora. "It's just easier to live here. At least you can get to the district center". Bus service to any of the villages was closed three years ago, and one can only get to Cheshegora by a private car, but Pyrinem is also across the river. There are no roads on that side, and it's much more difficult to get there. 

Rimma Petrovna and most of her neighbors don't drink from the well. Once a month her grandchildren bring her water in cans. Some villagers get water from Pinega, but it's quite a walk. The river is about 2 kilometers away from houses, and the banks are high and steep. Everyone invents their own workaround.

Inventing workarounds, surviving, perceiving extreme conditions as the norm has long become a habit here. As summer comes, preparations for winter begin. First of all, you need firewood. A woodpile should contain enough firewood for the next two winters at least, that's a rule. Then you go to the forest and harvest berries, mushrooms and herbs. You patch the house and bath. You grow potatoes, cabbages and carrots in your garden. Each winter is a circumnavigation. You need to prepare seriously to survive it without loss.

Maria Ivanovna Skomorokhova. This tractor, described in the newspaper from 1968, became her curse. "My husband Vasily was driving this tractor across a steep slope. He was a very experienced driver but he flipped the machine and it crushed Vasily to death. Right after we buried him, the collective farm director said: We cannot give you another tractor, Maria. You gonna keep working on this one. Well, I cried, of course, but I got behind the wheel and began to work, what could I do".

How many battles were there in the collective farms: for harvest, for workers, for every spot of land that can be plowed. Hectares of collective farm fields surrounded each village. There were stockyards, tractors and harvesters. Everything is abandoned. The whole Pinega district, which is 1.5 times larger than Israel, has three farms. It would seem logical to support these farms by distributing their products through the regional chains, but all tenders get won by powerful Vologda food enterprises. Local farmers are left with an option to go from door to door and offer milk to the villagers. This doesn't work well simply because Vologda milk is cheaper. 

Each farmer on Pinega is a special case. Kostya  is a special case, too. He is a young enthusiast who moved several years ago from St. Petersburg to one of the most remote villages of Pinega district to become a farmer. 

The lack of communication is his only complaint. It's not easy for him to get understood by local people. He has issues with those who get back to their village for summer vacations. They consider themselves the true owners of these places and are not happy with Kostya's initiatives. At the same time, those who live in the village all year round willingly help without taking anything in return. They also express their concerns as they see how fresh he is to rural life: “He didn’t prepare enough firewood. He doesn't want to repair the hay ramp... How is he going to survive here?”

Leonid Skomorokhov  is Kostya's closest friend among the locals. He helps him all the time. "There's just one problem: it is impossible to thank him," says Kostya. "It's ridiculous! One day I poured him a glass of milk, so the next day he tried to pay me for it!" Leonid lives in the neighboring village of Shotogorka and works in the district center as a cargo guard at the Karpogory railway station. Leonid took me to Kostya. The road was so bad that even his UAZ 4x4 got stuck at times. It was winter time. In spring and autumn the road becomes a mess. In spring and autumn Leonid walks to his workplace on foot. It's 35 kilometers one way. At 4am he leaves the house to show up at 8am on the spot.

Leonid is a working pensioner. He used to be a professional hunter. 

It's -35 Celcius outside. Suddenly the car stalls and stops. "It's because the fuel has frozen in the tank" says Leonid. Leonid warms up the tank with a burner, pours spare diesel from a plastic bottle directly into the filter, releases the air from the fuel system. For him, this is a routine caused by inappropriate winter fuel sold in the region. 

There is no way to get help in the north. But also there's nobody who would interfere. It has always been like this here, with the exception of seventy years of Soviet regime. Surviving is incredibly difficult, and what seems trivial to the locals is actually a daily feat. In the name of what? Maybe in the name of the birthplace, a family home, and ancestors who lived here for hundreds of years?