The abandoned villages of the Nizhny Novgorod region is a sad reality that you can see with your own eyes and take a picture. Why residents leave their homes, which leads to the desolation of entire settlements, this article will tell.
Nizhny Novgorod Region
Nizhny Novgorod celebrated its 795th anniversary. Throughout its existence, it has always been a major hotbed of political life and trade, and it is today. Being the administrative center of the Volga region, the city unites about 5,000 cities, villages and villages in the Nizhny Novgorod region.
Since ancient times, people have chosen the local beautiful places, famous for fish rivers, forests full of game, and arable land. Since the 9th century, the Slavs began to settle here, building small settlements and settlements. Since its founding in 1221, Nizhny Novgorod has been a stronghold and protection of Slavic lands from raids by unfriendly neighboring Ugric tribes, and by 1341 it became an independent Nizhny Novgorod-Suzdal principality.
Today in the region there are more than 400 large settlements and 3,000 villages. Unfortunately, time does not stand still and spares no one, as evidenced by the abandoned villages of the Nizhny Novgorod region (the photo below shows one of them).
To understand why this tendency is manifested, one should understand the status of the village and its functions as a unit of the administrative territory.
Village Status
Since ancient times, the so-called settlement of peasants. This is due not so much to the fact that in those days their huts were wooden, but to the fact that arable land and a sown cornfield were called a village. In addition to peasant villages, there were settlements of commercial hunters and fishermen, and the number of yards soon became the main criterion for the status of this type of settlements. As a rule, there were few of them - from 10 to 50 private houses with utility rooms and gardens, which were called yards.
The status of the village in those days was distinguished by the presence of such important institutions as the church and local government, the parish school and the feldsher point. With the advent of Soviet power, a tendency appeared to unite several villages into one collective farm, thereby enlarging the farms and the number of workers in it.
Today, there are no strict gradations of such concepts as “village” and “village”, since many of them have schools, kindergartens and churches. The status of a village is bestowed upon a settlement most often by the number of inhabitants living in them.
With the development of cities, abandoned villages in the same Nizhny Novgorod region became a familiar picture, but today the scale of this phenomenon is much wider than it was 100-200 years ago.
Why villages are empty
It just so happened that humanity's achievement of a certain level of development or, conversely, its absence led to changes in the social system and the emergence of new habitats or the destruction of entire civilizations.
The abandoned villages of the Nizhny Novgorod region are an example of how the lack of economic development affects entire settlements. But, as a rule, there are much more reasons for neglecting the region:
- In connection with the development of the industrial system and cities, Russian villages began to thin out on the map of the country 200 years ago. As soon as serfdom was abolished, many peasants gathered their belongings and went to the cities to seek happiness as workers in factories and manufactories. Today the same trend, but in connection with the reorganization of collective farms or their collapse.
- Currently, there are abandoned villages in the Nizhny Novgorod Region, whose addresses are still listed in the mail register and on the map, but in fact, no one has lived in them for decades. This happens because the outflow of youth from villages is a slow but constant process. The remaining old people live in their homes or move to the city with their children, which gradually reduces the population until the whole village is empty.
- Often, small towns are absorbed by the city or empty due to its proximity. For example, abandoned villages appeared in the Chkalovsky district of the Nizhny Novgorod region in connection with municipal transformations.
- Another reason for the disappearance of villages is the closure of enterprises or mines near which they were built. These include the abandoned villages of the Nizhny Novgorod region near the city of Volodarsk, for example, the village of Dalniy. It was once inhabited by peat mining workers, but in the mid-80s it ceased to exist due to the suspension of peat extraction. Now nature dominates here and is gradually taking away what people once robbed of it. Everything was overgrown with grass and bushes, and the houses were dilapidated.
- A person is so arranged that at all times he seeks comfort and stability, therefore a house in a village almost always loses a city apartment with all amenities. So the villages of Spassky District, Nizhny Novgorod Region, Vysokovo, Dyuzhakovka, Krasny Mary, Skuchikha, Syromyatnikovo and Yablonka, whose residents moved to places where there is a demand for labor, became abandoned.
Less commonly, natural disasters such as landslides or dry lakes and rivers become the cause of the desolation of settlements. In the Nizhny Novgorod region there were no such serious problems, and the main reason for the neglect of the villages was the lack of work, roads, schools and conditions for a comfortable life.
Spassky District
This part of the Nizhny Novgorod region is located in its southeastern part and today is represented by eleven village councils, which include 44 settlements. Once there was a center of Nizhny Novgorod trade, which appeared due to the annual noisy, rich summer and autumn fairs.
Today, almost 10,000 people live in the region, most of which are engaged in agricultural activities.
In connection with the transformations, some settlements were enlarged and merged into municipal councils. The most distant and sparsely populated villages were left without residents who moved to larger settlements.
Chkalovsky district
Even before the construction of Nizhny Novgorod in the middle of the XII century, a settlement appeared on the right bank of the Volga, which was given the name Vasilev in honor of the son of Yuri Dolgoruky. The settlement guarded, like the Gorodets fortress on the opposite bank of the river, a water trade route. Sloboda safely "survived" to the present day, having received in the XX century a new name given in honor of its native Valery Chkalov.
Today, a little more than 20,000 people live in the district, of which 53% are in the district center. The municipal district has one city council and 9 village councils. Abandoned villages in the Nizhny Novgorod region are in almost all its parts, and this fate has not passed Chkalovsky district. This is due to the fact that residents of small villages prefer to leave for larger settlements if there is work for them. According to the census, over the past ten years the population has declined in the region by almost 5,000 people, which is very small nationwide, but for a small area this is a significant loss of workforce.
Ardatovsky district
160 km from Nizhny Novgorod is the Ardatovsky district, known for its arable land, thanks to which 90 collective farms were organized during rampant collectivization.
Today, the same situation is observed here: the abandoned villages of the Nizhny Novgorod region of Ardatovsky district are the result of the resettlement of former collective farmers to the district center, in which almost 57% of the region’s population lives.
The number of people leaving the region forever is from 200 to 500 people per year and the villages that are usually the first to suffer.
Abandoned objects of the Nizhny Novgorod region
It is commonplace in the world when villages and even small cities become empty, which are economically and financially dependent on an enterprise or a strategic facility that has been closed over time for some reason.
There are a lot of such objects in the country, and if you count all the abandoned villages of the Nizhny Novgorod region, the list is impressive. It includes villages such as Mauritius, which was empty due to lack of profit and the collapse of the collective farm in the 80s of the last century. The Yamka village was empty after a school was closed in it in the 60s of the XX century.
There are many such examples, and the tendency for ghost villages to appear was the mismanagement of farms on collective farms back in the Soviet era.
Interest in abandoned villages
The Novgorod region has all the natural resources to attract people who want to own land and work on it. It has everything: rivers with excellent fishing places, and forests full of game, berries and mushrooms, and fertile lands that are waiting for hardworking hands to process them.
Today you can notice a great interest of urban residents in abandoned villages. As a rule, they come as families, settle in vacant houses all summer, adults cultivate gardens, fish, and children spend time in outdoor games. After harvesting, temporary residents go back to the city.
Another interest in abandoned villages is among treasure hunters and antiquities. Since most of the villages of the region were founded in the period from the 14th to the 18th century, interesting artifacts, jewelry and utensils from ancient times may well be found under the buildings of the Soviet era.
Revival of the Russian village
If you believe the scientists who claim that history repeats itself, then maybe someday people tired of urbanization will want silence and clean air, and this will become a revival of villages in the Nizhny Novgorod region.