Novozhilov and Nabat: they found each other

SARATOV REGION - MOSCOW

A Moscow entrepreneur invested a million dollars in his native village. The villagers are wondering: “Why?..”

X If you want to get to know a person, ask what he would spend a million dollars on. You don’t have to ask Andrey Novozhilov, the owner of a Moscow construction company: Saratov documentarians Valentin Kazakov and Valery Pryanikov made a film about him, which won first prize at the international television film forum in Yalta this year. Andrei Novozhilov literally buried his million in the ground, exporting capital to his small homeland - the village of Kushumskoye, Ershovsky district, Saratov region.

HELP! / Novozhilov and I met at the Moscow Hippodrome. Since the Kushumsky stud farm, which he revived, entered the top ten in Russia, he spends here almost every weekend and knows by name not only all his horses, but also their ancestors up to the third generation. And he rejoices like a child when the Kushum stallion Nabat wins the race.

From one end of Kushumskoye to the other there are 80 kilometers of steppe. Thanks to Novozhilov, people still walk and cows graze along these kilometers

Five years ago, no one dreamed of Russian Cups and other prestigious awards at the Kushum stud farm. The village farm of the same name was on the verge of bankruptcy due to multimillion-dollar debts to LUKOIL, which had already begun to sell off equipment and dispose of the few remaining assets that had not been stolen by the previous leaders. “Kushumskoye” has seven villages and more than three thousand inhabitants. And then Yuri Romanov, director of the farm, made up his mind. He called his fellow countryman Novozhilov in Moscow and said: “Help me out!” Novozhilov arrived with a team of capital lawyers and accountants, bought out debts from LUKOIL, bought 100% of the shares of the farm and purchased seeds and equipment for it.

“And I got stuck in it head over heels,” states the chairman of the Kushumsky village council, Vyacheslav Stepnov, who is also Novozhilov’s son-in-law (married to his cousin).

It’s not clear from his tone: he’s either worried about his relative, or he’s happy for himself. A school, a hospital, a kindergarten and a club - the rural administration should allocate funds for all of this, but for some reason it does not. If it were not for Kushumsky JSC, the school, for example, still would not have had not only a computer, but even lamps in the classrooms. So director Nina Gerasimova is very grateful to her fellow countryman. There’s only one thing she doesn’t understand: why the film about him was called “Everywhere There’s a Lenin.”

“After all, Lenin is a historical figure; an ordinary person cannot be compared with him,” she is sure.

But other Kushumites are indifferent to the figure of the leader. The figure stands near the village council building, tightly wrapped in cellophane so that the silhouette is barely discernible: the right hand has withered from decrepitude at the monument. Vyacheslav Stepnov honestly offered Kushum pensioners, most of whom keep party cards at home, to chip in for the leader, but they ignored his offer. So soon the leader will be dismantled altogether. Lenin is not children - JSC Kushumsky refused to fork out money for him.

IN THE FIELD A WARRIOR / Formally, Novozhilov no longer manages the farm: in January, having carried out the “successor” operation, he returned the powers of the general director to Yuri Romanov. But he still visits Kushumskoye regularly, every two to three months. Yes, I never stopped going there ever since I left for Moscow to study after school. He served in the army, graduated from college, became a foreman, foreman, construction manager... And in 1989 he opened his own construction cooperative, which as a result made him a millionaire. But relations with the capital, in every corner of which for 15 years something was built with his hands, did not work out.

- If I don’t visit my homeland three or four times a year, I’m suffocating. It's not a good climate here.

He says that he approached the idea of restoring an almost ruined farm like a businessman: “It was interesting.” But when I ask the businessman whether he expects to make a profit soon, Novozhilov waves his hands:

- What a profit!.. I didn’t get back the money I invested and I’m unlikely to get it back. Although the farm now lives on its own. But we can’t jump over some level. And it won’t work if nothing changes in the country.

What are the claims against the country? They are divided into two parts: the state and the people (although perhaps these parts are not so different).

The state is clear: the grain market is in a fever, fuel prices are rising, and the farm has not received a single subsidized ruble for diesel fuel in five years. Plus the tax office, the police and the prosecutor's office, which separately and together make Novozhilov remember the gang wars of the early 90s with nostalgic warmth: “Those bandits even had no shoulder straps, it was possible to come to an agreement with them.” For three years, Novozhilov was under investigation due to salary debts that accumulated under the previous management of Kushumsky. True, it is worth noting that there is not a single chairman in the region who has not been under investigation. “And maybe in the whole region. Here they say: they used to give orders for working on a collective farm, now they give prison terms,” explains Yuri Romanov.

The head of the stud farm Stepanych (in the center) left opera for the sake of Kushumsky

Life in Kushumskoye, of course, has not become saccharine in five years: salaries are still paid once a year, the rest is given in grain and feed for livestock. Almost everyone in Kushumskoye keeps pigs, cows, and geese - this is the only source of living money. But in almost every yard there is a “six” or “nine”. And 62-year-old Stepanych, the head of the stud farm Vladimir Stepanovich Melnikov, is a boomer. Silver, despite the fact that this “boomer” is hardly much younger than Stepanychev’s wife.

Everyone in Kushumskoye considered it their duty to report his wife, 19- year-old red-headed Nastya: everyone here seems to be proud of this union. At the same time, Stepanych himself seems to be a stern person. He doesn't swear - he speaks it. Moreover, he mainly screams, so much so that the horses in the meadow tremble. When I casually inquired where the voice comes from, it turned out that in his youth Stepanych sang in the opera - first in Saratov, then in Vladikavkaz. But he gave up his artistic career for the sake of horses: like Novozhilov himself, he could not leave Kushumskoye forever.

Stepanych is Novozhilov’s faithful ally. Unfortunately, one of the few. After a long separation, the Moscow builder, not without surprise, discovered that the former collective farmers had lost the habit of working and were accustomed to stealing. He is sure: the whole point is that people did not have time to live badly.

- They had just begun to collapse - I appeared. Those who have already seen what happens to farms want to work. People come to us from neighboring villages. I thought that the people of Kushum were also tired of living poorly. But they, it turns out, still want... to live poorly.

EXPLANATION BY CONTRARY / Saratov directors Valentin Kazakov and Valery Pryanikov differed in their assessments of their own work. Kazakov prefers the second part of the film, which was filmed quite recently, the one called “Andryushin’s Sorrows.” It turned out to be more real and tougher. The first film is dearer to Pryanikov - it is softer and more sentimental. Blue sky, yellow steppe. There is a feast in Stepanych's yard. “Let’s drink to those in the field,” says Stepanych. Bright red, like Nastya's head, a haystack in full screen. Green field, blue sky.

It is impossible to make a mistake: in front of the village council building there can only be a monument to the leader

It was the first film that received the prize in Yalta. It, unlike the second one, is not so much about life - about feeling. About the feeling of homeland, as inexplicable as any other love. Why do 19- year-old Nastya and 62-year-old Stepanych need each other? Why does a middle-class Moscow millionaire need a piece of land in the Volga steppe?..

“If I had a million, I would invest it anywhere, but I wouldn’t bury it in the ground,” Nina Burtseva, a veterinarian from Kushumskoye, is perplexed. - We can’t understand why he spent so much money?!

How to explain? Perhaps it's simpler in reverse.

- What if Novozhilov had not helped Kushumsky? - I asked director Yuri Romanov. - Well, the farm would go bankrupt. But people would still somehow survive on their own...

Instead of answering, director Yuri Romanov took me to the neighboring village of Yemenets - more precisely, to the place where the village once was. All that was left of it were empty boxes of houses with dark window sockets and a rural cemetery. The local state farm collapsed 15 years ago. During this time, the old people died, and their children and grandchildren dispersed in all directions. They themselves did not survive... Only steppe winds now blow on abandoned graves, forever erasing someone’s homeland from the map of the Motherland.

Millionaire in the steppe