Chuvash town on the edge of civilization If you feel that you are at 55 degrees 52 minutes north latitude and 47 degrees 28 minutes east longitude, then you are in the city of Tsivilsk. If at the same time you see that in the pond ...

Chuvash town on the edge of civilization

Well

If you feel that you are at 55 degrees 52 minutes north latitude and 47 degrees 28 minutes east longitude, then you are in the city of Tsivilsk. If at the same time you see that geese are swimming in the pond, then you are on the outskirts of the city; and if three goats are nibbling grass in front of you, then you are in the very center.

IN

The wonderful name of the tiny Chuvash town sounds like “civilization”, and of course, it exists somewhere here. But there is no hot water. Due to lack of funds, water is not heated for the seventh consecutive summer. By the way, this has happened before. In 1670, Stenka Razin almost took Tsivilsk: his girlfriend, the princess, they say, took it into her head to take a warm bath. But even then there was no hot water in the city. Stenka retreated to the Volga and was forced to bathe the princess in cold water.

Perhaps we make some historical errors, but the famous Tikhvin Convent was built here “in memory of the deliverance from the robber Razin” - this is a fact. It has not yet been clarified which robber suggested the idea of ​​building a women's treatment and correctional colony for drug addicts in Tsivilsk.

In the nineteenth century, 17 industrial enterprises operated in Tsivilsk. By the twenty-first, their number had dropped to 13, which may confuse future historians. The current time here is referred to in the reports as a "period of stable development." At the same time, many longingly recall the period of stable stagnation. In the last elections to the State Duma, the Communist Party of the Russian Federation supported 36 percent of voters here. Today they are unlikely to be less. Celebrating the 75th anniversary of the former first secretary of the Tsivil district committee of the CPSU, the local newspaper warmly lists the successes achieved under him, especially in agriculture. And the bread with him was higher, and the pigs were cleaner.

Those pigs are no longer there (I think they were eaten by the oligarchs, although the ethnic origin of many of them does not allow them to eat pork), and things in the village are now unimportant. Thus, the agricultural enterprise "Znamya" set the minimum wage (minimum wage) - 100 rubles per month. Against this background, the minimum wage at the Tiushi farm can be understood as the maximum - 140 rubles.

Tsivilsk, probably, can be considered the drunken capital of Russia. Here is the only Research and Design Institute of Hop Growing in the country. That's right: Chuvashia has long produced almost 90 percent of Russian hops. Chuvash hop hit the head well, and it didn’t occur to this head at all that the alpha acid content in it was somehow different. And recently, beer consumers have begun to understand everything subtly (they will also find a lack of alpha acid in wobble), and brewers have stopped taking hops from their native fields. Russia spends $65 million a year to buy hops abroad, and our hop farms have fallen into disrepair and are overgrown with thorns.

What to do? Of course, to hold meetings, preferably with banquets. A large meeting of hop growers and brewers was held in Tsivilsk in May with the participation of the Minister of Agriculture of the Russian Federation Alexei Gordeev. They talked about the reduction of acreage, lower yields, mentioned Germany, where they do not spare money for the scientific support of hop growing. In the end, they came to the productive conclusion that hops are "green gold", and parted ways.

“Nothing has changed since then,” says Aleksey Smirnov, director of the institute. - There are no investments, and the funds that the Russian Agricultural Academy is letting us down are not even enough for a salary. The institute cannot earn the missing money, since the farms around are poor and you cannot conclude any contract with anyone.

And most importantly, hop growers still do not know who they work for. After Gosplan, no unifying structure appeared in this industry. No management, no cooperation. Today the harvest is not bad, but the farms and last year's hops have not yet been sold. Poorly processed Chuvash hop confirms its name as a perennial crop - it has been in warehouses for many years.

Life, meanwhile, goes on, and the hope for its improvement does not fade away. You can talk on this topic with politicians and economists, or you can talk with a beggar named Alexander, who is sitting at the Tikhvin Monastery. Alexander was a quite successful artist, but, as he says, his son died in Afghanistan, his wife drank himself from grief, and he himself moved to the porch.

“I have two months left to beg,” he says. - I applied for retirement - the age is right ...

It’s a pity that neither the city nor the country will get out of poverty in two months ...