Huge Unknown World
Articles about notable places, phenomena, events, adventures, meetings, activities, travels
№3
Gas, Internet and MTV
(lyrical fantasy)
Once I was talking with a young, progressive Muscovite who lives for the magazines "OM" and "PTYUCH", goes to a certain club and reads incomprehensible books.
In the middle of the conversation, she admitted, elegantly flicking the ash off her long cigarette with her index finger, that she had never been anywhere except Sweden, England, and Australia. She didn't take Moscow into account, and that's understandable - she had lived here since birth. "What's it like, I wonder, in the hinterland?" she asked, looking thoughtfully into the smoky distance of an expensive café, and I choked on my beer. "It seems to me that outside Moscow, everyone wears felt boots, stokes the stove, and sits around without money."
In my drunken head I figured that somewhere in Ryazan people go for firewood in the morning, creaking in old felt boots, and freeze at night from the cold, envying the bears for sleeping in the winter. A few days later, having finished my studies at the institute, I was already sitting on a train that was taking me south five hundred kilometers from Moscow. The end point of my mini-trip coincided with a settlement called Krasnoye, which is in the Lipetsk region. I chose it by chance, guided only by aesthetic preferences - the name is painfully beautiful.
After spending thirteen hours on a slow and bumpy train, I got off at the chosen station. The station was empty - it seemed that no one lived there, except for sleepy dogs scurrying between the tracks in search of food. I did not find any traces of felt boots, if only because it was mid-June. After fifteen minutes of agonizing hesitation, I met an old woman who, it turned out, was going to the market in the village. Her name was Klavdia Stepanovna.
Having learned that I had come here for purely educational purposes, and not journalistic ones, she began to praise this place and at the same time regret that I was not a journalist for some major newspaper, otherwise she would have laid out our entire government on the shelves. The village turned out to be large and unusually beautiful - the name did not deceive. It is here that the smallest reserve in Europe is located - Galichya Gora, where you can see elks, foxes, and villagers tired from a working week.
People love to relax here. They go to the Don to the reserve with a supply of soaked meat for shashlik and banal vodka. The youth here turned out to be unusually curious - at the very first disco they knocked me down and asked where I was from. A stranger is immediately seen here, and if you do not give a worthy answer, you can end up without a couple of front teeth. A few minutes later I was already sitting and talking in the company of local youth under the quiet rustling of park trees and the gurgle of poured moonshine.
And the conversation was not cheerful. Peers complained that there was nowhere to go and nowhere to let loose. They entertain themselves only with the local flammable liquid, which is sold in every third house. There is a disco, and even then not always, but it is democratic: the music here is varied and not strictly specialized, like in Moscow. Sometimes, however, there are fans of heavy music, who sometimes make a micro-revolution, sweeping away all the DJs, and then extreme pounding explodes over the rural plains.
In general, after school, many young Krasnoye residents strive to move far away, to some big city like Moscow, Voronezh or nearby Lipetsk. Most do not return. I met only one patriot of his small homeland, Sanya. "Well, - he said, - I'll study at Selskokhozyaistvenny, become an agronomist, and come here to rebuild the village. And there's nothing to do in the city - there are only bandits there. Moreover, we already have the Internet and MTV." Yes, in an ordinary Russian village there is the Internet. Now you can get access to it from any nearby village. So "OM" and "Ptyuch" are read here at the same time as that Muscovite I know. And MTV is shown around the clock.
Freezing in winter is simply not fashionable here - almost every house has gas. At night, after the noise of the disco, you can hear the screeching of wheels and the roar of motorcycles. The kids increase their adrenaline dose in wild rides on their dad's cars and their own motorcycles. And the older residents of the village have to let loose at the Friday markets, where you can meet all your acquaintances and friends and stare at the new goods. I left here with a feeling of incomprehensible melancholy and a head that has not been cured, imagining how I will tell my friend about a beautiful village where there is gas, Internet and MTV.
Andrey KREKOV
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