vlad.tribnet.com / Issue #146 / Business / Reading article...

Despite abundance around Kavalerovo, villagers struggle to make ends meet in a land of alcohol abuse and dwindling population...

In the lush valleys of Kavalerovo, fat cows stand idly in the road and neat dachas burst forth with summer fruit. But many locals are malnourished, and more are dulling the pain of existence with alcohol in this central Primoryan region.

To the outside observer, it’s confusing. How can people go hungry in a place with fertile gardens and long, sunny days?

But the answer lies within Kavalerovo’s verdant hills: tin ore, once prized but now no longer worth mining.

The Russian government has been shutting down unprofitable mines across Primorye for the last five years. Kavalerovo presents a stark picture of how people outside Vladivostok are coping with the tumultuous changes in their lives since the Soviet Union’s fall.

Under communism, the ore extraction sites and processing plants employed thousands, giving small Primoryan villages an axis around which every aspect of their lives revolved. Now, in many areas, life is at a standstill.

The Soviet Union, trumpeting manual labor and the aristocracy of the people, gave Kavalerovo miners a good life for 50 years, locals say. Store shelves were always well-stocked, sometimes even with goods not available in Vladivostok, 275 km away. Dedicated miners got annual trips to sanatoriums, and they got generous pensions when they retired.

“When there was a wedding, everyone in the village celebrated,” says Lyudmilla Ogloblina, who spent summers in Rudny, about 15 km from the town of Kavalerovo.

Now, Rudny residents worry more about surviving than throwing parties for 5,000. The loss of the mines and plants has hurt virtually everyone here, even those not associated with the industry.

“I’ve lost 18 kilograms in the last two years,” says Nadezhda Bobeyko, 44, a cashier in one of the city’s two large grocery stores. But a look at the shelves makes it all clear. Besides a selection of grain, some alcohol and canned food, there is little for sale. “They should close the kiosks,” Bobeyko says angrily. “All anyone buys there is vodka.”

Bobeyko hefts two thick log books to show how many village residents are in debt to the store. She says children now go from door to door asking for food.

Denis Sotskov, 11, doesn’t knock on doors. He eats one meal per day at the local kindergarten; his unemployed mother cannot feed him and his sister. For his birthday in May, he got two rolls, two jars of jam and a cap. Denis’ ruddy summer tan keeps him from looking like a refugee.

“There are no jobs here,” says the Rudny village administrator, Valery Rukin. He says seventy percent of the present population is now receiving a pension, and that at least 1,000 people have left since 1995.

Those who are employed wait for their salaries. I spoke to no one who had been paid in the last six months — including teachers, doctors and repairmen.

Of course, this is because the only jobs left in the Kavalerovo area are with the cash-poor government. In Rudny, the movie theater, restaurant, bar and several grocery stores are gone.

The solution for those with a bit of capital and a lot of energy is “commerce,” or buying things elsewhere and selling them at a profit locally.

Larisa Belokon began selling shoes she buys in Vladivostok about three years ago, when her husband was diagnosed with a lung ailment common to miners here. She says his lungs are so bad that doctors have forbidden him from working in the mines again.

So Victor, 47, who worked 15 years as a technical engineer after graduating from the Mining University of Moscow, now does odd jobs at home. “I run the entire house,” says Larisa. “Everyone obeys me.”

Once a month, Larisa drives eight hours each way to Vladivostok, where she buys Italian-made shoes to sell in her two stores in Kavalerovo.

She complains that business is bad and that she will have to close a slow kiosk in Rudny, but her family is doing comparatively well.

They built their own two-story dacha along a stream not far from Rudny. There’s a banya and separate living quarters for Larisa’s mother Vera, 70. They have a hothouse for tomatoes and a separate area for growing ginseng, which Larisa hopes to start selling soon. And they pay $4,000 a year for a private education for Vanya, 17.

Larisa admits that she pays the mafia a protection fee but that “so far, they haven’t bothered me yet.”

A couple of “traders” in Kavalerovo actually credit the mob with their success.

Oleg and his brother Alexander make enough money to live comfortably, but not extravagantly. Oleg, a cheerful 22-year-old who transports vodka, pays for his and his wife’s college in Vladivostok. He’s a loving father to his 18-month-old son, but he insists that the Mafia is a modern necessity.

“I’m doing this so that my son can live honestly,” says Oleg.

Alexander, who worked in the mines five years before opening his own stores in Kavalerovo, says the Mafia is the only group he can count on for protection from criminals and payment from debtors. He and Oleg say the police are too corrupt to help them.

The brothers allow that there is widespread poverty in the area; most of Alexander’s customers are pensioners — the only ones getting paid regularly here, it seems. But they are enthusiastic supporters of Governor Yevgeny Nazdratenko, as are most other people interviewed for this story.

Nazdratenko spent most of his career as manager of a factory in Dalnegorsk, 60 km from Kavalerovo.

“Of course I support Nazdratenko,” says Nikolai Globa, 38, a maintenance man who says he doesn’t keep track anymore of when he last got paid. “I think he could help the region, but they just don’t give him the freedom,” said Globa.

Even a proud, ailing Communist finds kind words for the governor.

“He doesn’t help much — but he’s a good guy, says Mikhail Gorozhabin.

The former ventilation specialist, 68, also suffers from the lung disease. Although he worked 40 years in Soviet mines, he doesn’t make enough of a pension, so he spends every day tending his sheep, cows and garden, raising his own food for the year.

While doctors in Rudny and Kavalerovo deny it, Gorozhabin is convinced that almost every miner in Rudny dies of the lung disease he has, called silikos in Russian. He lists gruesome anecdotes about his acquaintances: A woman who married seven times because her mining husbands kept dying; the Communist “hero of labor” who dropped dead after getting his reward, a friend who died at 45 after begging for death.

Boris Pratsenko, Kavalerovo’s chief physician, says he hasn’t noticed any rise in the disease, but then he also hasn’t seen any rise in alcoholism. The children of Rudny disagree.

The stories they tell might recall American inner city life.

Ivan Krisko, 10, has an uncle in jail for murdering a man and attacking a woman. He says his parents, both teachers, are often drunk.

“Most people here are drunk,” Ivan says. He complains about an old couple next door who keeps him up every night with their drunken fighting.

“You have to be careful of going into the dark places,” says Ivan’s friend, Sasha Khomutov, 9. “Drunks and junkies always hang out there.”

And it isn’t just the alcoholism, but the collapse of the old, quiet ways that is hard for locals.

When two teenage friends recently reunited, the conversation between the girls consisted of who was now pregnant, who had had an abortion, who was getting married.

Lyudmilla Ogloblinas, 19, asked Olga, 17, why she had let herself get pregnant and then married.

“It doesn’t matter,” said Olga resignedly, looking out the window. “Besides, he really loves me.” Olga lives with her husband Sergei in Dalnegorsk. They are both unemployed.

Later, Oleg, the spunky vodka trader, waxes philosophical as we fly over Kavalerovo’s roads in the truck he uses for work.

“Yes, the simple people are losing out, but I believe in 10 years maximum we will have a golden age. By the way, do you want to buy a tiger skin? I know someone who knows someone who shot one and he wants to sell it for $3,000.”

Back in Rudny, Pasha Kostenko, who is small for his nine years, accepts a handful of crackers happily. Although he will probably eat only once today, he offers the crackers to everyone he passes.

The next day, he sits with his listless, frail sister, Natasha, 21, at the bus stop. They insist they’re going to Kavalerovo. But although several buses pass, they don’t get on.