To the west of Moscow there are almost no old villages, roads and residents
The Second World War was the most devastating for Russia in its entire history. “Throughout the land, there was no plowman behind the plow, but only crows were playing at the corpses of the fallen” - a steady phrase from The Lay of Igor's Campaign quite adequately describes the post-war situation in Russian villages west of Moscow. The country was rebuilt, villages and collective farms were rebuilt again - but these were already other villages with other people, connected by new roads.
The ruins of old villages - settlements - and ancient roads-tracts are forgotten and do not attract anyone except jeepers and trackers. Like fallen soldiers, Russian villages killed in the war remain unburied.
“In the 1930s, the USSR was proud that our country was the first in the world to provide a continuous coverage of the territory with topographic maps on a scale of 1: 25000. After the war, it turned out that these maps immediately and sharply outdated - they had to re-shoot. And pre-war maps were often ordered to be simply thrown away,”- said in his lectures the associate professor of the Department of Physical Geography of the Moscow State Pedagogical University. Lenin, topographer Evgeny Arzhanov.
Nobody went from there since the war
The village of Kamenka, Kholmsky District, Novgorod Region. Nearby is a huge, 50 kilometers in diameter, Rdeisky moss swamp, in the middle of which there is an abandoned monastery on the island. Now a lonely hermit lives there all year round, and until 2005 no one lived since the war. Only metropolitan travelers go to Rdeyskoye - in winter, on snowmobiles and prepared ATVs. Local
- they are afraid: “Nobody has traveled here since the war. And don't, there is nothing good there."
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The road to the Rdeysky monastery is scary. It has long been overgrown. As, for example, the old Gzhatsky tract, built for the transportation of bread during the reign of Mother Catherine, and during the war years served as a front-line rokada for both the Germans and ours. For the first time in our time, an off-road expedition took place along this route in 2007. Its participants said that the villagers greeted people who had arrived along a long overgrown road with superstitious fear.
The road map in the western part of the USSR changed dramatically after the war - dirt roads were restored in asphalt and taking into account new realities and new priorities. Where the old highways and highways were of no use to anyone, they were abandoned and from the 60s they were simply overgrown with grass.
Only wide glades in the forests, which are not yet completely overgrown with young trees, but in some places in the fields of the embankment, remind of the old roads. A couple more decades will pass - and those who will live on these lands will consider the roads abandoned after the Great Patriotic War to be as fabulous antiquity as the legendary "Serpent Shafts".
Bricks and nettles
Not more remains of the ancient villages and hamlets. For many of them, the war was the final point of 200-, 300-year history: when the front rolled twice through the villages of Belarus, Smolensk, Oryol and other regions, most of the settlements were turned into ruins.
“In the summer of 1941 we fled from Smolensk - by vegetable gardens, the roads were already cut off - and passed through many villages and villages. We were everywhere - women with children - received and fed, although everyone was madly afraid of the approach of the Germans and were going to leave. Now none of these villages is gone, I once traveled, but found nothing. Some of the stoves are sticking out,”Vitaly Russak, a resident of Smolensk, who was a child who found the war, told the SP correspondent.
It was not advisable to restore all settlements from scratch - therefore, the regional authorities decided which village to restore and which one to abandon. Yes, most of them have been restored - but many villages from the "key", the most important ones have become peripheral villages, and since the 1960s they have completely died out.
Nowadays a settlement - that is, a former village or a village - can sometimes be recognized only by the thickets of nettles (a plant that grows near dwellings) along the old road. In some places, the skeletons of furnaces rise from the thickets, and occasionally come across a lonely and, as a rule, a stone church destroyed by the war. The rest is gone - it has decayed, burned down, taken away for firewood.
Orlovtsy from Siberia
And the people living in the places where the war was going on are for the most part different. Not the descendants of those who were burned and crushed by the Germans, who found themselves under occupation and were taken to work in Germany, who burned down and died already during the liberation of the village
Soviet army. Only a minority of the old Oryol, Smolyan, Belarusians survived the war in their places and in the end greeted the winners with flowers.
And after the war, these lands - fertile, inhabited - were re-populated, but with completely different people. People came to Minsk from Moscow, Leningrad, Siberia and Kazakhstan; Smolensk was restored by residents of the Volga region. Central farmsteads of black earth collective farms, new agro-towns were settled by newcomers. These people then flocked to good owners of this land, but all the same - they were other people.
Maps of the western regions of the USSR before the war and a few years after it are maps of two different countries. In fact, after the war, in many regions, the country was not only rebuilt - it was rebuilt. Villages were built, collective farms were organized, people were brought in.
The scale of this project is now impossible to even imagine. As well as the qualifications of its authors: to assimilate such a number of visitors from other regions so that after a generation they will acquire the identity of their new land - Smolensk, Orel, Belarus … To rethink all logistics at the level of entire regions and in a few years to build not first-class, but quite a decent road network … Finally, organize construction on such a scale! For the current Russian state, which is building one Olympic city, one federal highway and one innovation center with the whole world, always behind schedule, this is unimaginable. And two or three generations ago in Russia they knew how.
By the way, the secret of mass housing construction was quite simple. The authorities did not build the villages centrally: the inhabitants of the villages under construction were simply given the right to cut timber, and the cartels' artels were allowed to work. Elementary, isn't it?
Anton Razmakhnin