Abandoned villages of the Nizhny Novgorod region: photos, reasons

Abandoned villages of the Nizhny Novgorod region are a sad reality that can be seen with your own eyes and photographed. Why residents leave their homes, which leads to the desolation of entire settlements, this article will tell.

Nizhny Novgorod Region

Nizhny Novgorod celebrated its 795th anniversary. It has always been a major hotbed of political life and trade throughout its existence, it is the same today. Being an administrative center of the Volga region, the city unites about 5000 cities, villages and villages in the Nizhny Novgorod region.

People from olden times chose the local beautiful places, famous for fish rivers, forests full of game, and arable land. Since the IX century, the Slavs began to settle here, building small settlements and ancient settlements. From the day of its foundation in 1221 Nizhny Novgorod was a stronghold and protection of the Slavic lands from the raids of unfriendly neighboring Ugric tribes, and by 1341 became an independent Nizhny Novgorod-Suzdal principality.

Today there are more than 400 large settlements and 3,000 villages in the province. Unfortunately, time does not stand still and spares no one, as evidenced by the abandoned villages of the Nizhny Novgorod region (the photo below shows one of them).

To understand why such a tendency is manifested, one should understand the status of the village and its functions as units of the administrative region.

Status of the village

For a long time the so-called settlements of peasants. This is due not so much to the fact that at that time the houses were wooden, but with the fact that the village was called arable land and a sowing field. In addition to peasant villages, there were settlements of commercial hunters and fishermen, and the main criterion for the status of this type of settlements soon became the number of households. As a rule, there were few of them - from 10 to 50 private houses with auxiliary rooms and kitchen gardens, which were called yards.

The status of the village in those days was distinguished by the presence of such important institutions as the church and the local government, the parish school and the paramedic center. With the advent of Soviet power, there was a tendency to unite several villages into one collective farm, thereby increasing the economies and the number of workers in it.

Today, there are no strict gradations of such concepts as "village" and "village", since in many of them there are schools, kindergartens and churches. The status of the village is awarded to the locality most often by the number of residents living in them.

With the development of cities, abandoned villages in the same Nizhny Novgorod region have become a familiar picture, but today the scale of this phenomenon is much wider than it was 100-200 years ago.

Why villages are emptying

So it was believed that the achievement by mankind of any level of development or, conversely, its absence led to changes in the social system and the emergence of new habitats or the destruction of entire civilizations.

The abandoned villages of the Nizhny Novgorod region are an example of how the absence of economic development affects whole settlements. But, as a rule, there are much more reasons for the desolation of the region:

• In connection with the development of the industrial system and cities, Russian villages began to thin out on the map of the country 200 years ago. As soon as serfdom was abolished, many peasants gathered their belongings and went to the cities to seek happiness as workers in factories and manufactories. Today the same trend, but in connection with the reorganization of collective farms or their decay.
• Currently, there are abandoned villages in the Nizhny Novgorod region, whose addresses are still listed in the postal register and on the map, but in fact, no one has lived there for decades. This is because the outflow of youth from the villages is a slow but constant process. The remaining old people live in their homes or move to the city to their children, which gradually reduces the population until the whole village is empty.

• Often, small settlements are absorbed by the city or empty due to its proximity. For example, there were abandoned villages in the Chkalovsky district of the Nizhny Novgorod region in connection with municipal transformations.
• Another reason for the disappearance of the villages is the closure of enterprises or mines near which they were built. These include abandoned villages of the Nizhny Novgorod region near the city of Volodarsk, for example, the village of Dalny. It was once inhabited by workers in the peat extraction enterprise, but in the mid-1980s it ceased to exist due to the suspension of peat extraction. Now here nature dominates and gradually takes away what her people once took away. Everything is overgrown with grass and bushes, but the houses are dilapidated.
• Man is so arranged that at all times he seeks comfort and stability, that is why a house in a village almost always loses a city apartment with all the amenities. So the villages of the Spassky District of the Nizhny Novgorod Region Vysokovo, Dyuzhakovka, Krasnye Mary, Skuchikha, Syromyatnikovo and Yablonka were abandoned, the inhabitants of which moved to places where there is a demand for labor.

Less often the reason for the desolation of settlements is natural disasters, such as landslides or dried up lakes and rivers. In the Nizhny Novgorod region, such serious problems were not, and the main reason for the desolation of the settlements is the lack of work, roads, schools and conditions for a comfortable life.

Spassky District

This part of the Nizhny Novgorod region is located in its southeastern part and today it is represented by eleven village councils, which include 44 settlements. Once here was the center of the Nizhny Novgorod trade, which appeared thanks to the annual noisy, rich summer and autumn fairs.

To date, almost 10,000 people live in the region, most of whom are engaged in agricultural activities.

In connection with the transformation, some localities were enlarged and merged into municipal councils. The most remote and sparsely populated villages were left without residents who moved to larger settlements.

Chkalovsky district

Even before the construction of Nizhny Novgorod in the middle of the 12th century, a settlement appeared on the right bank of the Volga, which was given the name of Vasilev in honor of his son Yury Dolgoruky. The settlement protected, like the Gorodets fortress on the opposite bank of the river, the water trade route. Sloboda happily "lived" to the present day, having received in the XX century a new name given in honor of its native Valery Chkalov.

To date, there are just over 20,000 people living in the region, of which 53% live in the district center. As part of the municipal district, one city council and nine town councils. Abandoned villages in the Nizhny Novgorod region are in almost all its parts, this fate and the Chkalovsky district have not passed. This is due to the fact that residents of small villages prefer to leave for larger communities if there is work for them. According to the population census, in the last ten years the population has decreased in the region by almost 5,000 people, which is very small in the country, but for a small region it is a significant loss of labor resources.

Ardatovsky District

160 km from Nizhny Novgorod there is Ardatovsky district, famous for its arable lands, thanks to which in the time of general collectivization 90 collective farms were organized.

Today the same situation is observed here: the abandoned villages of the Nizhny Novgorod region of the Ardatov District are the result of the resettlement of the former collective farmers to the district center, in which almost 57% of the population lives.

The number of people leaving the area permanently ranges from 200 to 500 people per year, and the villages, as a rule, are the first to suffer.

Abandoned objects of Nizhny Novgorod region

The commonplace in the world is the situation when villages and even small towns that emerge economically and financially depended on an enterprise or a strategic facility closed with time for some reason are empty.

There are many such objects in the country, and if you count all the abandoned villages of the Nizhny Novgorod region, the list will turn out to be impressive. It includes such settlements as Mavrytsia, which was emptied because of the lack of profit and the collapse of the collective farm in the 80s of the last century. The village of Yamki was emptied after it was closed in the 60s of the 20th century.

There are a lot of similar examples and the tendency to the appearance of ghost villages was the improper management of the economy in the framework of the collective farms in the Soviet era.

Interest in abandoned villages

The Novgorod region has all the natural resources to attract people who want to own land and work on it. There are all: rivers with excellent fish places, and forests full of game, berries and mushrooms, and fertile lands that await when they are worked by hardworking hands.

Today, you can notice the great interest of urban residents in abandoned villages. As a rule, they come from families, populate all summer in empty houses, adults cultivate vegetable gardens, fish, and children spend time in outdoor games. Gathering the harvest, the temporary residents go back to the city.

Another interest in the abandoned villages of the seekers of treasures and antiquities. Since most of the villages of the region were founded in the period from the 14th to the 18th century, interesting artifacts, ornaments and utensils of distant times may well turn out to be buildings of the Soviet era.

Revival of the Russian Village

According to scientists who claim that history repeats itself, people who are tired of urbanization may want quietness and clean air, and this will become a revival of villages in the Nizhny Novgorod region.