Page 8 - C.A.L.L. #33 - Winter 2010/2011

Abandoning the metropolis for a better future

Russia’s new homesteaders: from city life to wilderness utopia

By Anna Nemtsova, special to Russia Now (http://rbth.ru/index.html)

November, 15 2010

Thousands of Russian professionals among 51 other families in the Land of
have lost hope for a better life in Plenty commune whose members range
cities. They have taken to the forests in age from one to 91.

to create their own utopias
independent of the state. The eco New communities of homesteaders

movement has increased several fold in have sprung up across some of the
recent years. most remote sections of Russia in the
past decade, including Siberia,

Yevgenia Pystina is a attracting thousands
medical doctor who of Russians in search

was once a scientist of a simple, self-
at the Novosibirsk sufficient and
Medical Institute, environmentally

the prestigious friendly lifestyle
research facility in free from state

Siberia’s largest control and big city
city. Three years ago, The Land of Plenty ecological commune in corruption.
her husband, a south-central Siberia offers an escape

concert pianist, told from city life The number of “eco-
her about some green communes,” as they

movement activists living off the grid are called in Russia, has grown
on communal land about 75 miles north dramatically in the last decade, and the
movement back to the land is drawing
of Novosibirsk, along the banks of the

Ob River. professionals weary of the country’s
corruption, pollution and new

“I laughed at his fairytale but he said, consumerism.
‘let me take you there, so you see with A tall, slim woman, with a long dark
your own eyes’” she recalled. “That is

how we arrived here and stayed.” braid, Pystina sings through her busy
day, stacking cabbage heads on her
Pystina, her husband, and her seven- veranda, pouring her honey in cans for

and eight-year-old daughters now live

8