Travel to the city of Velizh

The federal highway M20, the highway from St. Petersburg to Kyiv and Odessa, begins from Pulkovo Hill to the south. Passing Gatchina, ten kilometers later it crosses the Oredezh River on a bridge, then easily passes Nabokov-Pushkin's Vyru, Rozhdestveno and Batovo, almost gets lost among the confusing streets of the city of Luga, but again turns onto the straight path and after thirty kilometers leaves the Leningrad region forever. Other lands begin, the lands of Pskov.

Three hundred and seventy-odd of these Pskov kilometers can be covered without stopping in four and a half to five hours: the road is not very good, but it is straight and not particularly congested - sometimes it is possible to accelerate as far as the engine allows...

Along its Pskov length, the route, in addition to Pskov itself, passes through Ostrov, Opochka, Pustoshka and Nevel - small regional towns, the center of life in this not very populated region - only they have canteens, gas stations and, if something happens, a car service - and woe to that , who was caught in need in the middle of a journey...

Along the roadsides near populated areas and beyond, as usual, local grandmothers stand, selling gifts of their native nature - the further south you go, the less brown color among these gifts and, on the contrary, there are more bright, festive flowers - buckets of potatoes are replaced by buckets of cranberries and lingonberries , and bunches of gloomy, wide-legged boletuses and boletuses are joyful chanterelles. And, of course, everywhere there are apples, apples, apples of all colors and sizes... My God - how many apples are there in the Pskov region this year!..

...So, already fifteen kilometers south of Nevel, Russia ends: there, on the Belarusian side, is the border Ezerishche, then Gorodok with the Usysaya River flowing nearby, which gave me my last name, and, finally, Vitebsk. However, we will go differently, turning from Nevel to the southeast - we will leave the federal highway onto a completely ordinary highway that goes around the Belarusian border, and we will find ourselves in a slightly different world - into the world, so to speak, of the inner Pskov-Smolensk outback.

You can drive ten kilometers and not see a single oncoming car - this is the absolute truth. On the other hand, if someone comes your way, it may turn out to be a shiny Mercedes with Latvian license plates, or a “wide jeep” from Estonia, which seems like a long journey from here... Or it may turn out to be, for example, a bulky van with the sides painted in cheerful yellow-green tones - they deliver expensive St. Petersburg Bochkarev beer to all our vast corners and villages. Let us note in passing that it is not easy to sell such beer here - oh, it is not easy! Therefore, it is not easy that many poor local residents are tempted by the cross-border “Lidsky” - although it has a nondescript label and a slightly urine-like taste, it costs seven or eight rubles versus Bochkarev’s thirteen. Well, somehow trade is still going on, since we came across the mentioned painted car...

Therefore, about the road and the oncoming people... Mercedes and jeeps - they, in general, are clear where they come from and where: starting, as I already said, from Nevel on the St. Petersburg-Kiev highway, this road leads out after about two hundred kilometers, to in turn, on the Moscow-Minsk highway just near Smolensk. So they go in transit to quite reputable cities and therefore are not particularly interesting to us now. Is it only because when they meet, they induce various kinds of semi-incoherent dreams, that is, thoughts about the main thing and forever unchanged. About Russian national invariants, for example. That is, you are driving, say, at night, better even in winter - the road is not lit, of course, and is barely silver in the moonlight - there is no one around, only the silhouettes of tall trees and that’s all. And at some point a light appears in the distance - someone is coming towards you. Actually, this already has everything - the whole complex of emotions, sensations, relationships to space, to other people, strangers and acquaintances, to the flow of time, which so slowly brings those moving along the Russian highway closer to each other and thereby allows one to mentally anticipate the event of the meeting, and subsequent separation. At such moments, you somehow understand with special spontaneity what warmth is, for example. And it doesn’t matter whether it’s the warmth of the sheepskin that wrapped you while sitting on a cart, or the warmth of a car air conditioner. It doesn’t matter which century is around you - the nineteenth, the twentieth, the current one...

However, let's return to our journey. So where are we stuck? Oh yes, we turned left from Nevel... Therefore, for now this is still the Pskov region - first the Nevelsky district, then the Usvyatsky district. That is, I want to say, today’s Pskov region, because, for example, in the 70s of the 19th century, when my great-grandfather was born in these Usvyati, this area was part of the Vitebsk province, in which “Jews were allowed to live.” Well, about Jews and provinces - later. I will only note that at that time Usvyaty was a typical Jewish town, which today nothing reminds a cursory glance from a car window. We see only the usual scattering of unsightly wooden houses, occasionally interspersed with two-story concrete monsters, erected according to the regulations of the Brezhnev era in this urban-type village .

Of course, there have been no Jews here for a long time. The stamp of depression is everywhere - that is, its external stamp, I want to say: not a single sociologist knows what people have in their chests and wallets, but the signs, or rather, the complete absence of them, are noticeable to everyone. Judging by them, nothing has changed here over the past ten to fifteen years, the only exception, perhaps, is the outlandish roadside cafe (“hot lunches, dinners, beer, barbecue, home cooking”). It’s clear that this is not McDonald’s, you won’t be happy with a double fishburger here - an ordinary hut, next to a traditional rural toilet with a cesspool. However, there are no barbecues either - the owner, speaking with a clear Belarusian whistle and croak, pushes a menu, also written with a Belarusian accent: “sausage... cutlet...” Here you can eat for eighteen rubles ($0.6) and, without receiving it, Of course, no gastronomic pleasure, but still get enough and stay alive.

In Usvyati there is the only traffic police post along the entire length of this road. A lone duty officer usually either sits in his Niva or gets out of it and stops passing people - not for the sake of self-interest, but mainly out of boredom...

But the landscapes around are of aching beauty! In principle, the places are swampy, waders, cranberry, sometimes interspersed with deciduous forest, then with good, light pine forests. Small rivers tend to overflow into calm, flat lakes overgrown with reeds... Speaking of rivers. They, accordingly, determine the foundations of local toponymy: thus, the Usvyacha flows through Usvyaty, the Udvyacha flows through Udvyaty, there is also the Uspol, in the same row the mentioned Usysa and other Belarusian tributaries of the Western Dvina - Ula, Usveyka, Ushacha and even the distant Uzhitsa. In general, this must be the only place on Earth where a person with the surname Usyskin feels, in a sense, like an endemic plant. Well, it looks like I started talking...

So, we are leaving the Pskov region, gentlemen. Vivat! Behind is a rickety and rusty, but not without traces of its former monumentality, banner “Usvyatsky District”. Ahead is its no less rusty brother, also with traces of the noble Soviet past: “Smolensk region. Velizh district." The road is still narrow and deserted. There are no cars or people in sight. The grace of a province lost in the forests, from where even if you gallop for three years, you won’t get anywhere - and this despite the fact that it will be no more than five kilometers to the state border in a straight line, through the forests!

Here you may want to object to me. "Border? - you say. - What a border this is, by God! This is Belarus! The same Russia, in fact... The same Western Russian primordial wilderness in all its glory...” And, nodding, I agree with you, but, having agreed, I will hasten in response to give here something like a historical mini-essay about the city of Velizh, sported on the knee , since we almost got to him during the conversation.

Velizh as it was

For the first time, the town of Velizh, located at the confluence of the Velizhka River with the Western Dvina, was mentioned in Lithuanian chronicles of the late 14th century. In 1392, Prince Witold made a successful campaign against the Pskov cities, among which Velizh was named. There is a mention of the city in connection with the military events of 1403; over the next hundred years, Velizh constantly passed from Russian to Lithuanian hands and back. These military actions reached particular drama in the 16th century. So, in 1533, after the unsuccessful campaign of the Polish king Sigismund I the Old, Velizh was once again included in the Russian state. A decree was issued, signed for the young Ivan IV, on the construction of fortifications on the Velizh fortification: “In the summer of April 7044 (1536), on the 19th day, Grand Duke Ivan Vasilyevich and his mother Grand Duchess Elena ordered to build a city in the Toropets district on the Velizh fortification, the city of Velizh , and finish the month of July, in the third summer of his state.”

The fortress was built by masters Ivan Rudak and Ivan Kolychev and in July 1536 it was erected in the form of three log buildings filled with clay. It had eight battle towers, two of which had entrance gates. The work was supervised by Prince Ivan Ivanovich Barabashin, who in the same year made a successful raid from the newly built fortress, which devastated the outskirts of Vitebsk. It is customary in Russia to count the history of Velizh from this date.

In 1580, Nevel, Usvyaty and Velizh were taken by the troops of Stefan Batory and, according to the Yam-Zapolsky Peace of 1582, they again went to Poland. In 1585, the Polish king granted Velizh a coat of arms: a golden cross, above it a naked sword, pointed east, on a blue shield of the European type. The Russian coat of arms was granted to the city by Catherine II in 1781.

In the middle of the 17th century, Velizh was destroyed by the troops of Mikhail Romanov, and in 1669, according to the Truce of Andrusovo, it finally went to Moscow.

Then it became quieter, even the Northern War seemed to pass the town by. According to the first partition of Poland in 1772, Velizh officially became part of the Pskov province, and in 1804, during the period of administrative reforms of Alexander I, it was included in the Vitebsk province.

There is information about the city of Velizh dating back to the period of the War of 1812. Thus, food was stored in Velizh for the Russian army; this was done by the 20th Jaeger Regiment under the supervision of Major General Gorikhvostov. On July 18, French cavalrymen of the 4th Corps of Viceroy Eugene Beauharnais burst into the city and cut down Russian recruits, General Ermolov mentioned this in his memoirs. It is also reported that on July 25, the Stavropol Kalmyk regiment “independently imposed a sudden battle on the French for the city of Velizh, which led them into complete disorder.” Isn’t it a completely postmodern picture: among the blackened, squat Russian huts there is a bloody battle between the Kalmyks and the French.

In 1817, the first general development plan in the history of the city was approved. Apparently, it was brought to life one way or another: the entire central part of the city along the left bank of the Dvina was built up with stone buildings, and all Velizh churches were stone, of which there were more than twenty by the end of the 19th century: 11 Orthodox, 9 synagogues, a Catholic church , Old Believer churches and so on. The city developed - timber was harvested and floated down the river, flax grown in the area was processed, bricks were fired - there were about a dozen brick factories in Velizh. There was only perhaps no railway - however, this was partly compensated by the then very intensive shipping along the Dvina, which had not yet become shallow: according to Brockhaus and Efron, the main trading partner of Velizh until the beginning of the 20th century was Riga...

In general, it was possible to live: in a town with a population of 12,000 people (data from 1913), there functioned almost the full range of secondary educational institutions that existed in Russia at that time, religious and secular, including men’s and women’s gymnasiums, as well as a completely unique Jewish technical school with teaching in Russian.

However, Velizh, alas, did not become famous throughout Russia for this. The beginning of the so-called “Velizh case” dates back to 1823 - one of the first high-profile cases of “blood libel” in the history of the Russian Empire. A group of Velizh Jews were accused of the ritual murder of an Orthodox Christian. The administrative investigation, however, did not reveal any evidence against the accused, which, given the government’s special attention to interfaith conflicts, local authorities immediately informed St. Petersburg. From there, in response, an order was received to close the case and release the suspects from custody: despite their generally squeamish attitude towards Jews, the government dignitaries of Alexander I were quite sensible people and in general did not believe idle nonsense. That would have been the end of it, but two years later, during his last trip to the south, Alexander made a stop in Velizh, during which supporters of the accusation of the Jews were able to obtain an audience and convince the king that public opinion in the city was dissatisfied with the sluggish actions of the authorities. After this, Alexander ordered a new investigation, carrying it out to the maximum procedural completeness. The Jews were arrested again, the car spun.

A few months later, Alexander I died in Taganrog, and the “Velizh Affair,” among other problems, was inherited by Nicholas. It is easy to guess that all this had a corresponding impact on the speed of the investigation - when in 1835 (!) the case was finally closed with a not guilty verdict, it was no longer possible to release two of the accused from custody: they died in prison. It is believed that under the impression of the “Velizh Affair,” Lermontov wrote his youth drama “The Spaniards” in 1830. Moreover, he apparently received the source material, so to speak, first-hand - from the Alexandrovsk Minister of the Navy, Count N. S. Mordvinov, one of the most progressive and independent figures of that time. It was to Mordvinov that Velizh Jews turned for help - among other things, Nikolai Semenovich owned a vast estate not far from the city, in the village of Selezni. Apparently, Mordvinov was the author of the final resolution in the case, approved by Nicholas I against the will of many members of the State Council: “open sealed Jewish schools in Velizh, send the accusers to hard labor in Siberia, and release the former accused from paying government duties for eight years "

This is the plot. In order, however, to understand the essence hidden in its depths, one should take into account the specifics of the then Jewish population of those places.

Having become Russian subjects for the most part back in the 16th century, these people first experienced, as usual, a wave of mass repressions unleashed on the infidels with enthusiasm and ingenuity by the armies of Ivan the Terrible and his heirs. Nevertheless, the Jews are tenacious - they did not kill everyone. The survivors managed to occupy a certain social niche and, in terms of adaptation to Russian realities, had a head start of more than a century over the bulk of the five million Russian Jews. So, from approximately the same places, Peter’s comrade-in-arms Pyotr Shafirov came from, who began his service as a clerk in the embassy order, in which, by the way, his father had previously served. Moreover, the Jews of these once border regions, inhabited by representatives of a dozen different nations, were internally emancipated, perhaps like no other - many spoke three to five languages, and Russian without an accent, bore Russian surnames, their business often extended to " Great Russian provinces” that lay outside the Pale of Settlement. In a word, for some these were serious competitors, and it was important to bring these seemingly ordinary people into some other ideological space in the eyes of government officials - a space of devilry and fear.

During the last war, Velizh was, in general, wiped off the face of the earth. The Germans entered the city about a month after the start of hostilities - by this time, Soviet troops had already begun to put up real resistance to the enemy, clinging to every populated area. It is clear that this did not benefit the settlements themselves. Moreover, Velizh was not particularly lucky - in the winter of 1942, during the Toropetsk counter-offensive operation, the Red Army was able to come close to the city and was again thrown back to the east only in the spring. Thus, Velizh managed to find itself in the role of a city on the front line not two times, like most others, but three times. However, sometimes once was enough.

On September 20, 1943, the city was finally liberated from the Nazis. At that time, no more than two dozen stone buildings could be considered surviving. Less than six hundred people inhabited the ashes, and out of one and a half thousand Jews, thirty-two people remained alive - the Germans drove the rest into the ghetto and burned them during the retreat.

After the war, Velizh was settled by other people - mainly short-term migrants from other areas of the Smolensk region: there appears to be a special mechanism for such migrations within one administrative unit. The current residents know little about the former population of these places, but they know something. “It was a good town, by all accounts,” I heard. “They cooked the cheese and then took it to Paris for an exhibition.” “It was a Jewish place - and Jews, it is known, will not live where it is bad...” Such a strange place on our planet, where Jews are considered the original inhabitants, sunk at the forks of History. In today's Velizh, the one-armed history teacher Alexander Grigorievich Bordyukov, who as a boy witnessed the destruction of the Velizh ghetto, is responsible for the past. Through the efforts of this man, a local history museum was created in the city. The museum's guest book contains dozens of entries in different languages: descendants of former Velizhans sometimes come to the “sacred stones.” People here are generally used to them. There is also the “Bordyukov list” - over seven hundred names of those killed in the ghetto. In addition to names, photographs and other biographical information were collected - everything that could be learned and found about people who, from the point of view of other people, should not have existed at all.

Velizh: landscape and economy

At the entrance to the city, we had to slow down to a minimum: ahead, straight along the highway, they were driving cows from their daytime pasture. The cows looked pretty good - I wanted to stick my hand out and pat them on their well-fed sides as they walked. Actually, there was little surprising in such well-being: next to each of the cows was its owner. Thus, these cows were private, and not “corporate”, that is, collective and state farms, in our opinion. As I learned later, almost everyone in Velizh has cows who can create conditions for keeping them. At the same time, their number is growing and growing, while the “corporate” herd is thinning. And the annual milk yield from private cows is sometimes several times greater. However, official agricultural statistics, while recognizing the reduction of the herd on large farms, also notes an increase in its productivity, i.e., milk yield per animal. In other words, the quality of the dairy herd is also growing on former collective farms - with a simultaneous increase in the number of pigs, poultry and other “fast-turnover” livestock. All this together is nothing more than the first, textbook, stage of the general rise in agriculture!

In principle, for many families, their own cow is almost the main source of income. Milk is delivered to factories in Rudnya or Smolensk, procurement is organized, and one animal can bring up to $300 per year. The costs are minimal - only labor: feed, of course, is prepared with one’s own hands. What is $300 for residents of Velizh? Quite a lot: average earnings in the region this summer ranged from 2,338 rubles per month ($80) for construction industry workers to 739 rubles ($25), received, so to speak, by agricultural professionals. (I will note in parentheses that the all-Russian average monthly income was then about $110.)

Here it is necessary to clarify that record-breaking builders are, apparently, primarily highway builders. Two or three enterprises of the corresponding profile existing in Velizh are considered prosperous by local standards: the presence in the area of ​​asphalt entrances to all more or less lively villages is a matter of local pride. As well as the technological re-equipment of road builders that has taken place in recent years: instead of women with shovels, now here are foreign cars. By the way, in addition to technical re-equipment, there is also personnel re-equipment: I was told with trepidation that our roads are being built by young leaders (listed by name!), natives of Velizh, who received their education in Smolensk and returned to their homeland. This is a natural miracle in a town where even if people leave to study, they never return. In light of all that has been said, it is not surprising that Velizh road builders have become adept at receiving orders even from their neighbors - in the Pskov region.

Another popular way to feed a family has become, as you might guess, dry fishing - men go to Smolensk and Moscow for seasonal work. It is curious that in this case the pre-revolutionary model is reproduced almost exactly - as then, Velizhans work in the capital, again, as builders, most often as carpenters. Of course, not everyone returns later: in general, as I already said, people leave Velizh , especially young people. The population is decreasing, especially in the region - there are more and more extinct villages. Actually, this is an all-Russian problem of a cardinal nature : bad centripetalism . The smaller the settlement, the lower the level of personal ambitions of its residents it is able to satisfy. At the same time, there is, apparently, a certain critical level of these ambitions - if this level cannot be satisfied, the settlement is doomed to desolation and subsequent extinction. As for Velizh, it seems that all local youth cherish in their souls the idea that sooner or later they will leave here someday: to what extent these dreams will come true is a separate question, but the presence in the minds of “emigration potential” is perhaps medical fact.

And it’s a sad fact, even if we assume that in reality no one will escape from Velizh: with such a nail in the head, it is almost impossible to significantly improve the environment around you. It turns out to be a vicious circle: “I will definitely leave here, because life here is very unsettled, so there is no point in improving it - so life continues to be unsettled - so you see: we should get out of here a long time ago!”

This is one of the unfavorable trends. But there are also the opposite. People, in general, seem to have come to the realization that the worst is over . There are few noticeable improvements, but it doesn’t seem to get any worse. For example, money began to circulate more or less normally - without debts and barter, everything seems to be good, but very little of it ends up circulating... If we try to generally characterize the stage of transformation of the local economy from the Soviet one to the present one, then, probably, This is the stage when privatized enterprises belong to their own administration in a joint-stock company intertwined with the district administration. At the same time, the stage when these enterprises were plundered by their own management has generally been passed, and the stage when a third-party investor comes to take over what was not stolen has not yet arrived. A kind of precarious balance when the directors-owners little by little begin to do something, or rather even begin to think about doing something for their farms and sawmills.

I repeat, no newfangled giants of metallurgy and food processing, who came from afar and bought up former collective farms on the ground, were found in the Velizh region. Especially foreign investors. However, I was told about one curious situation: a local flax mill, which quite successfully processes the flax grown by regional farms (since pre-revolutionary times, the flax here has traditionally been of very high quality), decided to grow raw materials for itself on its own and acquired land for this.

Another quasi-economic exercise is observations of the prices of provincial catering. As in the already mentioned Usvyatsky roadside cafe, prices are minimal: dinner at the only Velizh restaurant “Dvina” will cost you a maximum of sixty rubles ($2). This is the most expensive possible place - a hall with at least a dozen tables, operating as a restaurant two evenings a week (from 20 to 4) and for another four days serving as a regular dining room (from 11 to 17, it seems). Of course, even during these few working hours, Dvina is by no means crowded with visitors - locals eat at home, and there are almost no visitors. In the neighboring regional center of Demidov, I already discovered a canteen, so to speak, in the purity of the genre - with Soviet brown trays, dirty blue walls and a menu printed through purple carbon paper in a plexiglass case to the right of the entrance. So, in this menu there was not a single line where in the “price” column there was anything more than six rubles. What does this innocent cheapness mean? In general, there is a lack of economic justification for this activity. At such low prices, too little money is pumped through the system—at no point in the system can the profits necessary for subsequent investment be accumulated. Investments not only in the expansion of production, but even in the usual restoration of deteriorating buildings and equipment. That is, I don’t want to say that no one is renovating buildings now - it’s just that funds for this are allocated by someone unknown and not at all based on economic justification. This, generally speaking, has always been called socialism.

Velizh: landscape and accompanying emotions

Actually, as usual, I forgot about the most important thing. The fact is that my grandfather, Usyskin Lev Kuzmich (Kusielevich) was born on February 23 (10), 1901 in this district town of Velizh, Vitebsk province. Despite the fact that his family, more precisely, the family of his father, and my great-grandfather, lived somewhat higher along the Dvina (Andreapol, Staraya Toropa, Nelidovo, etc.), Velizh was the center for them - they went there to give birth, receive treatment, study and etc. Perhaps the notorious Pale of Settlement was largely to blame for this: all the towns I mentioned then belonged either to the Tver or to the Pskov province - Jews, generally speaking, were not allowed to settle there, and my relatives lived in those places only because they belonged to the status exception - these were people who were in the direct service of a Jewish merchant of the first guild , whose last name, it seems, was Golodets. It is clear that there were not very many such exceptions, because that is why they are exceptions - according to family legends, for a long time the great-grandfather served a sawmill in the village, where besides them there was only one other Jewish family. The owner of the sawmill managed his business, which included complex logging and subsequent rafting of timber along the Dvina, of course, from Velizh.

In the nineteenth, my grandfather went to Civil War, almost died during the flight of Tukhachevsky’s army from Warsaw, and in the twenty-first he settled in Petrograd - as far as I know, he returned to his native place for several years in the late 30s - perhaps precisely thanks to This is why my grandfather, being a man of very independent judgments, successfully survived the years of Stalin’s terror.

It is interesting that my grandfather carried his love for wood as a material throughout his life, working as a foreman at various Leningrad enterprises - woodworking, furniture and even wooden shipbuilding. Moreover, this passion was passed on to a certain extent to my father, and to some extent even to me - to this day I go a little crazy from the smell of fresh wood shavings or from the sight of some agate-like cross-section of wood with layers of growth rings.

Soviet families, alas, are not rich in archives: ours also has a few preserved - several portrait cards made in city studios (Photography by Raphael, Velizh), a book given to my grandfather for academic success ("Tribes of Deaf Corners" by Nemirovich-Danchenko - from it, in particular, I learned that the Russian exploration of Siberia in the 17th-18th centuries, from the point of view of methods, was no different from the campaigns of Cortes and Co. against the Indians of South America - the same open genocide, speaking in modern terms). Some things remained at the level of oral traditions - for example, my grandfather said that twice a year in Velizh there were fist fights (it was called going to the fist fights ) - the right bank of the Dvina went to the left. Grandfather usually took part in the winter ones, which took place right on the ice of the river - they were considered more honest, unlike the summer ones, no one in the heat of the moment violated the set of unwritten rules inherent in this type of leisure. It is unlikely that now we will be able to understand exactly why this happened...

There is still curiosity left. Returning home from Latvia, which was then visa-free for us, in the summer of 1992, I decided to stop by this town, as I now understand, mainly to verify its real existence on earth. Now, nine years later, I visited Velizh for the second time and, having already two points on its historical trajectory known to me, I am trying to draw some conclusions from my observations. The error of such an approximation is, of course, very large, but still...

So, at first glance, not much has changed on the streets. They built several ugly stone buildings (police station, cash settlement center, a couple of residential buildings). The rest seems to be the same and in the same places - if there are changes, then they are in the details, in some barely noticeable features. So, in the same place there is a long-distance call center - but now you don’t have to sit there for hours, there is an automatic connection with the whole world, a pretty girl manages the process using a brand new white Compaq laptop with a color plasma monitor. But the Internet, it seems, in Velizh is the privilege of the city administration and, perhaps, local schools. This is understandable - we don’t have our own provider due to the narrowness of the market. You have to communicate with Smolensk through intercity traffic - a little expensive for poor local residents. Hence the lack of demand and, therefore, the lack of a local provider. The circle closes. But in small settlements like these, this new window to the world is perhaps more needed than anywhere else!

There is also a hotel in the same place. The lonely blue spruce tree near the porch, as well as the frame for a large-scale sign hanging above this porch, reminds us of the past Soviet past, when each city had its own hotel. However, there is no sign itself. There is no much else in the hotel: telephone, hot water, buffet. There are no guests either: usually there are no more than two people per two dozen rooms. It is clear that with such an influx of clients, the hotel cannot help but decline: today, in fact, it is able to offer you only three things: a room with dilapidated furniture and cold water in the washbasin, dubious bed linen and a view from the window of the Western Dvina, evoking what - vaguely melancholic thoughts about the fluidity of time and, at the same time, its inseparability. The girl who performed the duties of a receptionist and at the same time a maid (some kind of languid, fleshy Tatar beauty) in the evening will ask when you plan to leave in the morning and when to return later: after you leave, she will also go home on a bicycle and arrive again an hour before you. But they will charge you as much as half a day - 75 rubles. ($2.5), not for full. Although this is a lot - some granny at the bus station will offer you an overnight stay for 20 rubles. ($0.7), and for 50 rubles ($1.7) you can quite comfortably spend the night in the dormitory of a local technical school - what can you do: everyone has to get by somehow. However, the hotel in question has also been privatized—go figure, what is the point of such a business for its owner!

In the Velizhanka cafe-bar, back in 1992, I was amazed by the presence of a microwave oven. It is still alive - pies and semi-finished pizza are heated in it. In the evenings, men's voices and music can be heard from the establishment - apparently, it is in greater demand than the Dvina restaurant.

But you won’t be able to drink normal coffee either in Velizhanka, or in Dvina, or in Velizh in general. In grocery stores only instant. One day I just caught my eye in the far corner of the counter, in the far corner of the counter, a variety of some kind of rotten grains in a nondescript plastic bag - apparently brought here back during the era.

So we are not used to drinking coffee here - the closest cup of espresso to Velizh is a hundred kilometers from the city, no matter which direction: in Vitebsk, in a cafe at a gas station at the fork on Nevel, or in the opposite direction - in a similar cafe at the 397th kilometer Federal highway M1 Moscow-Minsk at the confluence of the highway running through Velizh from Nevel. By the way, it’s worth making a special trip to that intersection and then returning to Velizh again. The feeling is quite acute - you first drive along the city streets past wooden houses with the same geraniums on the windowsills and hollyhocks on the porches, then for more than an hour along a humpbacked highway among forests, silos and half-abandoned cowsheds - you, without knowing it, get used to this landscape , you can no longer imagine anything else, when suddenly... Suddenly you find yourself in another world: a wide, four-lane, straight and smooth highway, sparkling with brand new markings, along which beautiful cars are rushing... Right there - painted in bright colors a gas station, and next to it, on a hill, is that same cafe, where plastic and tiles are everywhere, imported toilets and water gurgles in them, where you can have lunch, or sit over a cup of coffee, watching long trucks rush past one after another, carrying the capital various useful foreign things. Yes, this is a different world - bright, clean and rich, inhabited by other people, and it’s simply a miracle that the transition from it to the world of the Russian provincial outback and back is so easy! However, I think this is, in fact, a typical Russian trait or problem, if you will - dual worlds - the coexistence in time and space of two different ways, two systems of values ​​- miraculously preserving, however, both the unity of language and the unity of banknotes...

But let us return again to Velizh, where the lamps installed along the main street do not light up in the evenings out of economy, where cast-iron Lenin points with an outstretched hand to the legal advice office, where there is a grocery store “Fortuna”, which with its name inevitably suggests thoughts about the likelihood of food poisoning, where characteristic early Soviet toponymy rules the roost ( Imeni Sacco and Vanzetti Street) and where the consumer cooperatives buy apples from the population at the extortionate price of 80 kopecks per kilogram ($0.026).

In general, the city is like a city: people live. They are proud of the successes of local young chess players - one of them, Alyosha Zhuravlev, even receives a scholarship from the Anatoly Karpov School. The newspaper “Velizhskaya Nov” is printed twice a week at the local printing house. On the wooden stand “Traffic Police Window” there are only poorly visible photocopied portraits of the leaders of the Chechen partisans - there are apparently few car accidents here: I was told several times about what happened two years ago when a car collided with a moose that suddenly ran out onto the highway. In general, the criminal chronicle of Velizh does not excite the imagination: mainly the theft of ripening crops from vegetable gardens and spare parts for agricultural machinery from workshops. These are, by the standards of local residents, real and quite acute problems. Another natural background is drunken fights and suicides. And only once - a victorious report - a message about a transit storage facility for poppy straw being closed by the police.

Velizhans don’t have many cars, but the abundance of cyclists is immediately noticeable. In this regard, Velizh, in spite of itself, makes us remember the Dutch province: a person on two wheels here is by no means a teenager in the appropriate outfit. It can be a resident of any age and gender, going to the store, to work, on a visit, etc. He can be with bags, an umbrella, or something else as common in life as it is exotic as part of the appearance of a “driver” bicycle."

Another kind of “European” association in Velizh arises from the very sight of people on the streets. More precisely, from the almost complete absence of these people - both on weekends and on weekdays, the streets of the town are, by and large, deserted: any passer-by attracts attention, and, in general, it is clear where he is going and why. You seem to be in the frame of Antonioni from the time of “Blow-up” or “Professione: reporter”.

On weekends, services are held in the only Orthodox church on the right bank of the Dvina. But on weekdays, a kindergarten operates at the same church - almost the only one of its kind in the Smolensk region. Apparently, local residents tried to build another church for themselves - not far from the bus station there was a sign stating that there would be a temple in honor of Sts. Equal-to-the-Apostles Cyril and Methodius. However, this sign is also fairly overgrown with grass.

A few years ago, another temple appeared in Velizh: on the most elegant wooden house on the main city street there is an inscription: “House of prayer for Evangelical Christian Baptists. Church of the Renaissance". Worship services are also held here on weekends and are becoming increasingly popular in the city. In general, traces of the successful missionary activity of the ECB are already quite clearly visible, at least in the western regions of Russia - this is, apparently, some qualitatively new phenomenon that will have to be taken into account in the not too distant future. Although, I think this is a positive phenomenon.

It is interesting that local authorities show commendable religious tolerance, wisely encouraging any cultural activity of their citizens - one way or another, this activity arises around the parishes of any denominations, but the primacy here is held by those of them that actively work with proselytes.

A parishioner of the ECB church, by the way, is the main local poet and secretary of the Dvina literary association, Valentina Elkina. In general, about ten people write poetry in the region. Not only in the city, but also, for example, in the village of Selezny. Once a week, Dvina members get together and communicate. Collective and individual collections are published in the already mentioned printing house, published in Velizhskaya Novi - on its pages, by the way, the same Elkina once started a playful poetic correspondence with a local lawyer. Elkina acted under a pseudonym, and so did the lawyer. In general, life goes on little by little.

...Immediately behind the bridge over the Western Dvina there is a one-story dilapidated bus station building. This is, in a sense, the center of the city - on weekends in the morning hours the largest flea market in Velizh is held here. Here they sell apples and cranberries all day long, here, and only here, there are several “tents”, quenching the thirst of Velizhan residents around the clock with appropriate drinks... There is nothing interesting inside the bus station: crumbling plaster of the walls, a ticket office window, several half-broken benches of the waiting room, as well as a built in the corner there is a quick pharmacy and perfume kiosk. Somewhere on the wall we manage to find a schedule: a dozen passing flights to Vitebsk, Velikiye Luki, Nevel and, of course, Smolensk. I am surprised, however, to discover another daily intercity bus route from Smolensk to St. Petersburg passing through the town. That is, I could come here by bus. Or I could have passed by on the way to Smolensk: during the quarter-hour stop, I probably would have even gone out to stretch my legs, used the toilet, and bought mineral water.

And I would return about five minutes later to the bus - in fact, nothing interesting: a small depressive regional town, of which there are many. Some kind of Velizh. I would straighten the green curtain that had come loose from the belt holder and, having thereby provided myself with the light flux necessary for reading, I would return to studying the thick and interesting newspaper.