"Happy people. Tuva. Old Believers." Old Believers of Tuva. Forgotten children of the taiga

Photographer and traveler Oleg Smoliy searches for and photographs everything good and beautiful that our country is rich in. He combined these shots into the “Unforgotten Russia” project, part of which were the photographs of Old Believer Siberian villages published below. And they are accompanied by the author’s heartfelt story about the people living there.

Having passed remote villages on the banks of the Small Yenisei - Erzhey, Upper Shivey, Choduraalyg and Ok-Chara - I met five large families of Old Believers. Always persecuted, the owners of the taiga do not immediately make contact with strangers, especially with a photographer. However, two weeks of living next to them, helping them with their daily hard work - harvesting hay, fishing, picking berries and mushrooms, preparing firewood and brushwood, collecting moss and building a house - step by step helped to overcome the veil of mistrust. And strong and independent, good-natured and hardworking people emerged, whose happiness lies in the love of God, their children and nature.

The liturgical reform undertaken by Patriarch Nikon and Tsar Alexei Mikhailovich in the 17th century led to a large-scale schism in the Russian Church. The brutal persecution of the tsarist and religious authorities, who wanted to bring the people to unanimity and submission, forced millions of Russian people to leave their homes. The Old Believers who kept their faith fled to White Sea, in the Olonets region and Nizhny Novgorod forests. Time passed, the hands of power reached the Old Believers in new places, and the seekers of independence went even further, into the remote taiga of Siberia. In the 19th century, Russian people came to the inaccessible region of the Small Yenisei, the Kaa-Khemsky kozhuun of Tuva. New settlements were founded on lands suitable for farming in the river valley, higher and higher upstream. Here, in the upper reaches of the Small Yenisei, the life and traditions of Russian Old Believers have been preserved in their original form.

We gathered on the road with a small team of photographing travelers, five of us. Quite far from Moscow. By plane to Abakan, then ten hours by car through Kyzyl, the capital of the Republic of Tyva, to Saryg-Sep, the regional center, there we change to a UAZ “loaf” and for another couple of hours we travel along forest roads to a point on the bank of the Small Yenisei. We cross to the other side of the river, to the Erzhey camp site, by boat. The owner of the base, Nikolai Siorpas, brought us in his UAZ. He will be lucky further, into the depths of the taiga, but you need to wait a day or two until the road at the pass, washed out by long rains, dries out.

Erzhey, next to which the base is located, is a large village with a population of up to one and a half thousand inhabitants, with electricity and a boarding school, where Old Believers from villages higher up the Kaa-Khem, as the Small Yenisei is called in Tuvan, bring their children. In the old faith, not everyone here is a villager. Some of the locals are close to her, but they are not part of the community; there is not enough strictness. There are also representatives of the new Orthodox faith. There are even complete non-believers.

It was not far to go see the village and buy food, less than a kilometer from the base. Siorpas, seeing him off, joked: “You can tell the Old Believers: men with beards, around the yard there are a dozen or so little kids, women in scarves and skirts down to their toes, in a year or two with a belly.”

Here is the first acquaintance: Maria, a young woman with a stroller. They said hello and asked where to buy bread and cottage cheese. At first she was wary of strangers, but did not refuse help, and even surprised them with her responsiveness. She took her all over Erzhey, showing who had the best milk and where the salted milk mushrooms were good.

Here, in villages remote from civilization, the harsh taiga nature has imposed its own characteristics on the way of farming. Summer in these places is short, and winter comes with severe frosts. Arable land is conquered with great difficulty from the forest, in the valleys along the banks of the river. Locals grow bread and plant vegetable gardens. Due to frost, perennial crops do not take root, but annuals, even small watermelons, grow. Taiga is feeding. Only ungulates are killed; the meat is eaten wild. They collect pine nuts, mushrooms, and berries for jam. The river gives fish. There are a lot of grayling here, and taimen are often released - they are last years became scarce.

Old Believers do not get drunk, they do not drink “kazenka” at all, and on holidays they drink a glass or two of weak homemade wine made with taiga berries, blueberries or boneberries.

After resting at the Siorpas base for a couple of days, we waited for dry weather and moved to the first settlement of the Old Believers - Upper Shivei, forty kilometers from Erzhey, with a difficult pass over the hills.

All the way to Shivey, Nikolai Siorpas, under the strained hum of the engine, convinced us to be super respectful and behave more than modestly, not to push people with our huge photo guns. He himself is not an Old Believer, but Nikolai developed good relations with the taiga residents, for which he reasonably feared. It seems that during these two days at the base he was not only waiting for the weather, but also taking a closer look at us and thinking whether it was possible to take us further.

We met the hard-working people of Upper Shivei long before the village, in a mowing meadow. They asked to help, throw cut hay into the tall haystacks.

We rolled up our sleeves, tried our best and still fell behind. The science of lifting large armfuls with long three-pronged wooden forks was not easy. While working together we got to know each other and struck up conversations.

Mown and dried grass is collected into buds - this is what the whole of Siberia calls haystacks. Laying them is a responsible matter: the hay must lie evenly and tightly so that it does not get scattered by the wind or become soured by the rain. Upper Shivei

Peter and Ekaterina Sasin arrived at the Upper Shivey estate, then empty, about fifteen years ago. The farm was raised from scratch, and at first they lived and wintered in a shed. Year after year they built, strengthened, and raised three daughters. Then other relatives came to settle, and now several families live here. The daughters grew up, moved to the city, and now their restless grandchildren - two girls and two boys - come to Peter and Ekaterina for the summer.

The Sasins’ grandchildren are completely worldly; they come for the whole summer. For them, Pyotr Grigorievich holds solar panels with a battery and a converter, from which it turns on a small TV and a disc player - to watch cartoons. Upper Shivei

The children who brought fresh milk and sour cream woke up our tent city with a cheerful noise. The second day, throwing hay on the crops is more difficult - all the muscles of the townspeople ache because they are not used to it. But the hosts’ faces are also warmer, with smiles, laughter and approval. “Tomorrow is the Transfiguration, come! Try homemade wine,” the villagers call.

The house is simple, no frills, but clean and well built. The spacious vestibule dividing the house in half, the rooms with whitewashed walls, large stoves in the middle, and iron spring beds reminded me of a Carpathian village, which has also largely preserved its way of life. “One at a time!” - says Pyotr Grigorievich, and we try the delicious drink. Blueberry juice is infused for a year without sugar or yeast, and the result is a wine with a barely noticeable degree. It's easy to drink and doesn't get you drunk, but it lifts your mood and enhances talkativeness. Joke after joke, story after story, song after song - we had a good time. “Would you like to see my horses?” - Peter calls.

The stable is located on the outskirts, there are two dozen horses, there are even pacers. And everyone's favorite. Petr Grigorievich can talk about each foal for hours.

We parted with the Sasins like old friends. And again we hit the road, by boat up the Small Yenisei.

It’s a half-hour motorboat ride up the river to the next stop. We found Choduraalyg on a fairly high bank with a spacious, cornice-like valley, the outermost houses standing directly above the river. The opposite shore is an almost vertical mountain covered with taiga.

The place here is convenient for farming, growing bread, and raising livestock. There are fields for arable land. River, nurse and transport artery. In winter, you can get to Kyzyl on ice. And the taiga - here it is, begins with hills on the edge of the village.

We sailed, threw our backpacks ashore and went to look for a convenient place to pitch our tents so as not to disturb anyone and at the same time have a good view of everything around. We met Grandfather Eliferiy, who treated him to freshly baked delicious bread and advised him to go to Baba Marfa: “Marfutka will accept and help.”

Marfa Sergeevna, thin, small and agile, about seventy years old, gave us a place for tents next to her small house with beautiful view both to the river and to the village. Allowed to use the stove and kitchen utensils. For Old Believers, this is a difficult question - sin comes from dishes that were taken by worldly people. Marfa Sergeevna took care of us all the time. We also helped her - picking berries, carrying brushwood, chopping wood.

Her youngest son, Dmitry, was in the taiga on business. The eldest daughter, Ekaterina, got married and lives in Germany, sometimes her mother comes to visit.

I had a satellite phone, and I suggested that Marfa Sergeevna call her daughter. “This is all demonic,” Grandma Martha refused. A couple of days later Dmitry returned, and we dialed his sister’s number, turning up the volume. Hearing her daughter’s voice, forgetting about the demons and throwing away her bow, Marfa Sergeevna ran across the clearing to Dima and me. It’s a pity, then she didn’t allow herself to be photographed yet, otherwise it would have turned out to be an interesting photo: a cute little village grandmother in ancient clothes stands against the backdrop of the taiga, beaming with a smile, and talking to her daughter in distant Germany on a satellite phone.

Next door to Marfa Sergeevna, further from the coast, lives the large family of Panfil Petenev. The eldest of twelve offspring, Grigory, 23 years old, called us to the place of children's games - a clearing in the forest outside the village. On Sundays, children from all nearby villages, dressed up, come running and coming on horses, bicycles and motorcycles to socialize and play together. The guys weren’t shy for long, and ten minutes later we were playing ball with them, answering a sea of curious questions and listening to stories about life in the villages, pampering bears these days, and a strict grandfather who drives all the children away for being naughty. They made us laugh with stories, were interested in technology, and even tried to take pictures with our cameras, posing tensely for each other. And we ourselves listened with pleasure to Russian speech as clear as a stream and enjoyed taking pictures of the bright Slavic faces.

For children of Old Believers, a horse is not a problem. By helping with housework, they early learn to communicate with pets.

It turns out that Choduraalyg, where we stayed, is called Big, and not far away, the road runs right past the playing field, there is also Small Choduraalyg. The children volunteered to show this second one, out of several courtyards deep in the forest. They drove us joyfully, on two motorcycles, along paths and paths, through puddles and bridges. The escort was dashingly accompanied by teenage girls on fine horses.

For a teenager in an Old Believers village, a motorcycle is a source of pride, passion and necessity. As befits boys, with the dexterity of circus performers, they demonstrated to the visiting photographer all the skill of controlling a two-wheeled motor miracle. Choduraalyg

In order to get to know each other better, start communicating and achieve the necessary level of trust that would allow us to photograph people, we boldly became involved in the daily work of Old Believer families. They have no time to chat idly on a weekday, but in business, talking makes work more fun. Therefore, we simply came to the Petenevs in the morning and offered Panfil help. Son Grigory decided to get married, he is building a house, so he found a job - caulk the ceiling. Nothing complicated, but painstaking. First, go to the other side of the river, along the mountains between the thickets, collect moss, put it in bags and throw it down the steep slope. Then we take them by boat to the construction site. Now go upstairs, and here you also need to bring the clay in buckets and drive the moss into the cracks between the logs, covering it with clay on top. We work briskly, the team is large: five eldest children of the Petenevs and three of us travelers. And younger kids are around, watching and trying to help and participate. We communicate at work, we recognize them, they recognize us. Children are curious, everything is interesting to them: and how in big cities they grow potatoes, and where do we get milk at home, do all the kids study in boarding schools, how far do we live? Question after question, some are difficult to answer, and this is understandable: our worlds are so different. After all, for children Saryg-Sep, the regional center, is another planet. And for us, city dwellers, the taiga is an unknown land with its subtleties of nature hidden from the unknowing eye.

We met Pavel Bzhitskikh, who invited us to visit, in Maly Choduraalyg, where we went with the children on Sunday. The path to it on Ok-Chary is not short - nine kilometers along the rocky, forested bank of the Small Yenisei. The estate of two courtyards impresses with its strength and thriftiness. The high rise from the river did not create any difficulties with water - here and there many springs gush out right in the courtyards, and clear water is supplied to the vegetable gardens through wooden gutters. It's cold and delicious.

The inside of the house surprised me: two rooms, a prayer room and a kitchenette retained the appearance and decoration of the monastic community that was once here. Whitewashed walls, wicker rugs, linen curtains, homemade furniture, pottery - all the nuns' household was natural, they did not communicate with the world and did not take anything from outside. Pavel collected and saved household items from the community and now shows them to guests. Extreme tourists raft along Kaa-Khem and sometimes drop by here. Pavel even built a separate house and bathhouse so that people could stay with him and relax along the route.

He told us about the life and rules of the Old Believers monks. About prohibitions and sins. About envy and anger. The latter is an insidious sin, anger multiplies and accumulates in the sinner’s soul, and it is difficult to fight it, because even slight annoyance is also anger. Envy is not a simple sin; envy breeds pride, anger, and deception. Paul talked about the importance of praying and repenting. And take on fasting, whether calendar or secret, so that nothing prevents the soul from praying and realizing its sin more deeply.

Not only severity reigns in the souls of Old Believers. Paul also spoke about forgiveness, about peacefulness towards other religions, about freedom of choice for his children and grandchildren: “When they grow up, they will go to study, whoever wants to. They will go out into the world. God willing, our ancient Orthodox faith will not be forgotten. Someone will come back, with age they think more often about the soul.”

From ordinary community members, not monks, the outside world is not prohibited; they take the Old Believers and the achievements of civilization, which help in work. They use motors and guns. I saw they had a tractor, even solar panels. To buy, they earn money by selling the products of their labor to the laity.

Paul read to us selected chapters of John Chrysostom, translating from Old Church Slavonic. He chose them so well that you listen with bated breath. I remembered the seal of the Antichrist. Pavel explained in his own way that, for example, all official documents registering a person are his seal. This is how the Antichrist wants to take control of us all: “In America, they are already going to sew some kind of electrical chips under the skin of every person so that he cannot hide from the Antichrist anywhere.”

From the “museum” he took us to the summer kitchen, treated us to honey mushrooms, smoked taimen, fresh bread and a special homemade wine made with birch sap instead of water. When we left, we bought a young turkey from Pavel and plucked it until late at night, laughing at our ineptitude.

We met the Popov children from Maly Choduraalyg on the day of their arrival at the playground. Curiosity led them to the tents every morning. They chirped happily and asked questions non-stop. Communication with these smiling children gave a charge of warmth and joy for the whole day. And one morning the children came running and invited us to visit on behalf of their parents.

On the way to the Popovs, there is fun - the younger three have found the blackest puddle with liquid mud, they are enthusiastically jumping in it and looking for something. Laughing mother Anna greets us: “Have you seen such grimy people? It’s okay, I’ve heated up the water, we’ll wash it off!”

The Popovs not only love their children, now seven, they understand them. The house is bright with smiles, and Afanasy began to build a new one - more space for the children. They teach the children themselves, they don’t want to send them to a distant boarding school where there will be no parental warmth.

Over the course of the meal, we quickly began talking, as if some invisible wave began to play in harmony and gave birth to lightness and trust between us.

The Popovs work a lot, the older children help. The economy is strong. They themselves carry food to sell in the region. We used the money we earned to buy a tractor and a Japanese outboard motor. A good engine is important here: on the Small Yenisei there are dangerous rapids, and if an unreliable old one were to stall, you could die. And the river feeds and waters, it is also a means of communication with other villages. In the summer they go by boat, and in the winter they drive tractors and UAZs on the ice.

Here, in a distant village, people are not alone - they communicate and correspond with Old Believers from all over Russia, a newspaper of the old faith from Nizhny Novgorod receive.

But they try to minimize communication with the state; they refused pensions, benefits and benefits. But contact with the authorities cannot be completely avoided - you need a license for a boat and a tractor, all sorts of technical inspections, permits for guns. At least once a year, you have to go get the papers.

The Popovs treat everything responsibly. Afanasy had an incident in his youth. He served in the army in the early 1980s in Afghanistan as an armored personnel carrier driver. Suddenly, disaster struck: the brakes of a heavy vehicle failed, and an officer died. At first the situation was determined to be an accident, but then high officials exaggerated it and the guy was given three years in a general regime colony. The commanders, regimental and battalion, trusted Afanasy and sent him to Tashkent without an escort. Imagine: a young guy comes to the prison gate, knocks and asks to be allowed to serve his sentence. Later, the same commanders achieved his transfer to a colony in Tuva, closer to home.

We talked with Anna and Afanasy. About life here and in the world. About the connection between Old Believer communities in Russia. About relations with the world and the state. About the future of children. They left late, with a good light in their souls.

The next morning we headed home - short term the trip was ending. We warmly said goodbye to Marfa Sergeevna: “Come, next time I’ll settle in the house, I’ll make room, because we’ve become like family.”

For many hours on the way home, in boats, cars, and planes, I thought, trying to comprehend what I saw and heard: what did not coincide with initial expectations? Once in the 1980s, I read in Komsomolskaya Pravda fascinating essays by Vasily Peskov from the series “Taiga Dead End” about an amazing family of Old Believers who left people deep in the Siberian taiga. The articles were good, as were other stories by Vasily Mikhailovich. But the impression of the taiga hermits remained as of people who were poorly educated and wild, who shunned modern man and were afraid of any manifestations of civilization.

The novel “Hop” by Alexei Cherkasov, read recently, increased fears that it would be difficult to meet people and communicate, and that taking photographs would be completely impossible. But hope lived in me, and I decided to go on a trip.

That’s why it was so unexpected to see simple people with inner dignity. Carefully preserving their traditions and history, living in harmony with themselves and nature. Hardworking and rational. Peace-loving and independent. They gave me warmth and joy of communication.

I accepted something from them, learned something, thought about something.

It is populated predominantly by Russians. Here, in the upper reaches of the river, in the remote taiga, in the second half of the 19th century, Old Believers fled from royal and church persecution in search of the unknown country “Belovodye”.

Constantly persecuted, the Old Believers were forced to move higher and higher along the Yenisei. New settlements were founded in the river valley, where there was at least a tiny piece of land for plowing. Therefore, historically, all villages were strung on the Kaa-Khem thread. It was here, in the upper reaches of the Small Yenisei, that the life, way of life and traditions of the Russian Old Believers, whom our team of travelers decided to get acquainted with, were preserved in their original form.

In two weeks, by car, boat and on foot, we traveled 1200 km to reach the most remote villages in the upper reaches of the Kaa-Khem: Erzhey, Upper Shivey, Uzhep, Choduralyg, Ok-Chary.

Photo: Natalia Sudets/website

The first stop on our way was the Old Believer village of Erzhey, or rather the tourist base of the same name a couple of kilometers from it. The owner of the camp site, Nikolai Vladimirovich Siorpas, transported us to the other side of the Small Yenisei and placed us comfortably in wooden houses on the river bank. We spent a couple of days here, waiting for the rain to stop and the road to dry, and at the same time sleeping off after a 24-hour trip by car from Abakan airport through Kyzyl, Saryg-Sep to Erzhey.

In order not to waste time, our team visited the village where local residents After meeting us, they willingly sold their own products: pickled mushrooms, homemade milk, bread. To be honest, we ate half a jar of mushrooms right there on the porch to the delight of the hostess; they turned out to be very tasty.

On the morning of the third day, Nikolai and I crossed back to mainland, loaded into the UAZ “loaf” and headed east through the pass to meet with the Verkhovskys, as they call the Old Believers in the upper reaches of the river, who are distinguished by a particularly strict way of life. 40 kilometers of a logging road, muddy from the rain, and we are at the Upper Shivey Zaimka.

Photo: Natalia Sudets/site Photo: Natalia Sudets/site Photo: Natalia Sudets/site

We met the head of the village, Pyotr Sasin, a strong man with a thick beard, at the entrance to the field, where he and his fellow villagers were in charge of harvesting hay.
- You live well! - Nikolai shouted to him from the window with emphasis on the second “o”. - I brought you helpers!
- Do they know how to throw eggs? - answered Peter. - If you didn’t hold a pitchfork in your hands, then it’s better not to interfere, we need to get it done before sunset.

Having received permission to participate in the common cause, we hastened to unload our things on the outskirts of the village near the river and returned back to the field, hiding the cameras in our backpacks so as not to frighten our new acquaintances.

They didn’t let us go to the haystack, where work was in full swing. We were given the go-ahead to collect the remains of hay in the field that the horse drawn by the rake could not pick up. An hour of full-time work in the company of curious children - and all the dry blades of grass from the ground were collected. It was possible to rest a little while waiting for a new task. We carefully took the cameras out of our backpacks, took a couple of pictures and showed the results to the little ones. The experience turned out to be successful - we found a common language with the younger generation.

Photo: Natalia Sudets/site Photo: Natalia Sudets/site Photo: Natalia Sudets/site Photo: Natalia Sudets/site

The next morning was the Feast of the Transfiguration, Sasin invited us into the house to talk and taste some berry mash. The dishes for the worldly are separate. Old Believers don’t serve food from their own, otherwise it will make you worldly and you’ll have to get out of the house. According to the calendar, it’s Lent, so there’s nothing meat on the table, just potatoes and mushrooms, and conversations about life.

Photo: Natalia Sudets/site Photo: Natalia Sudets/site

Peter and his wife Ekaterina moved to Shivey from the regional center in 1999. He is a fourth generation hereditary Old Believer. His great-grandfather traveled half the country, from Far East to Tuva, in search of a secluded place to preserve the faith. During the Soviet years, Peter himself worked as a forester in the Leskhoz, but after the collapse of the country he finally decided to leave the world and officials. He founded a settlement on the site of a village that died out in the middle of the last century, registered the land, started a farm, and breeds dogs and horses. I even once tried to breed a rare breed of horse, the “golden” one. But twice during his trips to the village, the herds were taken away by strangers.

Photo: Natalia Sudets/site Photo: Natalia Sudets/site

The Sasins' three daughters live in the village and send their grandchildren for the summer. The kids stick their noses into everything, strive to help in everything, and master the instrument. Despite his departure from everything worldly, Sasin, as a good businessman, although he lives by his own labor, does not disdain to enjoy the benefits of civilization. In addition to the tractor working in the fields yesterday and the motorcycle standing near the barn, we note solar panels on the wall of the house. There are only four of them, but the charge is enough for a separator and a VCR for the grandchildren. What fits into the concept of rational use is permitted. Hence, everyone whose boat is on the shore has Japanese outboard motors. You can’t go anywhere without a good motor: you can’t go fishing, or go to a village tens of kilometers away. And sometimes there is a need. You can't escape the world completely.

A few days later, Sasin and his son-in-law took us to the shore of Kaa-Khem to the crossing near the village of Uzhep, hidden behind the island. We are 15 kilometers upstream to the remote village of Choduraalyg. The only way there was by water, so Peter called the boat from Uzhep with three shots from a gun into the air.

Photo: Natalia Sudets/site Photo: Natalia Sudets/site Photo: Natalia Sudets/site

The once large Old Believer village of Choduraalyg was deserted by the efforts of the authorities in the 70s of the last century. Only the old nuns remained to live in a small monastery. But after the collapse of the USSR, old people came here from the city and lower villages, wanting to preserve the faith, and after them their children and grandchildren began to move here. Many children have already been born here.

Photo: Natalia Sudets/site Photo: Natalia Sudets/site

In Choduraalyg, people live according to the rules of the Old Believers, without a passport, registration, school and everything else “of the devil.” Knowledge in the form of sets of rules of the old, pre-Nikonovsky Scripture is obtained in Sunday school and from the caretaker of the monastic cell at the Ok-Chara estate from Pavel Bzhitsky. Many people cannot read and write. Yes, they don’t need it. The only children with three grades behind them were 23-year-old Grigory Pletenev and his younger sister Natalya, children of Panfil, the father of the largest family in the area.

Panfil has 12 children. One eldest daughter married in a neighboring area, the second went to a monastery. Grisha is the last of the children to leave the farmstead for the city. And his five younger sisters and four brothers with big world have never come into contact, except for rafting tourists, of whom up to twenty groups pass each day in the summer.

Photo: Natalia Sudets/site Photo: Natalia Sudets/site Photo: Natalia Sudets/site

The Old Believers have a small business with tourists in the form of selling milk, medicinal herbs, mash, bread, eggs and other products. But the main trade is with Kyzyl, where in the summer they take goods and hunting supplies by boat, and in the fall, when the ice freezes. They bring back boat motors, guns for hunting, and ammunition. Something that even the Old Believers cannot do without.
Photo: Natalia Sudets/website

From the children, rumors about the newly arrived worldly people spread throughout all the villages in a matter of hours. They already knew about us and met us, some with open interest, some with extreme caution.

During the expedition, we met six families of Old Believers, lived side by side with them and actively participated in their daily difficult work: we helped harvest hay, fished, guarded livestock, milked cows, collected berries, brushwood, moss, and participated in the construction of a house. .

Photo: Natalia Sudets/site Photo: Natalia Sudets/site Photo: Natalia Sudets/site

Due to the peculiarities of faith and culture, historically the persecuted owners of the taiga did not immediately make contact. It was not always possible to melt the ice of mistrust, but when it was possible, the townspeople were received warmly and cordially. Two weeks flew by. And when the time came to go home, we were surprised to discover that the Old Believers, who were initially distrustful, saw us off with sadness, providing us with gifts and good wishes for the journey.

Having passed remote villages on the banks of the Small Yenisei: Erzhey, Upper Shivey, Uzhep, Choduraalyg, Ok-Chary, I met five large families of Old Believers. Always persecuted, the owners of the taiga do not immediately make contact with strangers, especially with a photographer. Two weeks of living next to them, helping in their daily hard work - harvesting hay, fishing, picking berries and mushrooms, preparing firewood and brushwood, collecting moss and helping to build a house - step by step helped to overcome the veil of mistrust. And strong and independent, good-natured and hardworking people emerged, whose happiness lies in the love of God, their children and nature.

The liturgical reform undertaken by Patriarch Nikon and Tsar Alexei Mikhailovich in the 17th century led to a large-scale schism in the Russian Church. The brutal persecution of the tsarist and religious authorities, who wanted to bring the people to unanimity and submission, forced millions of Russian people to leave their homes. The Old Believers who kept their faith fled to the White Sea, to the Olonets region and the Nizhny Novgorod forests. Time passed, the hands of power reached the Old Believers in new places, and the seekers of independence went even further, into the remote taiga of Siberia. In the 19th century, Russian people came to the inaccessible region of the Small Yenisei, the Kaa-Khemsky kozhuun of Tuva. New settlements were founded on lands suitable for farming in the river valley, higher and higher upstream. Here, in the upper reaches of the Small Yenisei, the life and traditions of Russian Old Believers have been preserved in their original form.

Alone at home. Erzhey.

The place is far from the capital. By plane to Abakan, ten hours by car through Kyzyl to Saryg-Sep, transfer to a UAZ loaf and another couple of hours by forest roads to a point on the bank of the Small Yenisei. On the other side is the Erzhey tourist center, we cross by boat. The owner of the base, Nikolai Siorpas, brought us in his UAZ. He will take you further, into the depths of the taiga, but you need to wait a day or two at the base until the road at the pass, washed out by long rains, dries out.

Erzhey, next to which the base is located, is a large village, up to one and a half thousand inhabitants, with electricity and a boarding school, where Old Believers from villages higher up the Kaa-Khem, as the Small Yenisei is called in Tuvan, bring their children. In the old faith, not everyone here is a villager. Some people are close to the faith, but do not join the community; there is not enough rigor. There are those who are in the new Orthodox faith, and there are even complete non-believers.

With character. Petenev family, p. Choduraalyg.There is a Tuvan site next to Verkhny Shivei.

It turned out that it was not far to go see the village and buy food, less than a kilometer from the base. Siorpas, seeing him off, joked: “You can tell the Old Believers, men with beards, there are a dozen or so kids around the yard, women in headscarves and skirts down to their toes, in a year or two with a baby bump.”

Here is the first acquaintance, Maria with a stroller, a young woman. We said hello. They asked where to buy bread and cottage cheese. At first she was wary of strangers, but did not refuse help, and even surprised her with her responsiveness. She led them around the entire village, showing who had the best milk, where the salted milk mushrooms were good, and so on until they found everything they wanted.

Here, in villages remote from civilization, the harsh taiga nature imposed its conditions on the way of farming. Summers are short and winters are notoriously cold. Arable land is reclaimed from the forest, in the valleys along the banks of the river. They grow bread and plant vegetable gardens. Due to frost, perennial crops do not take root. But annuals grow, even small watermelons. Taiga is feeding. Only ungulates are killed; the meat is eaten wild. Pine nuts, mushrooms, and berries are collected for jam. The river provides fish, a lot of grayling. Taimen is often released - there has been little of it in recent years.

Old Believers do not drink alcohol, they do not drink “breech beer” at all. And on holidays they drink a glass or two of weak homemade wine made with taiga berries, blueberries or boneberries.

After resting at the Siorpas base for a couple of days, we waited for dry weather and moved to the first settlement of the Old Believers - Upper Shivei, forty kilometers through a difficult pass from Erzhey.

All the way to Shivey, under the strained hum of the engine, Nikolai Siorpas convinced us to be super respectful and behave more than modestly, not to push people with our huge photo guns. He is not an Old Believer himself, but he has developed good relations with the taiga residents, for which he reasonably feared. It seems to me that for two days at the base we not only waited for the weather, but he looked closely at us and thought whether it was possible to carry us further.

Grandfather Elifery and Marfa Sergeevna. Big Choduraalyg.

The hard-working people of Upper Shivei were met long before the village, in a mowing meadow. They asked to help, throw cut hay into the tall haystacks.

We rolled up our sleeves, tried our best, and still fell behind. The science of lifting large armfuls with long three-pronged wooden forks was not easy. While working together we got to know each other and struck up conversations.

The Sasins, Peter and Ekaterina arrived at the Verkhniy Shivey estate, then completely empty, about fifteen years ago. The farm was raised from scratch, and at first they lived and wintered in a shed. Year after year, they built, grew stronger, and raised three daughters. Other relatives came to settle, now there are several families here. The daughters grew up, moved to the city, and now their restless grandchildren - two girls and two boys - come to stay with Peter and Ekaterina for the summer.

Pavel Bzhitskikh. Small Choduraalyg.

The children woke up our tent city with a cheerful noise and brought fresh milk and sour cream. The second day, throwing hay on the crops is more difficult - all the muscles of the townspeople ache because they are not used to it. But the hosts’ faces are also warmer, with smiles, laughter and approval. “Tomorrow is the Transfiguration, come! Try homemade wine,” the villagers call.

The house is simple, no frills, but clean and well built. Spacious vestibules dividing the house in half, rooms with whitewashed walls, large stoves in the middle, iron spring beds - reminded me of a Carpathian village, which has also largely preserved its way of life. “One at a time!” - says Pyotr Grigorievich, and we try the delicious drink. Blueberry juice is infused for a year, without sugar and yeast, resulting in barely noticeable alcohol content. It's easy to drink and doesn't get you drunk, but it lifts your mood and makes you talkative. Joke after joke, story after story, song after song - we had a good time. “Would you like to see my horses?” - Peter calls.

Fences are made from whole logs and fastened without nails. Big Choduraalyg.

A stable on the outskirts, with two dozen horses, there are even pacers. And everyone's favorite. Pyotr Grigorievich can talk about each foal for hours.

We parted with the Sasins like old friends. And again we hit the road, by boat up the Small Yenisei.

It’s a half-hour boat ride along the river with a motor until the next catch. We found Choduraalyg on a fairly high bank with a spacious, cornice-like valley, the outermost houses standing directly above Kaa-Khem. The opposite shore is an almost vertical mountain covered with taiga.

The village of Choduraalyg is at an altitude of about 800m above sea level, and here in the morning clouds fall in the form of fog.

The place is convenient for farming, growing bread, keeping livestock. Fields for arable land. River, nurse and transport artery. In winter it’s possible to travel on ice to Kyzyl. Taiga - here it is, it begins with hills on the edge of the village.

Small Yenisei, or in Tuvan Kaa-Khem.

We sailed, threw our backpacks ashore and went to look for a convenient place to pitch tents so as not to disturb anyone, and at the same time have a good view of everything around. We immediately met Grandfather Eliferiy, who treated him to freshly baked delicious bread and advised him to go to Baba Marfa: “Marfutka will accept and help.”

Marfa Sergeevna, thin, small and agile, about seventy years old, gave us a place for tents next to her small house, with a beautiful view of both the river and the village. Allowed to use the stove and kitchen utensils. For Old Believers, this is a difficult question - it is a sin to use dishes that were taken by worldly people. Marfa Sergeevna took care of us all the time. We also helped her - picking berries, bringing brushwood, chopping wood.

The youngest son, Dmitry, was in the taiga on business. The eldest daughter, Ekaterina, got married and lives in Germany, sometimes her mother comes to visit.

The calm river creates sandbanks, while on the stormy Kaa-Khem the sandbanks are rocky. Over time, the shallows turn into taiga islands.

We had a satellite phone and suggested that Marfa Sergeevna call her daughter. “This is demonic,” Grandma Martha refused. A couple of days later Dmitry returned, and we dialed his sister’s number, turning up the volume. Hearing her daughter’s voice, forgetting about the demons and throwing away her bow, Marfa Sergeevna ran across the clearing to Dima and me. It’s a pity, then she didn’t allow herself to be photographed yet, otherwise it would have turned out to be an interesting photograph: a small, pretty village grandmother, in ancient clothes, standing against the backdrop of the taiga, beaming with a smile, talking to her daughter in distant Germany on a satellite phone.

The hard-working Grigory Petenev returns for another batch of bags of moss to build a house. Big Choduraalyg.

Next door to Marfa Sergeevna, further from the coast, lives the large family of Panfil Petenev. The eldest of twelve children, Grigory, 23 years old, called the children to the place where they played - a clearing in the forest outside the village. On Sundays, children, dressed up, come running and coming on horses, bicycles and motorcycles from all nearby villages to chat and play together. The guys were not shy for long, and after ten minutes we were playing ball with them, answering a sea of curious questions and listening to stories about life in the villages, pampering bears these days and a strict grandfather who drives all children away for being naughty. We laughed with stories, were interested in technology, and even tried to take pictures with our cameras, posing tensely for each other. And we ourselves enjoyed listening to the Russian speech, clear as a stream, and enjoyed photographing the bright Slavic faces.

The Sasins’ grandchildren are completely worldly; they come for the whole summer. For them, Pyotr Grigorievich keeps solar panels with a battery and a converter, from which he turns on a small TV and a disc player - to watch cartoons. Upper Shivei.

It turns out that we stopped in Choduraalyg, which is called Big, and not far away, on the road past the clearing, there is also Small Choduraalyg. The children volunteered to show this second one, out of several courtyards deep in the forest. They drove us joyfully, on two motorcycles, along paths and paths, through puddles and bridges. The escort behind us was dashingly carried by teenage girls on fine horses.

The sisters asked to tie the horses, and they immediately ran to their friends. A playground between Small and Big Choduraalyg, where children gather on Sundays.

In order to get to know each other better, start communicating and gain the necessary level of trust that allows us to photograph people, we boldly became involved in the daily work of Old Believer families. They have no time to chat idly on a weekday, but in business, talking is more fun. So they simply came to the Petenevs in the morning and offered Panfil help. Son Grigory is thinking about getting married, he’s building a house, and now the work is caulking the ceiling. Nothing complicated, but painstaking. First, go to the other side of the river, along the mountains between the thickets, collect moss, put it in bags and throw it down the steep slope. Then we take it by boat to the construction site. Now go upstairs, and here you also need to bring the clay in buckets, and drive the moss into the cracks between the logs, covering it with clay on top. We work briskly, the team is large: five eldest children of the Petenevs and three of us travelers. And younger kids are around, watching and trying to help and participate. We communicate at work, we recognize them, they recognize us. Children are curious and want to know everything. And how they grow potatoes in big cities, where we get milk at home, whether all the children study in boarding schools, how far away we live. Question after question, some find it difficult to answer clearly - our worlds are so different. After all, for children Saryg-Sep, the regional center, is another planet. And for us, city people, the taiga is an unknown land with its subtleties of nature hidden from the unknowing eye.

Growing up boys look for their wives in other Old Believers villages. They leave for half a year, sometimes for a year. Masha was matched in a distant village Krasnoyarsk Territory. Erzhey.

We met Pavel Bzhitskikh, who invited us to visit, in Maly Choduraalyg, where we went with the children on Sunday. The path to the Ok-Chara settlement is not close, nine kilometers along the rocky, forested bank of the Small Yenisei. The estate of two courtyards impresses with its strength and thriftiness. The high rise from the river did not create any difficulties with water - here and there there are many springs right in the courtyards, and clear water is supplied to the gardens through wooden gutters. The water is cold and tasty.

There was a surprise in the house: two rooms, a prayer room and a kitchenette, had retained the appearance and decoration from the times of the monastic community. Whitewashed walls, wicker rugs, linen curtains, homemade furniture, pottery. The nuns’ entire economy was subsistence; they did not communicate with the world and did not take anything from outside. Pavel collected and preserved household items from the community and now shows them to the guests. Extreme tourists raft along Kaa-Khem, sometimes they stop by, and Pavel even built a separate house and bathhouse so that people could stay with him and relax along the route.

A useful technique in winter when you need to tow huge hay loads. We raised money for the tractor using the entire loan. We bought it in the regional center, it was old but working. To cross the stormy Shivey River, a temporary bridge was built, which was washed away by the first flood. Upper Shivei.

Pavel spoke about the life and rules of the Old Believers monks. About prohibitions and sins. About envy and anger. Anger is an insidious sin, anger multiplies and accumulates in the soul of a sinner, and it is difficult to fight, because even slight annoyance is also anger. Envy is not a simple sin; envy breeds pride, anger, and deception. How important it is to pray and repent. And take upon yourself fasting, whether calendar fasting or secretly self-imposed, so that it does not in any way prevent the soul from praying and realizing its sin more deeply

Not only severity reigns in the souls of local Old Believers. Paul spoke about forgiveness, about peacefulness towards other religions, about freedom of choice for his children and grandchildren. “When they grow up, they go to study, whoever wants to. They will go out into the world. God willing, our ancient Orthodox faith will not be forgotten. Someone will come back, with age they think more often about the soul.”

Pyotr Grigorievich Sasin and his horses. Upper Shivei.

From ordinary community members, not monks, the outside world is not prohibited; they take the Old Believers and the achievements of civilization, which help in work. They use motors and guns. I saw a tractor, even solar panels. To buy, they earn money by selling the products of their labor to the laity.

He read to us selected chapters of John Chrysostom, translated from Old Church Slavonic. So you chose that you listen with bated breath. I remembered the seal of the Antichrist. Pavel explained in his own way that, for example, all official documents recording a person are his seal. So the Antichrist wants to take control of us all. “Look, in America they are already going to sew some kind of electrical chips under the skin of every person so that they cannot hide from the Antichrist anywhere.”

From the “museum” he took us to the summer kitchen, treated us to honey mushrooms, smoked taimen, fresh bread and special homemade wine made with birch sap instead of water. When leaving, they bought a young turkey from Pavel and plucked it until late at night, laughing at their ineptitude.

The Petenevs' daughter, Praskovya. Playground.Granddaughter of Pavel Bzhitsky in the monastery hut. Ok-Chary.

We met the Popov children from Maly Choduraalyg on the day of their arrival at the playground. Curiosity led the children to the tents every morning. They chirped merrily and asked questions non-stop. Communication with these smiling guys gave a charge of warmth and joy for the whole day. And one morning the children came running and their parents invited us to visit.

On the way to the Popovs there is fun - the younger three have found the blackest puddle with liquid mud and are enthusiastically jumping in it and looking for something. A laughing mother, Anna, greets us: “Have you seen such grimy ones? It’s okay, I’ve heated up the water, we’ll wash it off!”

Dima Popov. Small Choduraalyg.The younger Popovs found a wonderful puddle of black mud.

During the meal we quickly started talking, as if some invisible wave began to play in harmony and gave birth to lightness and trust between us.

The Popovs work a lot, the older children help. The economy is strong. They themselves carry food to sell in the region. We used the money we earned to buy a tractor and a Japanese outboard motor. A good engine is important here - on the Small Yenisei the rapids are dangerous, if an unreliable old one stalls, you can die. And the river feeds and gives water, it is also a route of communication with other villages. In the summer they go by boat, and in the winter they drive tractors and UAZs on the ice.

Here, in a distant village, people are not alone, they communicate and correspond with Old Believers throughout Russia, they receive a newspaper of the old faith from Nizhny Novgorod.

But they try to minimize communication with the state; they refused pensions, benefits and benefits. But contact with the authorities cannot be completely avoided - you need a license for a boat and a tractor, all sorts of technical inspections, permits. At least once a year, you have to go get the papers.

The Popovs treat everything responsibly. Afanasy had an incident in his youth. He served in the army, like many in the early 80s, in Afghanistan, as an armored personnel carrier driver. A disaster occurred, the brakes of a heavy vehicle failed, and an officer died. At first it was determined to be an accident, but the situation was exaggerated by high officials, and the guy was given three years in a general regime colony. The commanders, regimental and battalion, trusted Afanasy and sent him to Tashkent without an escort. Imagine the situation: a young guy comes to the prison gate, knocks and asks to be let in, to serve his sentence. Later, the same commanders achieved the transfer of Afanasy to a colony in Tuva, closer to home.

Morning over the Small Yenisei. Big Choduraalyg.

We had a good talk with Anna and Afanasy. About life here and in the world. About the connection between Old Believer communities in Russia. About relations with the world and the state. About the future of children. They left late, with a good light in their souls.

The next morning we headed home - the short trip was over. We said a warm farewell to Marfa Sergeevna. “Come, next time I’ll settle in the house, I’ll make room, because we’ve become like family.”

From the nearby hill there is a wonderful view of the villageBig Choduraalyg.

For many hours on the way home, in boats, cars, planes, I thought, trying to comprehend what I saw and heard, which did not coincide with my initial expectations. Sometime in the early 80s I read in “ Komsomolskaya Pravda” fascinating articles by Vasily Peskov from the “Taiga Dead End” series. About an amazing family of Old Believers who left people deep in the Siberian taiga. The articles are good, as are other stories by Vasily Mikhailovich. But the impression left about the taiga hermits was that they were poorly educated and wild people, who shunned modern man and were afraid of any manifestations of civilization.

The novel “Hop” by Alexei Cherkasov, read recently, increased fears that it would be difficult to get acquainted and communicate. And it may be impossible to take photographs at all. But there was hope, and I decided to go.

I accepted something from them, learned something, thought about something.

Thank you for your attention!
Oleg Smoliy.

The upper reaches, the valley of the Old Believers, is the Sizimsky sumon, there are four settlements in it: the village of Sizim, the arbans of Erzhey, Ust-Uzhep, Katazy, and a dozen towns (farms). The number of monasteries is not exact. According to papers, there are 228 households in the sumon, more than 800 inhabitants, approximately a thousand Russian people, Old Believers of the Chapel Concord.

From the Usinsky tract (the wonderful Abakan-Kyzyl road) you go to the southeast, and a little more than a hundred miles from the capital of Tuva - although intermittently, in a dotted line, there is asphalt to Ust-Buren. I passed by a village with traces of a vanished civilization: against the backdrop of wooden huts inhabited by people - white stone cowsheds with tall windows, now broken, the indispensable Lenin, here he is in a hat with earflaps (temperature range - one hundred degrees from the absolute maximum to the minimum, minus 60), honor boards with the main fellow countryman - Sergei Shoigu. Further roads are conditional. There are none in spring and autumn. In the summer you might be lucky if a gold miners' grader passes by again, which happens; There are ferry crossings along the way. From December to March the winter road is wedged. There were and are no roads to remote settlements and hermitages. Now you can only go there by boat - and these are rapids, shivers, rifts, clamps, cheeks. In winter - on snowmobiles. They also get to their taiga: each family in the taiga has an inherited plot of tens of square kilometers, where the head of the family hunts in winter. The sites are located far from villages, near which animals are not killed and forests are not cut down. And they don’t cut down trees near the winter hut—they move deeper into the thicket. You won’t notice the huts from the river, although they are located on the bank. The paths are barely distinguishable. The same goes for monasteries. They go to the elders and elders, but do not trample the paths.

They say: the higher you go along the Yenisei, the stronger your faith. You can’t check it, but what you see with your own eyes is that the higher you go along the Yenisei, the worse the roads become, until they disappear completely. But it is wrong to deduce an inverse relationship between the strength of faith and the accessibility of the world. Here one consciously leaves the world for the desert - a secluded area - first faith, then the monastery. Desert living is an ideal here, a “spiritual paradise.”

How many years are left for the invisible country with alternative Russians?

Iron Stream

Photo by the author

The 410-kilometer railway link Kuragino-Kyzyl (and further to the Elegest coal mines) for the export of minerals from Tuva has been talked about for many years. The Ulug-Khem basin is called upon to replace the depleting Kuzbass. And those interested in the road are no less than those who do not accept and fear it (but who ever cared about the opinion of the aborigines). The Russian government approved the project in 2007. And the road had to open more than once. In 2012 - according to the Development Strategy railway transport Russia until 2030. According to a later government plan - in 2016.

In June 2011, Ruslan Baysarov became the owner of the Elegestinsky coking coal deposit, and Moscow indicated its readiness to get down to business. By that time, Putin had not yet caught the famous 20 kilo pike in Tuva, but he was already carrying grayling and lenok here with the Prince of Monaco, after which he shared: “I have never seen such gorgeous, powerful nature anywhere. I don’t want to say any pompous words, but this is a very strong impression. I’ve been to a lot of places and seen a lot of things, but I’ve never seen anything like this before.” Nevertheless, in December 2011, Putin drove the first golden spike into the first sleeper.

Since then, the horse has never fallen, and besides that crutch, only one kilometer of tracks have been built near Kyzyl. Last year at the Eastern Forum it was announced that construction would resume in 2018, the government approved another plan, and at a meeting with Dvorkovich a concession agreement was signed with investors. This year, in May, Shoigu said that the military was ready to take on the construction.

While long trucks and heavy trucks are coming from Tuva along the Usinsky tract, they are transporting its subsoil to the microdistrict (in polypropylene bags up to 3 tons with slings). This iron flow, like the Yenisei, consists of two tributaries: Elegestian high-quality coal and ore from Toji, where the Chinese Longxing launched a mining and processing plant in 2015. This is on the Big Yenisei (Biy-Khem), where the Old Believers are present dispersedly and disappear. The Chinese were given the Kyzyl-Tashtyg deposit of polymetallic ores ( see “New” No. 134 of 2012) - 200 km northeast of Kyzyl, Academician Obruchev ridge. There is now an industrial zone there: near Ak-Khem, a tributary of the Greater Yenisei, hundreds of hectares of cedar forest have been cut down almost on the shore, and a quarry has been dug in the bald patch. This is an open mine. There is also a processing plant with a capacity of 1 million tons of ore per year. Zinc, lead, copper concentrates. The ore also contains cadmium, selenium, barium, gold, and silver.

Vacum: “They rake everything: earth, tree roots, grass, trees. What they dig up is taken to their place for processing. They got to the bottom of it, and now they’re transporting ore. This breed has everything, the main thing is the necessary metal for phones and computers. At one time the Chinese did not allow tax office. So a helicopter with security forces landed on their roof.” (About a helicopter with riot police, it seems to be true. Until June 20, fishing was prohibited in the Yenisei basin from time immemorial, but some Moscow redneck in the Upper River caught lenks with Red Book taimen. They were taken out in flasks and barrels. They were stopped: two thousand per snout and go. Yeah , we are Moscow! Should we buy you off, grimy ones? And so we feed you. In Kyzyl, riot police and television cameras were waiting, they opened a case, they immediately burned the fish.)

Longxing is a subsidiary of the largest mining holding in China, Zijin Mining Group, with a sad background and a reputation as the largest polluter and poisoner within the PRC; scandals haunt it abroad, from Peru to Kyrgyzstan.

In the Upper Reaches, China was a buyer of bugs until World War II; now it dictates prices for musk deer stream, bear paws and bile, and lynx skins. Vakum: “Well, we don’t pass by, we catch it all, but we don’t use anything ourselves. The same bear bile - of course, it sounds more romantic than boar bile, but it is the same. And we raise these wild boars, they run around the village, eating the same roots and grass as bears.”

For more than a hundred years, the Old Believer system of management in the Verkhovye region has not disrupted natural cycles and symbioses, the number of animals is stable, no one takes it above their eyes. Late annexation to the USSR, dissected terrain that impeded roads, allowed the entire isolated Tuva to remain the most environmentally friendly last region former Union, not spoiled by industry. Why, there are only a few such territories on the planet that have preserved untouched landscapes. And so she waits, not believing in her end, for the appearance of a road and civilization.

For indigenous communities and ecosystems everywhere and always, from Mongolia to Latin America, from Africa to Transbaikalia, globalization, investment and Chinese resource companies mean the same thing. Not only Chinese, of course. Ours are no better, gold miners are stripping Tuva, destroying it, poisoning the rivers, and they are definitely taking revenge for what, and, for example, Tuva learned in detail about cyanides thanks to a joint venture between the Swedes and Canadians; It’s not about the Chinese or Canadians, and not even about Russia, which allows them to behave this way. However, they say that there is something in globalization that the retarded children from the bear corner will finally watch “Scooby Doo”: “Many are trying to change everything in this world, they think that this is progress! But there is something that is already beautiful, and there is no need to change it.”

What will happen in the specific Upper Reaches is approximately clear. The Maasai walk across Africa with spears. They also live in harmony with nature. Beautiful people, stately, clean, covered with red sheets and wearing slippers cut from tires - thanks to progress. And all their protected rhinoceroses were shot because of the value of the horn in Chinese medicine. Both the local subspecies of the black rhinoceros and the white one that lived nearby have been declared extinct. But they did not die out - they were exterminated; even the fact that the rangers guarding the last animals did not fire at strangers without warning did not help. And those subspecies that are alive wander more and more often without a horn - it is cut off, euthanizing the animal, both by poachers and conservationists - in order to save rhinoceroses.

Bears without paws and musk deer without their stream are unlikely to be able to do so.

The Verkhovskys are real Indians. The Chinese will not go for the amusement of the bear with a spear. But it’s unlikely to fight for the sources of the Yenisei. They will take off again and leave. There will be a globalized devastated space without them.

Vakum reports: “The Chinese have already built roads to Toju. And Russia railway Do you think it will be built to the Trans-Siberian Railway? No. Shoigu said: there are three hundred ancient burial places on its way. Until we check everything, there will be no road. They check two mounds a year. And Shoigu is already over 60 (years old).”

But Shoigu has nothing to do with it. What does China have to do with it. From the Tourism Development Strategy approved by the Tuvan government on December 28, 2017: “In June 2016, the leaders of Mongolia, Russia and China approved a program for creating an economic corridor: Western Railway Corridor (Kuragino-Kyzyl-Khandygayty-Borsho-Kobdo-Takeshken-Hami-Changji district- Hui Autonomous Region-Urumqi); Northern railway corridor (Kuragino-Kyzyl-Tsagan-Tologoy-Artssur-Ovot-Erdenet-Salkhit-Zamyn-Ude-Erlian-Ulanchab-Zhangjiakou-Beijing-Tianjin).”

The documents of the trilateral meeting in Tashkent on June 23, 2016 are not so clear, they say “to study and, if economically feasible, begin to implement these projects,” however, the Tuvan Cabinet of Ministers knows better; its head Kara-ool recently stated that the Asian Development Bank is ready to invest in the Northern Corridor about 3 billion dollars. Tuva and Mongolia propose to consider it a priority. Meanwhile, in Tuva, all new deposits are being sold off.

Minaeus says that he saw Avatar. Life cinema. About them.

Small Yenisei. Chapels. Photo by the author

Perpendicular

Autarky of the Upper Reaches is the best experience of self-isolation, import substitution and mobilization economy. And the Verkhovskys don’t expect anything from the authorities: no protection, no medicine, no benefits—the dream of “United Russia” and the government, it would seem. Clone these. They work, reproduce, and are moderately interested in politics. They don’t watch TV, that’s bad, but it’s not very good for America: “They say it’s against Russia” (Vakum). It’s unreliable, of course, what they “say.”

Business customs are a gray economy: everything is in words, personal relationships and guarantees, on concepts, without being legalized. Community property is given to the most skilled for growth; their names do not shine. In terms of methods, it is the same closed offshore kleptocracy that is at the heart of the rest of Russia. The results are the opposite.

By the way, nothing about the Middle Ages. They could successfully resist Soviet progress - so what if Gagarin, the hydrogen bomb, the Bratsk hydroelectric power station and Uralvagonzavod? Since the 90s, many (desert dwellers) have been using a lot of things to make everyday life easier; They have bank cards and motor drills...

The chapels settled in patches throughout the Yenisei and many tributaries. The Soviet Angara radio stations help keep in touch - signals are caught along the bed and river terraces, “shelves” and “counters”, as the developed, plowed, pieces of land taken from the taiga and rocks are called. You can hear the taiga villages all the way to Igarka. Several years ago, at the request of Larisa Shoigu, the minister’s sister, the Krasnoyarsk regional center of the Ministry of Emergency Situations handed over to Verkhovye an army command and staff complex - a radio station on an all-terrain vehicle chassis and six portable devices. This is a permanent connection for 300 km. And then in Sizima they installed a cell tower and a card payphone. And television came, just in case anyone wants it.

The Maasai, who hold on to their roots and traditions, sacrifice their most prized goat to bring rain. And then they stare at their cell phones to see changes in the weather forecast. But the Old Believers are not here, there is no sturgeon in Vekhovye, much lower down - they take pictures using samolov, already guided by GPS.

Well, if not about the technical side, there’s not much archaism in sight either. If Russia does everything in order to be chopped up and sold like the carcass of an already killed animal. If he tries so hard to blend in, he will disappear. If Christian churches brought to talk about the imminent end of Christianity. So what, tell me, is more relevant than the Upper River, what is more meaningful if not its people?

They still don’t have idols, they still don’t pray for the king and don’t recognize him as God’s anointed. Everyone is equal before God. Hence the fundamental impossibility of the existence here of “little people”, “cogs”, “anchovies” who do not solve anything. Their communities have democracy and humanistic values.

This means that they are still perpendicular to the state. Not dealing with him is a condition for preserving yourself.

But they are constantly overtaken. Meanwhile, China and the road are external threats, and they sometimes only reflect internal contradictions.

Rapprochement

Tuvans gave their names to many villages and villages founded by Russian merchants or Old Believers, for example, the regional center, to which Verkhovye belongs, from Znamenka became Saryg-Sep, but the house is not the main thing for the Old Believers, it will be rented and moved at a moment, rivers are more important, and they call them as of old or by the first and last names of those who live on them. We pass the “Permyakov River” - 30 km from its mouth the village of Katazy. With the Permyakovs (they are also from the Perm region, like Vakum’s family, they just came later), Vakum and Miney have a lot of common memories. The countdown of events is from Illarion Lvovich, the head of the community: “Grandfather Illarion was still alive.” 9 of his sons are here, and only one in the village has no surname; his daughters have left to get married. Now - granddaughters. And the sons have 70 children. Army. Outpost. Just not far from Por-Bazhyn.

But grandfather Hilarion arranged it so that Katazy from a borrowed property turned into a brand, into a tourist center for foreigners and rich compatriots. IN different time P. Borodin, Yu. Luzhkov, N. Mikhalkov, S. Shoigu flew here. And many other clans now have camp sites that provide good income.

The pioneers named one of the dangerous rapids on Ka-Khem Moscow. Their grandchildren and great-grandchildren have found how to make money in Moscow. Wallets fly to the roar of the deer. And in Erzhey itself there is now a regional festival “Singing art and traditional crafts of the Old Believers of Siberia.” And in Sizima there is an interregional festival of Russian culture.

The two Russias are getting closer. For some Verkhovskys, this is an adaptation to modernity; in 1912, they allowed eating potatoes, and in 1972, pasta; others see this as a rejection of foundations and a path to destruction. “He ate separately, but came to us to drink. And on the way back I didn’t drop him off at the rapids,” one of the tourists said about his guide.

Fortress

Now it’s not at all about whether a road is needed. Roads, of course, are a blessing. I’m talking about something else, and the chapels are aware: if the world gets a chance to disfigure or destroy some space, so be it. Beautiful, whole, best - to die: they will get to the ship's pines and cut them down. But there is an option: you can matte it. When they go to cone, large cedars are not chopped. What's the point, don't shake it. The upper reaches are a fortress, like a cedar.

It has endured a lot. The outflow of Russians from Tuva began in the 70s of the last century, and before my eyes, in 1992, it was already a mass exodus. An extract from the anamnesis: first, the Slavs flooded the shrines of the Tuvans, erecting the Sayano-Shushenskaya hydroelectric power station, began to build factories on their sacred mountains, and the Tuvans could only ride horses and throw knives at KamAZ trucks. Then they began to break the windows of the Slavs, set fire to houses, and horsemen in a column of three began to gallop along the streets of Kyzyl under yellow banners, demanding independence from Russia. The Russians went to bed with their loaded guns in bed, then moved across the passes to the north. The upper reaches have also thinned out, but now there are no disputes.

Globalization and progress cannot be dealt with. But nothing is predetermined. It was not possible to pump oil at Syma. Rosatom has been discouraged from mining uranium in the Krasnochikoysky region of Transbaikalia. The gas pipeline never went through Altai to China - but they wanted to build it before Power of Siberia, the contract was ready to be signed. Everywhere the Old Believers rose together with the autochthons - respectively, the Kets, Buryats, Telengits and other Altai peoples. With shamans, lamas - maybe not together with them, but shoulder to shoulder. And they won. And “Mekran” was blown away, cutting down the forests on the middle Yenisei, where the chapels live. But Angara, where there were no Old Believer communities, was mutilated and buried.

Why is that? “Public opinion” may have something to do with it, but its role is not decisive. Unprofitability of megaprojects, corruption as their cause and effect, lack of money, crisis phenomena? Yes, but none of this can explain why the leviathan suddenly unclenches its jaws. Old Believer cemetery in the center Olympic Sochi they didn’t dare raze it to the ground. There was enough money there.

Whether the Verkhovskaya people will fence themselves off from livestock more tightly, or they will throw nails, or the mountains will grow, but in the existing plan to make way for Chinese business and push out the Old Believers somewhere in Latin America, adjustments are possible. In the end, there is no such law obliging us to give up and leave. The Yenisei should begin in the Upper River, and not in Bolivia.

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