No through road

Villagers in the Russian Arctic have become angry about their months of isolation each year

Due to a lack of a surfaced road, an entire district of the Arkhangelsk region in Russia’s Arctic far north is cut off from the outside world for several months each year. Villagers in this remote and rural area must live off their own stores of food in total isolation, beyond even the reach of the emergency services. A road that the regional authorities promised to build has never materialised, and desperate villagers have even sent a video message asking Vladimir Putin to help them, so far to no avail.

Off-road

There are over 17,500 people in 19 sparsely populated villages living in the Arkhangelsk region’s Pinezhsky district, which is on the left bank of the Pinega River. There is no road connecting them to the main town in the district, Karpogory, on the far side of the river. In winter, when the weather conditions allow, the authorities set up an ice bridge to the other side of the river, but the only way to reach that is along a poorly maintained dirt track.

A ferry crosses the river in the summer, costing 450 rubles (€4.20) per car one way. If water levels are low, the ferry doesn’t run. When the river melts, those strong enough can row themselves across to the other side if they need to get medical assistance or visit a store. But these aren’t options to most of the pension-aged population, who simply remain cut off from the rest of the world.

The situation has gone on for many years. The residents of Trufanovo and 18 other villages were again left with no access to a road, food or healthcare for two months late last year. They first appealed to the Arkhangelsk Governor Alexander Tsybulsky, and then to Vladimir Putin, asking them to build a road that would connect three key settlements — Shilega, Bereznik and Shotogorka.

“The road is extremely important to us, because for several months of the year, when it becomes impassable, our villages have no access to medical care, there is no way of getting to the main towns in the district and region, no food comes in, there is no postal service, and those who work on rotation cannot get home from or go to work.”

In their appeal, they said that in late November a man in one village had suffered a compound fracture in one leg, and nobody had even tried to get him to the regional hospital, 80km away in Kholmogory, for three days. He was then transported in stages, and spent the night in the village of Bereznik, and the following morning the car couldn’t negotiate the road due to the terrible state it was in. As a result, in the most impassable areas, he had to be transported on a homemade swamp buggy, a vehicle used to traverse boggy terrain.

Children who live in Bereznik have to be taken to school by horse. The pensioners said that although officially many other villages have no minor residents, children still often come on vacation to visit their grandparents and are also then cut off from the world.

Another problem is that there is one paramedic on the left bank of the river, whose working hours were reduced by 50% as of 2025. However, the villages are home to people with diabetes and other diseases who often cannot get the medicines they need in good time. One female resident of Shotogorka said that few people visit the local nurse as she “has no medicines or bandages”. Waiting times can also stretch to several hours. She adds you need to either go to Karpogory, on the other side of the river, if you want any medication or ask somebody else to collect it for you.

The villagers have asked for 18 kilometres of unpaved road to be laid to help solve at least some of their problems.

Abandoned to fate

Galina has elderly parents in Shotogorka — her 93-year-old mother with her 89-year-old husband. She readily admits the road has always been a problem. “There are roads on the other side of the river, where the district’s main town Karpogory is. I grew up there, lived there for a long time. Now it’s mostly pensioners living in these villages. All the schools have closed.”

Now the period where the current road is impassable drags on even longer as winter starts later, says Galina, making it even more difficult to get to the village.

Galina says elderly people have to stock up on food in Karpogory for months in advance to have supplies for the season when they’re cut off. She feels the authorities have abandoned the villagers to their fate.

“How is my 93-year-old mother going to get across the river to buy bread? So many people bake their own and stock up on other products for future use.”

Yulia, another local resident, said in one group forum on popular Russian social media platform VK that the villages had had no food deliveries throughout November. She says this happens in the spring and autumn too.

Other local residents said the appeal had led the district Prosecutor’s Office to promise the authorities would build the road by 2035. That is not good enough, say the locals, who have been waiting for normal infrastructure for decades.

“What good is a road in 2035? Young people won’t come back to live in the village. It’s just elderly people, and they need the road right now,” another resident notes.

The 250-kilometre drive from Arkhangelsk to Trufanova takes five to six hours. Olga, who travels from Arkhangelsk to the village to visit her husband’s parents, says she and her family got stuck in the mud for five hours in November. They had to clear deadwood off the road, which was completely overgrown, and stick to the centre of the carriageway as it was impassable closer to the edge. The drive took them 24 hours over the New Year holiday.

“There has never been a proper road. We go more often in the winter when there’s an ice bridge. Or in summer, when there’s a ferry. For now, nothing has changed. They’ve smoothed the road surface a little, but that’s it. They don’t clear it very often either,” says Olga.

She said she had never seen such a terrible road anywhere else. The state of the road means “mums, dads, old people postpone operations and appointments”.

Addressing complaints about the lack of medical staff, the chief physician at the hospital in Karpogory, Svetlana Tushina, insists that the local conditions do in fact meet accepted standards. She wrote on social media that, according to regulations, small settlements with a population of under 100 people receive primary health care by medical teams twice a year, when a “general practitioner and an ophthalmologist” go to the villages.

Lyudmila Kolik, the head of the Pinezhsky district, has written on VK that the local authorities are considering several construction projects for the road, saying they know what has to be done, and how, for it to be passable. But no dates have been provided.

“They’ll hand out money for any old rubbish, but here we are without food or healthcare,” Olga says. “It shouldn’t matter that only five people are living there. Why pay taxes if there is no road? It’s like they’re waiting for a disaster to happen and people to suffer. Only that will force them to act.”