‘Your field has been impounded’

Why a 19-year-old farmer threatened to burn down her own wheatfield

Anastasia Dolgopolova, a 19-year-old from the Kursk Region, became a household name throughout Russia after she recorded a video address to President Vladimir Putin. In the video, she explained that, given Russia's sanctions against foreign produce, she had decided to become a farmer and plant wheat in her field. But the storage warehouse was burned down by unknown arsonists, the banks refused her credit, and there was no government assistance available. Because of this, the only option she had left was to burn the wheat in the field. Dolgopolova’s appeal reached both the Kremlin and her region's local bureaucrats. The field was impounded and, on Tuesday, August 4, the authorities brought in a combine harvester, intending to harvest the wheat themselves. The young farmer’s parents, who acted as guarantors on her loans, now risk losing their property. Andrey Kozenko, special correspondent for Meduza, went to Kursk to find out how it all came to this.

On July 23, 2015, Anastasia Dolgopolova, a 19-year-old student, left her home in Demenino, a village on the outskirts of Kursk Region, near the Ukrainian border. Accompanied by her niece, she set off for a nearby field, which had been sown with wheat. Her niece turned on a video camera and Anastasia, slightly nervous at first, but with growing confidence, began to speak. “Greetings, Respected Vladimir Vladimirovich…” And with these words began the biggest scandal this tiny, quiet corner of Russia had seen for decades.

Demenino is a small village, with two streets and about 30 households. In the field outside the Dolgopolovs’ house, I’m greeted by the barking of two dogs, but it seems to be more out of habit than malice. In the house itself are several small rooms. After Anastasia became famous far beyond the borders of her hometown, the local press wrote that her family had wasted the money given to them by the government on a European-style makeover for their home. This is not the case, unless it is currently fashionable in Europe to decorate one’s home with dark-red patterned wallpaper, rugs on the floor and lace curtains. As for the story that the family spent their money on a holiday to Turkey, it's also untrue. No one in the family has a passport.

Anastasia tells me that she decided to become a farmer before she turned 18. She has a year left in the medical special school not far from the town of Rylsk and then she plans to go to the Kursk Agricultural Academy. In April 2014, she turned 18 and in October of that year she registered her business—a farming venture called “Peasant Farmstead.” Anastasia was the legal owner and her father, Sergei, was named the general director. Until 2013, Anastasia’s parents worked as entrepreneurs, but then decided to dedicate themselves to running a farm. They have 60 hectares (about 150 acres) of farmland, some farming equipment, and a small number of animals.

In the spring of 2015, Anastasia signed a legal agreement with her mother, under which her mom would offer her material assistance. As part of this deal, Anastasia rented 58 of her 60 hectares. After this, her father sowed the field with wheat seeds over a three-day period of constant work. The harvest wasn’t intended for sale, it was planned to produce feed for different kinds of livestock, which Anastasia planned to acquire with the aid of loans and with various government and local programs designed to help Russian agriculture. This plan was based on faulty projections. As it later emerged, neither the banks, nor the authorities, were prepared to offer her any money.

But in spring of 2015, she still had hope. At the end of March, Dolgopolova and her father managed to gain an audience with Governor Aleksandr Mikhailov. There, in the presence of the the head of Khomutovsky District (where the Dolgopolovs’ village is situated) and the leader of the local agribusiness council, Mikhailov promised the young farmer the use of an abandoned warehouse to store grain, as well as another 100 hectares (250 acres) of land. This was the last good news Anastasia would receive.

As soon as news broke out about the warehouse, a “Niva” 4x4 car pulled up to the farm. Four men jumped out, went up to the house, and explained that the warehouse actually belonged to them. And if Anastasia wanted to use it, they explained, she would need to pay them one million rubles ($16,000). Sergei Dolgopolov categorically refused to tell me who these people were, though he clearly knows them. We spoke for several hours, and during our conversation he wouldn’t even explain what it was they did, other than to say they were “crooks.” He also uttered the word “Kushchevka” several times when referring to Khomutovsky District, alluding to a village in the Krasnodar region that was notoriously dominated by a criminal gang, exposed in 2010, following the massacre of a family.

A few days after the meeting with the governor, the warehouse was set on fire. According to the official version of events, the surrounding grass caught fire and the blaze spread to the premises. This is difficult to believe, though, as the warehouse had concrete walls 5 meters (16 feet) tall, and only the roof was made of wood. Everything inside that was flammable burned, leaving only ash and soot-coated walls.

Even after this episode, there was still hope of finding another warehouse. First, Anastasia went to Sberbank for a loan. They advised her to come back in two years, after her business had gained sufficient financial history. She applied for a loan at Rosselkhozbank (the state agricultural bank), which turned down her application a month later. Finally she applied for a grant from the local government. This time, she managed to get an scholar from the local agricultural academy to help her compose a business plan (the Dolgopolovs didn’t want to give his name, so as not to embroil him in the scandal). But this application failed to get a sufficient number of points during the competition. And so all that the budding agriculturalist had left was 250-300 tons of wheat, which had to go somewhere.

Dolgopolova used her last remaining money to purchase several tons of diesel. Several days later, she recorded her video address, at the end of which she announced that she would simply burn down the field and its wheat. The video touched on everything: the sanctions against Western products, the state’s declared support of the agricultural sector, and, finally, there was her genuine rage at everything that had happened. At first, the video was simply posted on YouTube. Then, it was picked up by the small online-television station Kursk-TV. Then it was shown on other Kursk media outlets, before finally making it to national media. The video now has over 400,000 views on YouTube.

The Dolgopolovs won’t talk about it directly, but the idea to make a video address was likely the idea of one of their acquaintances, Olga Li, a deputy in the Kursk Regional Duma. Li is one of the area's main local oppositionists. She is a supporter of Alexei Navalny. Pro-government media and semi-anonymous blogs are unsurprisingly critical of her. They claim that she lives with a criminal and together with him extorts bureaucrats and businesspeople by threatening to release negative information about them. Outside of Kursk, she’s known for a video she released in 2013, where she called on Russian citizens not to pay for local utilities, until the chaos and theft that was endemic in their provision was addressed.

By this point, everyone was already calling on Putin’s press secretary, Dmitry Peskov, to comment on Dolgopolova’s video. The Kremlin could hardly have been expected to be in the loop about the state of agribusiness in Khomutovsky District, so it demanded an explanation from local authorities in the region. And this is when the real scandal began. Coming up against questioning from Moscow, the regional administration started to defend itself and blamed the Dolgopolov family for everything it could think of.

“I don’t think it was really Dmitry Peskov. Most likely someone just made something up on the Internet.” Sergei Dolgopolov told me. He respects Vladimir Putin. But unfortunately for the father, the quotation attributed to Peskov is very real.

“The situation was investigated and in reality everything was not [the way Anastasia explained it in her video address to the President]. It emerged that the farmer was already heavily in debt and she already had large, if not astronomical debts,” Peskov told reporters. “Naturally, in accordance with all banking practices, she was refused further credit. This was all investigated properly.”

The investigation, according to the Dolgopolovs, went down otherwise. No one from the District or Regional Administration called them. Then a whole delegation of bureaucrats showed up in the village of Demenino without warning, accompanied by journalists from all the local and national television outlets. No one attempted to go up to the Dolgopolovs’ home and try to talk to them. The reporters were, however, shown a field and told that no wheat had been planted there. The wheat was low and the field full of weeds (the family says it purposefully didn’t use chemicals in the field, in order to get healthy feed for their animals). The journalists were told that there was no farm as such here, and that the Dolgopolovs had no livestock, either, and that what the journalists saw didn’t belong to them, but to their neighbors (these neighbors are a myth; the Dolgopolovs had bought several houses in Demenino to shelter their livestock, but no one realized this). Finally, the journalists were shown a burnt-out and ruined warehouse: “Well what kind of grain storage could have possibly been here? What are you talking about?” reporters were asked.

After this, local officials and their entourage of state journalists took off for Khomutovka, for a special meeting to decide how the Dolgopolovs would be handled. The Dolgopolovs were, of course, not invited. Participants of that meeting told me (anonymously) that the discussion was not about how to help the would-be farmer, but how to protect themselves against Moscow, whose attention was rare and sudden. At the meeting, Anastasia was called “crazy” several times.

Officials managed to find a weak point in the Dolgopolovs' defense and began hitting it with all their might, saying the family was a long-standing and incorrigible debtor that already owed 800,000 roubles ($12,500). What sort of new loans could there possibly be?

These accusations have some basis. As Sergei Dolgopolov told me, in 2013 his wife, who is legally disabled, decided to make use of state benefits in order to make the move from small business to agriculture. The authorities apparently promised the family 1.8 million rubles ($28,000) to establish a farm and proposed that, if the family didn’t have sufficient funds, they should take out a loan.

After that, by all accounts, the older Dolgopolovs bid farewell to financial common sense. They took out a number of small loans from various banks, ranging from 30,000 to 200,000 roubles ($465 to $3,100) which, as a rule, they used for servicing day-to-day costs, rather than investing in their business. Some of these loans, based on their insanely high interest rates, must have been taken out not at commercial banks but at “payday-loan” companies, whose advertisements are common all over Khomutovka and other small towns in the region. The Dolgopolovs used this money to buy 120 sheep, 18 bulls, and to lease land. But then the authorities' promises somehow came to naught, and the family received no money from the government in 2013.

When the time came to pay back their loans, the Dolgopolovs had to sell off most of their livestock. They attempted to restructure some of their loans, stopped paying on time and lost a few lawsuits. “We were conned!” Sergei insists. They met with Deputy Governor Aleksei Zolotarev twice, hoping to gain some sort of refinancing, but were unsuccessful. Zolotarev now calls the Dolgopolovs “con artists” and promises that “the final verdict on their actions will come from the law enforcement agencies.”

The Dolgopolovs have two things to say about that impending “final verdict.” Firstly, even after they’d taken out all their loans and before they’d repaid them all, this “family of con artists” was still given a grant of about 500,000 rubles ($7,800) and this money was spent on a tractor and trailer, as well as other farming equipment (the grant wasn’t permitted to be used for servicing existing loans). “The feed mixer’s right over there!” Dolgopolov says, pointing his finger out the window.

Secondly, Anastasia Dolgopolova is her parents’ daughter, but the business is her own. She doesn’t owe a single kopeck in loans to anyone. When the loans were taken out, she was a minor and no one could have given her any. And there’s nowhere in Russian law that says that if parents can’t pay off their debts, that their children also should be denied new loans.

I sit with Anastasia and her father in their GAZelle van, as we drive around the farm. Anastasia films another video, this time refuting what’s been said about her family. She’s planning to post it soon. Her phone rings. A journalist from Kursk asks her to comment on the fact that the local authorities have shared information about her family’s grant with the police. She spends a long time heatedly defending her parents. Aside from journalists, she fields calls from farmers in different districts of the region. Some have had land taken from them, another has lost a pond. They ask how they can get their story out to the whole country, too.

“We’re going to burn this field. Well, or they’re going to help us. Anything could happen here, ” her father tells me. He adds that he already has a bag packed, in case they come to arrest him.

Meanwhile, Deputy Governor Alexei Zolotarev is giving a special press-conference in Kursk. “I’m very sorry for her as a kid,” he says about Anastasia. “As it is, my daughters are the same age. And I’m really sorry she’s ended up in this situation on a purely human level.” The official's pity doesn’t extend to the parents. Zolotarev promises to seize their property as collateral for their debts. “How could I pressure [Anastasia], when I’ve never even seen her? Let her come to me and tell me, what I did to her, so I can respond to such allegations,” the Governor says, agitated.

On the afternoon of August 3, I was leaving Demenino for the highway, when a car of court officials passed me. The Dolgopolovs were expecting this visit. Several days earlier, officials had issued an injunction to seize their tractors and other equipment, which the family had obtained with its government grant. According to the conditions of the grant, the equipment remained the property of the state for five years. The officials had given notice of their arrival and said that they were coming to carry out the seizure. However, when they got there, things went down slightly differently than expected. They also seized the field that Anastasia had sown. Now if she burns it, as she swore she would do, it will be a criminal offense.

The next day, Anastasia wrote me to say that they had driven combine harvesters to her field, which were now apparently harvesting the wheat that belonged to her. “They drove in when we weren’t home. They didn’t warn us about anything. The land has been leased, it’s government land. But the wheat is mine!” she said.

Despite everything, Anastasia still wants to become a farmer, she says.

Andrey Kozenko

Demenino, Kursk Region