summed up her community’s rise and fall: “We came in 1979, and
everything was new and beautiful; the roads were good; the loggers were
taking trees out day and night. Life was good to us. Then, perestroika
came and everything was ‘reorganized.’ Who needs Sobolonye now?
Nobody does.”
The Middle Bikin National Forest Enterprise died a slower death than
most, first pulling out of Sobolonye around 1992, and then out of its
sister village, Yasenovie. By 1994, the operation had retreated to Verkhny
Pereval, where it shut down altogether, leaving the residents of
Sobolonye with two stark choices: they could abandon their homes and
social network on the off chance they would find something better
elsewhere (an unlikely prospect in mid-1990s Russia). Or they could stay
and live off the land in defiance of a system of laws that seems
strategically designed to punish the poor.
At this point, Markov was in his early forties; he had spent more than
half his adult life in Sobolonye and he had made some good friends there.
He had also made some serious commitments. Because of this, and
because the forest offered him and his neighbors a measure of security
that nothing else in Russia could match, he decided to stay, along with
about 250 others. What emerged over the next fifteen years was a kind of
feral community, left largely to its own devices. In this sense, Sobolonye
offers a foretaste of a postindustrial world.
By 1997, the village of Sobolonye, then only twenty-five years old, was
already falling into ruin. Though still inhabited, it had the feel of a ghost
town, a place where the boom had busted and the life drained out, leaving
the survivors to struggle on in a desolate, man-made limbo. By then, the
rec center had burned down, along with a number of houses, including
Markov’s. The family moved to another house, but very little had
survived the fire. As if in response to the prevailing spirit of decay, the
two-story brick building that housed the diesel generator began
crumbling in on itself. And yet the generator continued to rumble away
inside, like a stubborn heart in the dying body of the village. Danila
Zaitsev and a few others, including Markov, took shifts, sleeping next to
it in a decrepit trailer, nursing it along.
ron
(Ron)
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