GRANDMA NADIA AND HER DAIRY OLIGARCH
The villagers know Granny Nadia (Nadiya Brunets) as someone who would skip all the household chores to help the local collective farmers sow sugar beets or harvest flax. In fact, she used to be a distinguished kolhosp team leader, repeatedly commended and awarded by Soviet authorities (including the most prestigious Order of Lenin). All that is left from those years of such enthusiasm are her government decorations (mostly confiscated by the grandchildren as exotic toys). Two weeks after the elections, they stopped buying peasants’ milk, and the 80-year-old woman found herself thinking like a statesman, trying to figure a way out of the situation.
“Say, old lady, what would you change in this country?” younger villagers asked her good-humoredly, watching her make cheese from her milk and feed it to the chickens every day.
Now the local procurement agency had not bought the village milk for more than a month, and the same was true of other villages, ever since they had lowered the price from 50 to 29-20 kopiykas per liter (35-30 kopiykas with the state subsidy). Actually, almost the whole Lokachi district had stopped supplying milk to the state. That way the pathologically patient (like most Ukrainians) villagers tried to prove to the “milk oligarch” that they were human beings, not mute masses. Pavlo Muzychuk, former collective farm brigade leader, currently in charge of milk procurements, says he refused to collect milk the following days, after studying the new price list, because he did not want a scandal.
The milk issue remains acute at Zhuravets and other villages. Baba (Grandma) Nadia says it is a bad trouble that they want to buy milk at such humiliating prices. If she were to meet with the “milk oligarch,” she would tell him that she had spent her youth as an Ostarbeiter slave, that she had dedicated the best years of her life to the collective farm, that she had outlived her husband, that her daughter had left Zhuravets for Belarus where she now lived better, even if with six children to support; that the former distinguished collective farm team leader, now eighty, had to keep a cow to survive, although she could no longer tend it and had to hire a herder. Until recently what she was paid for milk had been an addition to her meager pension. Pavlo Muzychuk says that peasants with two cows and milk with high fat content used to earn over 200 hryvnias a month. A woman in Movchany, a neighboring village, had three cows and daily supplied a whole milk can, making 500 hryvnias a month. In early April, he had collected 170 liters of milk at Zhuravets alone (with its 40 homes and 25 cows) and expected to increase the amount to 200 liters any day.
Does this mean that the state is so rich it needs this milk no longer?
TEACHER WITH BLACK HANDS
Baba Nadia feeds her homemade cheese to the chickens or gives the milk to her sister who has no cow. Zoya Sokoliuk, a teacher in the primary school in Kholopyche, gives her milk and cream to her colleagues free of charge. She has two cows of 35 in the neighborhood. Two cows is trouble she could well do without except that the state has placed schoolteachers like her in a position where you have to keep a cow to survive. Every morning she walks five kilometers to her school in Kholopyche, then five kilometers back. And there are a host of household chores to do, so she calls herself a teacher with black hands.
“Why do they pay so little for our milk? It is so good that, after a cup with a piece of bread, you feel as though you had a hearty meal,” she says, although she knows why. Pavlo Muzychuk twice visited Poland this spring. They pay a zloty per liter, not less. Even in Lviv oblast, a short ride from Lokachi district, the cost of milk remains stable: 55 kopiykas, never 35, which would be is an insult.
“Half the village will come to see you before you know it. They will think that some official bosses are visiting us,” we were told on the road by Olena, a clerk with the village council. Indeed, there was a neat rally by the former village club (actually, the reason for our visit, as we wanted to know how the woman formerly in charge of the club still kept it in one piece without being paid anything; but then we learned about the milk problem and it seemed more important).
A former collective farm brigade leader complained about 600 hectares (!) of good soil at Zhuravets lying fallow this spring, as they had for several years. Other villagers tried to figure out how they would go about plowing that land — if and when — what with a young forest growing and birch groves, such thick underbrush, and all the German graves overgrown with weeds. With what? And the kind of flax they used to grow, and potatoes, rye, wheat what nice farms they used to have, breeding horses, sheep, and countless chickens. And then someone on high came up with the imbecile idea of land in reserve, so there it was, staying idle and actually being wasted. “Yet you have to pay the cashier 40 hryvnias for a centner of hay which is just two bundles,” Muzychuk pointed out angrily.
Baba Nadia was sure that the Ukrainian state could be saved by strict discipline, to which voices in the crowd replied that what we actually need is another Stalin or even Osama Bin Laden. They would straighten things out overnight.
Others remembered what a certain Semen Tur had to say, after a couple of drinks: “People are a labor force; they can build and ruin things, they’ll do as they’re told.”
A VILLAGE WHERE FLOWERS NEVER BLOOM AND CHILDREN ARE NOT BORN
The busy Volodymyr-Volynsky highway is five kilometers from Zhuravets. After riding for about ninety minutes you are in Poland, but here time seems to have stopped, then started to move backward.
“We bought bricks and are now trying to figure out where to start building,” says Zoya Sokoliuk. “This village is doomed, the last home was built seventeen years ago. If nothing changes it’s going to become just a large farmstead.”
Almost every second home is inhabited by an old woman or remains deserted. The grade school was closed this year, because the building threatens to collapse any moment. Over a dozen children have to walk to neighboring villages through the forest. Paradise on earth! Zhuravets is actually one long street with a small lane amidst a pine forest (after half an hour the crystal clear air made me, a veteran urban dweller, see stars jumping in front of my eyes). Lots of strawberry and mushrooms (people from all over the administrative district come to pick the local masliuk variety, which is especially abundant here). The villages bordering on Zhuravets are known as the Lockachi Polissia, because the soils, environs, and populated areas are so very different from the rest of the district. In Kysylyn, a neighboring village, for example, the pear and apple trees bear no fruit. No one knows why. In Zhuravets, flowers planted by the homes do not blossom, except the early spring varieties. The last wedding party took place about five years ago — and not a local one, simply the young couple’s parents living in Lutsk had relatives in the village and took advantage of the scenic environs.
Everything used to be different. The club was so popular that young people would come riding cars, motorcycles, even combine harvesters not only from all the nearby villages, but also from the Rozhyshche and Turyisk districts. Once those that could not get inside (the club was small) pulled out the window frame, so they could have a better view of what was happening inside, and Liudmyla Holubko, the veteran club manager, did not notice. She recalls that she could always come to terms with the village youth, staying at the club until three or four in the morning if necessary. “I’d just put together a couple of armchairs in the library next door and doze.”
Zoya Sokoliuk remembers that Liudmyla Holubko was a good manager and upheld discipline. No one was allowed to smoke at the club, let alone come drunk. She would stop the music, turn on the lights (the young preferred dancing in semidarkness at the time), and order the smokers or drinkers out.
The district’s first discotheques also appeared at Zhuravets. And the concerts and plays they used to stage! “With her in charge we were all actors,” Zoya recalls nostalgically.
Remarkably, Baba Nadia was a reputed actress (on the local scale, of course). She would leave all her chores aside to come for a rehearsal. First, they performed in propertied peasants’ barns — under the first Soviets (Soviet rule was enforced in Volyn in 1939, and then the second came in 1944).
“I could perform even now,” the old woman laughs at the memory.
When it was time for Liudmyla Holubko to retire, the district culture department staged a gala show starring a Liubystok rock group popular all over Volyn. It happened five years ago, just as “cultural work” was being driven down the drain, with “cultural workers” being a quarter of their previous salaries or given the pink slip. For the past five years she has been the club’s “housekeeper,” storing the most expensive equipment at home, seeing that no one smashes the windows and making those that do fix them. But for her, the club would have long been with empty windows. By the last election she painted the club walls and washed the floor so clean everyone thought it was freshly painted.
“I wish someone took the keys and kept the club going,” the former distinguished cultural worker says.
Indeed, the club premises are kept clean and fully operational, and there are still people living in the village. The last electoral roll showed 76 names, including quite a few young residents, including a dozen young fellows fresh from the army. They are unmarried. And there is a girl that would make a perfect club manager (she is still unemployed). And the club could regain its popularity, attracting people from other villages without clubs or where the clubs have long been closed. And then weddings would be celebrated again and children born. “My little home, its roofing is thatched, its walls are bent, / It’s small but neat and sweet, because it’s all my own,” Baba Nadia recited a poem she had learned at a Polish school seventy years ago, forgetting all about the milk problem, even if only for a moment.
* * *
“Whole villages and village councils, the better part of the district, refuse to supply milk,” Viktor Zahorsky, chairman of the Lokachi district council, comments on the situation. “A man from the dairy factory told me they don’t care, that milk doesn’t pay off; they are looking for a market and don’t know what to do with the products they have.”
“Will they buy milk if the people agree to sell at that miserable price, 35 kopiykas a liter?”
“Yes, and people will agree, because not all will be willing to spend the summer having a cow and earning nothing at all.”
