Life and Death in a Siberian Village
The Bratsk dam in Eastern Siberia was constructed in 1954-1967 as part of the grand Soviet project of bringing electricity to the dark vastness and unimaginable, unruly voids of Siberia. The Communist state power was to be manifested in unprecedented construction. In the phenomenological logic of the Soviet state superiority should be evident, results tangible, everydayness, revolutionized. The infrastructure was rapidly created and facilitated the industrial development. The Soviet project included bringing Siberian territories into modernity. The new Soviet man, the actor freed from constraints of Capitalism, was to transform the face of the planet and to build “cities of the future,” which emerged as mushrooms, to be abandoned—or, to continue their existence. The material remnants and traces of the utopia-that-was-never-to-be, proceed on shaping the present more than a quarter century after the USSR collapse. In the aftermath of the Bratsk dam construction, people in rural and urban Siberia organize and live their everydayness around the material legacies of the utopian, industrial dreams. People navigate the materialities of disrupted infrastructure, in which embodied experiences and ordinary affects spring from and contest precarious existence and unsafe environment. The struggle for survival is an everyday mode of living.
The village of Anosovo is one of many small villages that can be easily lost against the backdrop of the vast Siberian territory. Like many similar villages, it suffers from political and social abandonment, infrastructural degradation, and geographical isolation. Anosovo, like other small industrial settlements, is a critical place to investigate everydayness, mobility, and hope.
Anosovo is a hybrid place that bears the qualities of both village and town. I like to call these places, “places of nascent urbanity.” It seems especially apt since the “Western” and “Russian” city taxonomies do not coincide: “administrative division” is not, strictly speaking, “district,” “raion” is not “county,” “prigorod” and “suburbia” mean different ways of space organization—architecturally, administratively, culturally, socially, and politically.
In its current reincarnation Anosovo emerged in 1961, the year when the construction of the Bratsk dam resulted in raising of the level of the water, and many villages fell into the zone of flood. Anosovo was made out of six small villages and one “almost-village”: Yandi, Podjandoushka (literally, “Near-Yandi,” it had several yards); Shishimorovka; Fedorovka; Bernikovo; Boutakova; and Anosovo. One of these settlements, Yandi, was the oldest. It happened to be a tsarist ostrog (outpost), a place that traced its history from the 17th century.
Anosovo is a hybrid place that bears the qualities of both village and town. I like to call these places, “places of nascent urbanity.” It seems especially apt since the “Western” and “Russian” city taxonomies do not coincide: “administrative division” is not, strictly speaking, “district,” “raion” is not “county,” “prigorod” and “suburbia” mean different ways of space organization—architecturally, administratively, culturally, socially, and politically.
In its current reincarnation Anosovo emerged in 1961, the year when the construction of the Bratsk dam resulted in raising of the level of the water, and many villages fell into the zone of flood. Anosovo was made out of six small villages and one “almost-village”: Yandi, Podjandoushka (literally, “Near-Yandi,” it had several yards); Shishimorovka; Fedorovka; Bernikovo; Boutakova; and Anosovo. One of these settlements, Yandi, was the oldest. It happened to be a tsarist ostrog (outpost), a place that traced its history from the 17th century.