Photography by The New Tab Text by Danila Istomin
A group of people moved to a Arkhangelsk Oblast village to learn to live in harmony with nature. Here’s why – and what has come of their endeavor.
Tarasovskaya is a tiny village in Russia’s far-northern Arkhangelsk Oblast. Only two of its long-term residents stick around for the winter. But since 2014 some of the houses have been occupied by members of a community that calls itself “Living Village.” They are learning to live in harmony with nature as they operate a cooperative farm. At one point, it seemed the project was getting off the ground: in 2020 and 2021, Living Village had as many as 15 residents. As of February 2022, however, only two women remain, along with the children of one of them. They’re not opposed to joining forces with locals, but they haven’t found common ground with many of their fellow villagers. This is the story of how the remaining newcomers are doing and what the other village residents think about Living Village.
The kitchen table is set with bowls of seeds and berries and two pots of porridge: one made with milk, the other with water. This is breakfast, which starts at eight o’clock every morning in a log house in the village of Tarasovskaya. Most of the dishes prepared here are vegetarian. The house contains a common kitchen and dining room as well as a guest room. A large white brick oven painted with stylized red horses sits in the middle of the kitchen; next to it are buckets for recycling and organic waste. A schedule for planting vegetables is mounted on the dining room wall. There’s a goat shed next to the house.
“Okay, let’s get going, it’s 8:30 already.” Zoya Afanasyeva is reading the day’s work plan from her phone. “There are a lot of jobs on the list to do with tidying, laundry, gardening and food prep. I’ve got a Zoom this morning, and after that I’ll make lunch.”
“I have a Zoom this evening,” says Yelena Skibina. “My plan today is to cut the grass and work in the garden. And the laundry is already going.”
“Lyosha,” Zoya says to a volunteer, “Can you pull the nettles?”
This is how the day begins at Living Village, a community of people who decided almost 10 years ago to reawaken Russians’ interest in country life. And they chose to do it in the village of Tarasovskaya, 400 kilometers from Arkhangelsk.
Legend has it that Tarasovskaya was founded when Catherine II (“the Great”) began relocating Cossacks from the Black Sea to the Kuban region. Some fled instead to the Arkhangelsk region, which was free of serfdom. Cossack groups led by men named Taras, Boroda and Yakov moved to the lands that are now the Ustyansky District; they founded the villages of Tarasovskaya, Borodinskaya and Yakovlevskaya. The lattermost no longer exists, but the collective name for the settlements is Upper Bereznik. And you can hear an echo of their Cossack past in the villages’ most common surname: Kazakov.
At the close of the nineteenth century, Tarasovskaya, then part of Vologda Province, had more than 150 residents. Old-timers claim the number climbed to 250 or 300 by the 1950s, by which time the village had a primary school, a library, big state farm fields, and a cattle yard. The population began to dwindle in the late 1980s. After the 1990s, only the elderly remained. According to the parish website, about 100 people currently reside in the village, though locals say that just two stay through the winter – and it’s been a long time since any of their children or young people lived there.
Trains from St. Petersburg and Moscow stop at the nearest train station, Kizema, for two minutes. Getting to the village takes another 30 minutes by car, after which you have to walk another 20 minutes and cross a suspended wooden footbridge. At the entrance to Tarasovskaya there is a memorial cross. A group of parishioners put it up in the summer of 2023, at the location of the old cemetery. Other residents say it’s as if the cross was put there for the whole village, as though Tarasovskaya itself had been laid to rest.
Some abandoned state farm buildings stand nearby, and a bit farther on is a Soviet-era memorial to those killed in the Great Patriotic War – it includes 54 names from Tarasovskaya.
The village has three streets, all partially overgrown with grass and weeds. Of its 73 houses, at most 10 are inhabited. Most of the empty ones are broken down and listing; there’s no glass in the windows; broken dishes lie here and there on the shelves.
In the center of the village is a large, boarded-up wooden building. A sign at the entrance reads “Club.” It seems to have been here since Soviet times.
Thieves have stolen everything from the houses that have been uninhabited for at least a year. For the most part, the inhabited homes have modest vegetable gardens with a few crops. The largest and tidiest of them all has a United Russia flag above the greenhouse. The owner, a pensioner named Galina Ivanovna, says she doesn’t belong to the party.
Toward the end of the street are the seven buildings belonging to Living Village. Three of them are in regular use. The community shrunk after 2022; the only permanent residents are Yelena, Zoya, and Zoya’s children. The first house is the common building, where everyone gathers for breakfast. Zoya and her children live in the second and Yelena lives in the third, which also has a playroom for kids and a place for the children to study and have classes during the school year. One house also contains a free store with various items, including clothing, that visitors can take if there’s anything they need. Project founder Antonina Kulyasova used to live there. Guests and volunteers are usually placed in houses with other villagers. The other homes are used when a lot of people come at once.
From the outside, the community’s way of life looks like that of any other Russian village. But when you look at the details, a lot is done differently. Living Village residents run a cooperative farm that includes a potato field, a vegetable garden, greenhouses, goats and chickens. They organize a daily division of labor and often welcome guests and volunteers, such as when they host eco-retreats for families who want to get acquainted with their way of life. They celebrate Christmas and Kolyada, the traditional Slavic winter holiday, as well as the solstices and the summer festival of Ivan Kupala. Some community members are vegan. Recyclables are separated and sent for processing.
Antonina Kulyasova, a 45-year-old ecologist, arrived in Tarasovskaya in 2014. Before that, beginning in the 1990s, she had been living in a small village in Vologda Oblast, where she organized seminars about and celebrations of traditional culture and ecology that drew participants from near and far.
As the 2010s began, Antonina decided to initiate a multifaceted project aimed at reviving a village: gathering a community of residents, creating a permaculture farm, and presenting educational lectures. The idea was to combine tradition and innovation. She said it was difficult to do this in her Vologda Oblast village, as all the houses there were occupied. But in 2014 her home burned down and so she decided to move to Tarasovskaya.
It was there that she launched a pair of educational projects, Country Farmer School and Forest School. Participants learned about eco-friendly ways of life and Russian village traditions. Among the students were children found by reaching out to nearby schools. Local residents Alexander and Lyubov Kazakov helped Antonina with the projects. It was Alexander who had invited Antonina to come to Tarasovskaya during an activist outing to the Kaluga Oblast eco-village Kovcheg (“Ark”). He wanted his native village to flourish.
“I was excited by the idea of introducing people from eco-villages to people active in traditional villages,” Kulyasova says. “The eco-villagers are missing a kind of groundedness, a knowledge of traditional culture, while with local residents it’s the other way around – they don’t get how completely essential this all is. And so, we decided to start this project.”
For the next six years, Alexander helped Antonina find houses in Tarasovskaya and assisted with the farming. She says the houses each cost between R50,000-200,000 (approximately $770-$3,000 at the time) and that she bought them with her own money.
Two years later, Zoya Afanasyeva, who had been working as an environmental consultant in St. Petersburg, joined Antonina in Tarasovskaya. She developed an environmental education program that taught parents and children how to sort their waste and work the land in harmony with nature.
At that time, Antonina says, the entire Ustyansky District government was supportive of the project and its founders, as were the majority of local residents. But in 2016, after a turnover in local government, the relationship changed. Then, later that year, 14 children attending a camp at the Lake Syamozero Park-Hotel in Karelia (over 500 kilometers away) died when their boat capsized during a storm. After that, district residents stopped sending their children to local eco-camps – though Antonina says they had never presented themselves as a camp.
Zoya said that, in 2016 or 2017, while they were working at one of their eco-retreats, somebody reported them to the police for supposedly not paying property taxes and for other administrative offenses. A local officer came to investigate but couldn’t find evidence for the claims.
Zoya moved to the village permanently in 2020, and she and Antonina were joined by several other people. That’s when they named their project Living Village.
After breakfast, Zoya takes on one more task for the next day: baking bread in the household oven.
Zoya Afanasyeva is 40. She prefaced our interview by saying she would not talk about politics or Living Village’s finances.
Zoya started school in 1990 – the final year of the Soviet Union. That means she got to be a Little Octobrist for one year.
“I wasn’t part of any of the subcultures at school,” she says. “I just dressed like a hippie. I was into rooftopping for a long time. Once I even managed to get on the roof of the General Staff Building [on Palace Square in St. Petersburg]. I studied geology at St. Petersburg State University and did research until 2015, defended my PhD.”
When Zoya gave birth to her oldest daughter, Vita, she came across the website of the VITA Center for Animal Rights Protection in Moscow. Then she watched the documentary “Earthlings” and got into veganism and animal welfare. She became co-organizer of a project called Voices for Animals, which did research and developed regulations to protect animal rights, and then turned to activism, organizing environmental programming for children that included teaching them how to separate waste, to create animated films, and to make candy out of dried fruit.
“I’m just living the way I want to and that I believe is necessary,” Zoya says in explanation of her move to the countryside. She started living in Tarasovskaya alongside her husband, Anton. They’re divorced now, but they still visit each other, he to the country and she to the city.
Up to 15 people lived in the community during various periods in 2020 and 2021, not counting volunteers and program participants. But after February 24, 2022, some Living Village members left Tarasovskaya – including Antonina Kulyasova, who moved to Crimea together with Vladislav Stain, another resident. She said her decision was influenced by the fact that several people close to her wanted to assemble a new community in the South.
According to Antonina, many people came to Tarasovskaya during the Covid pandemic, and it seemed everything was going to work out. But when Russia’s full-scale War on Ukraine started in 2022, the majority of them left. She says the main reason was Living Village’s emerging financial problems. Until that time, they had been receiving grants, and a number of community members were doing climate research in collaboration with Northern (Arctic) Federal University and St. Petersburg State University, as part of a project that was terminated after the war began. Some participants had also put their own money into the community.
The young people who had joined the community wanted stability. Almost all ended up scattered across various parts of Russia, while one couple left the country (something they had been planning to do even before 2022). Zoya doesn’t say how Living Village is financing its existence now, other than the support it gets from her former husband and from Yelena Skibina, who works remotely for a private school in St. Petersburg.
“I feel like I tried every possible option to expand the community, but we just hit a dead end,” Antonina says. “But I also just got tired after all those years of constant work. Moving to Crimea, the new projects there – I thought they’d give me fresh motivation.”
With the departure of most of the members, they had to sell two cows, a horse and their Sobol minivan.
“Am I resentful? No. Am I sad and hurt that Tonya [Antonina] decided to leave? Yes,” Zoya says.
Zoya and Yelena often buy firewood for the winter from neighbors in other villages and settlements. In March 2024, Zoya posted on her social media page on VKontakte that they were looking for volunteers to help chop and bundle firewood. They found helpers.
Anyone can become a volunteer at Living Village. After a conversation, applicants are invited to Tarasovskaya for two weeks, during which time residents and the volunteer see how they get along. If that works out, the volunteer can then stay year-round.
There are currently two volunteers at Living Village: Aleksei and Alyona. Both found out about it from the website Goodsurfing. Aleksei is 25; he lives in a dacha in Leningrad Oblast and works as a gardener. In Tarasovskaya, he’s hoping to learn how to live in this sort of community and, in time, to be able to leave the city permanently. Alyona is 44 and from the city of Maykop; she teaches English remotely. She has previously volunteered in settlements in Krasnodar Krai, Tatarstan, the Caucasus mountains, Altay, Belarus, and Turkey.
During our visit to the village, another Antonina was volunteering there. She is 40 and a photographer, psychologist, coach, and yoga devotee. During her time at Living Village, she took photos, helped around the farm, and ran training sessions on nonviolent communication. She had become acquainted with Zoya a long time ago via an online breastfeeding group, but met her in person only in Tarasovskaya.
Zoya’s younger children, Asya and Mitya, study at a school in Tarasovskaya started by Yelena Skibina, who is a teacher and previously worked, for 19 years, at a Montessori school in St. Petersburg. The village school also uses the Montessori method, which is based on the principles of humanistic pedagogy and sensory education. For example, a child might figure out the formula to calculate the area of a square based on their own investigations and experience.
Vita, Zoya’s 15-year-old daughter, followed the family school’s Montessori program for three years. Then, in seventh grade, she decided to switch to an online school. (She also takes her exams online through a St. Petersburg school.) Her favorite historical era is the sixteenth century, the Tudor period. She’s only allowed an hour a day of recreational screen time. Her favorite cartoon is Princess Mononoke, by the Japanese animator Hayao Miyazaki. It’s about a girl who lives with wolves.
All three children take their year-end exams through a regular school in St. Petersburg. Meanwhile, all are learning to work the land, care for animals, and run a farm. Each has their own responsibilities. Vita takes care of the goats: she grazes, feeds and milks them. Ten-year-old Asya looks after the chickens, which includes not letting chicks hatch. They don’t have the resources to keep them, and if a new rooster hatches, it won’t share space with the old one. Eight-year-old Mitya feeds the cats and makes sure there is always water in the tanks that provide running water to the sink. Every day, other chores come up: pulling weeds, planting basil and beets, sorting waste.
By their own accounts, none of the children miss the city. Yelena Skibina is 49 but, like Zoya, looks younger than her years. She first heard of Living Village at an environmental event. Tired of city life, she left St. Petersburg in 2017 for her family home in an abandoned village in Tver Oblast. After three years living alone there, she moved to Living Village, seeking experience building this sort of community. Her 25-year-old daughter lives in St. Petersburg.
Yelena is therefore old enough to have experienced being a Pioneer and the related communal movement. And while she now considers the old Pioneer organizations to have been an abomination, she remembers the camps as exemplifying “honest, sincere, true relationships.” She said she was influenced by that experience of communal living.
“I don’t want to attach that experience with any kind of ‘ism,’” Yelena explains. “Besides, I’m bad at telling opinions from the left and right apart. I get so mad when people say one thing and do the exact opposite, then use loud ideological words as a shield.”
In the evening, Vita and Alyona sit at the table singing a folk song about rusalkas that they’re planning to perform for the Ivan Kupala holiday on June 24. Vita is reading the lyrics from her notebook, Alyona from her phone. The residents of Living Village try to celebrate the main folk holidays, including the spring and fall equinoxes and the summer and winter solstices. They also observe the day of the ancient Slavic goddess Mokosh, celebrate Pentecost, and sing carols at Christmastime. While she was still there, Antonina Kulyasova, who has studied Russian folk culture, put on performances using traditional Slavic animal masks.
Zoya and Yelena are very different people. They don’t even consider themselves to be friends. Other than their shared farm, the only thing that seems to unite them is their desire to stave off ecological catastrophe.
“I want to believe [that it’s possible], because otherwise, what’s this all for?” Zoya says. “You can, of course, feast in time of plague, or you can change something, bit by bit.”
Yelena adds that people need to reduce their consumption and become more mindful. “There are people in cities who live their lives without ever considering where their food and water come from and, most important, where that water goes,” she laments. “We don’t have to give up the gifts of civilization. We just have to change where they come from.”
I ask Zoya if she’d rather completely disappear into the forest.
“If I just wanted to save myself, I would go,” she says. “But, first of all, I depend on community – I find it important and interesting to be around people. Second, I have a desire to effect some kind of change, perhaps as a role model, or to be useful in some way to those who are looking for alternatives.”
Zoya adds that they never intended to leave the “wider world.” They came to Tarasovskaya to build a community of people who want to live in harmony with the world.
“Lyubov Kazimirovna, hello! What’s new?” Zoya says, greeting the neighbor who just popped in.
“Hello. Today is my daughter’s 35th birthday and my internet is out, as always.”
Lyubov Kazakova is a bit over 60. She came to Tarasovskaya in 1981, from another village in Arkhangelsk Oblast, and worked as an elementary school teacher for 30 years, then as a librarian. For the past couple of years, she has spent the winter elsewhere, in Leningrad Oblast.
Kazakova invites us over. Her home has several rooms, an animal shed no longer in use, and a water-supply system that her husband Alexander built in the 1980s, when he was 25. He has spent his whole life making things – boats, toys, furniture – and has even done engravings and written poems. Not long ago he had a stroke but survived. Lyubov is one of the few villagers with a close relationship to the people at Living Village. In the winter, Yelena Skibina visits her in Leningrad Oblast.
Kazakova says she was drawn to Antonina Kulyasova because she knew a lot and was able to teach it. Today she socializes with Yelena and Zoya and they help each other out.
“But there were people in the village who had a real hatred for them, because the way of life here changed,” Kazakova says. “They didn’t like them driving past their homes. They thought they were abnormal people, not the same as us. But they should have realized: the village is dying out and they were filling it with a kind of life. There was a hope that something new would happen here.”
Zoya later said that, early on, the long-time village residents truly counted on Antonina and believed in her ideas for revitalizing the village. And it’s for that reason, according to Zoya, that they were disappointed when their expectations didn’t pan out.
We go back outside and meet an older man who doesn’t want to give his name. He doesn’t trust the Living Village newcomers. “They’re doing it all on Soros money,” he says. “Well, whatever, it’s their life. I just don’t get why they have to act like they’re resurrecting the village, that’s such a meme.”
All the Tarasovskaya residents we visit prominently display photos of their children. Manefa Parshina, who is 86, lives in the village only in the summer, in a house her son built. In her sixties, Manefa cared for her paralyzed husband and has lived alone since he passed on. Yelena Skibina now lives in Manefa’s old house and occasionally drops in on her retired neighbor.
We approach the home of Nikolai and Tamara Kazakov, who are in their seventies. Tamara pours us tea, produces pasta and candy, and slices some sausage, cheese and bread. Nikolai tells stories of his youth, of his military service in Germany, his studies in Leningrad, and his return to Tarasovskaya. When the conversation turns to Living Village, Nikolai conspicuously frowns. He says that, in order for Zoya and Yelena to become part of Tarasovskaya life, they have to work in the fields and help locals revive the state farm and stay on top of weeding, so that there won’t be fires when the grasses dry out.
Yelena thinks it’s natural that their ideas about farming are not the same as those of the locals. “They grew up in a different time, when farming was on a different scale,” she explains. “Growing food is the ultimate goal for them, where for us, it’s one of many. For us the community is more important.”
Zoya believes they didn’t succeed in joining their community to that of the wider village because cooperation meant different things to the longtime residents and to the Living Village members. “It’s that same old story about why some relationships don’t work out,” she says. “Either one person doesn’t contribute enough or the other expects more. Our ideas of what we wanted were probably too far-reaching.”
It’s 10 p.m. and Yelena and Zoya are sitting in the common kitchen. Zoya has usually been asleep for an hour by this time. Two neighbors from the village drop by: Sergei “Shorty” Parshin and his relative Vasily.
“Good evening, okay to come in?”
“Oh, hi, Seryoga,” Zoya replies.
Vasily appears behind Shorty, along with the smell of liquor.
“Oopsie daisy, what about me?”
“You, sir, seem to be drunk!” Zoya remarks. “Okay, come in already.”
Sergei calls Vasily his little brother, but in fact Vasily is his father’s cousin, though Sergei is older. Vasily’s father died young and the two grew up together.
Sergei is 49, with graying hair and stubble. He’s wearing a T-shirt with the English words “Son of Anarchy.” He might be called Shorty, but he’s at least 5′11”. Born and raised in Tarasovskaya, he left in the mid-1990s to work in construction in Leningrad Oblast. He only returned to the village two years ago, when his father died. A huge fir tree and a small cedar stand on Sergei’s property. His father planted the former and Sergei planted the latter. He returned to the village, he says, because he wanted to die on his native soil.
Vasily’s hair is fully gray and he’s wearing work clothes. The men admit they’ve come over because they’re trying to find a match for Vasily – he’s a widower and needs a woman to help take care of his farm in another village. Yelena gets most of the attention. “I’m not going anywhere,” she replies with a laugh. “I’ve got a farm here too.” At one point Vasily starts talking about love, about God, about honesty and even about his flaws.
“You should talk less, dumbass,” Sergei scolds him.
“But a man can’t discuss only his positive traits like you do, Seryoga,” Zoya retorts.
The two men leave after an hour and a half. “Wow, that’s the first time that’s happened,” Zoya and Yelena remarks. “Seryoga is usually more gloomy.”
Later I ask Antonina: “Do you think the attempt to build an established community in Tarasovskaya was a failure?”
“Zoya and Yelena will be spending their third winter there. That sounds established to me,” she replies. “Now a new community is forming around them. Yes, I left as a founder, but the practices of life that we built up together are still going. Hundreds and even thousands of people came to us, and we had an influence on some. We planted the seeds, and now they’re growing.”
Read the original Russian language article.
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