Don't Blame the Weather

For better or for worse, heat in Russia — whether the climatic or the political variety — doesn’t last too long. The days of heated political haranguing quickly faded away, and now we’re all watching Boris Yeltsin take the presidential oath amid comparisons with tsars’ inaugurations.

As the show’s organizers racked their brains for lyrics to the ode to the President, (and yours truly over the contents of this letter) Muscovites sought refuge from the stifling heat as temperatures broke all records. Forget that all now — with the thermometer on the window of our office showing 12° C (54° F), we work on our September issue and lament the passing of this short, hot Russian summer.

September augurs the beginning of the harvest, as embattled Russian farmers sit entrenched between the Scylla of mistakes inherited from heavily subsidized agriculture and the Charybdis of a perilous new freedom. And this time they won’t be able to blame the weather if anything goes wrong.

Nor can they expect any favors from the state, unlike the smiling Pasha Angelina on the 50th anniversary of the first Five Year Plan (pictured below), who got a free tractor just because she happens to be the granddaughter and namesake of a Heroine of Socialist Labor (see Russian Life March issue).

Some Russian farmers still long for those days, but tractors and combine harvesters no longer grow on trees — nowadays you have to pay full market prices for farm equipment. As Yelena Utenkova points out in this month’s cover story Battle for the Harvest, farmers now follow other axioms: common sense and the ability to make considered decisions based on current economic realities.

When common sense and initiative prevail, even cities with bitter memories like Gorky become attractive for investors — as Managing Editor Robert Greenall shows in his article Building the Future of Russia.’Once a stronghold of the Russian defense industry, Gorky was a gloomy place where the ideological gendarmes of the Communist Party chose to exile academician Andrei Sakharov. If, as you’ll discover from our recipe page, those who called themselves ‘the intellect, honor and conscience of our era’ (a euphemism for the Party) could be scared by something as harmless as a salad name, then the ‘subversive’ ideas of a human rights activist must have been truly fatal.

With its old name Nizhny Novgorod back, the city is working hard to regain its former fame, from the times of the celebrated annual Fair and the All-Russian Exhibition of 1896. It’s staging an economic comeback, with progressive local governor Boris Nemtsov intent on proving to the world business community that Moscow and St. Petersburg are not the only places in Russia worth watching. And once you’ve seen William Brumfield’s picturesque photos, you’ll agree that the city’s architects and developers deserve praise for their taste and ability to match traditional Russian style with modern design.

While Russia rediscovers its economical and spiritual values, one vast sector of the economy that still needs all the help it can get is the non-profit sector, whose chequered progress is examined by Katherine Young in Growing a Democracy. And, last but not least, we share the sentiments of our calendar expert Valentina Kolesnikova, who takes pride in the rich musical and spiritual traditions of the Moscow Conservatory this month on its 130th birthday.