Issue #11/66, June 3 - 17, 1999  

by Matt Taibbi

I'd already stayed up half the night and polished off about a half-liter of vodka with old Volodya Zuikov, the stable watchman, when I decided to leave the Siberian village of Tolstikhino. It was four in the morning, and I had a plane to catch in Krasnoyarsk at nine; besides, the optimal thieving hours had come and gone. The sky over the little muddy settlement was black, and the roads were quiet. The cows, asleep in the barn next door, were less than an hour away now from their morning milking. Nightly threat was giving way to daily routine.

It was the appropriate time to leave.

"Have a safe trip back," he said, then added. "Good night, dear Steve!" As I got in the car, my driver laughed. "You should have stayed a few more minutes," he said. "You could have been Charlie. Hell, by morning, you'd have been Vanya."

The Tolstikhino farm had lost four horses to thieves a few nights before, on May 8th, but the villagers didn't blame Zuikov, who goes by the nickname "Volodya Zatilok", or Volodya "Brainpan". They know Volodya drinks heavily to combat the cold weather-- an obvious handicap to any crime-prevention strategy-- and also that the shed where he keeps his watch has no windows. People in Tolstikhino are quick to point out that it doesn't take a fancy engineer from the neighboring 19,000-person metropolis of Uyar, or even from the illustrious regional capital of Krasnoyarsk, to realize that it's hard to spot a thief if your shed has no windows. If you have windows, the local logic goes, you can look out; but there weren't any windows in Volodya's shed, so he couldn't, so to speak, look out.

Thirdly, and most importantly, old Volodya Zatilok was unarmed on the night of May 8. In fact, neither Volodya nor any of the watchmen on the farm are ever armed, which is why horse and pig thieves, cattle rustlers and calf-snatchers and have been descending on Tolstikhino at will on a weekly if not daily basis for over a year and a half now. It is a cynical and one-sided feeding frenzy to warm the heart of the hardest Social Darwinist: on the one hand, mechanized brigades of young out-of-towners are leading the livestock away through forests and swamps with KamAZ trucks and even motorcycles-- while on the other hand, a half-cocked and eccentric community of amiable Gogolian peasants scratches its collective head, and waits patiently for the day when the disappearance of its last head of cattle announces its final exit from the pages of Russian history.

In better days, Tolstikhino and its 3,000-odd residents were a collective farm, growing grain for sale around the Soviet Union and raising cattle for delivery to the big slaughterhouse in neighboring Uyar. Those dull and severe times are now known as the good old days, and they ended in 1992, when the Agriculture Ministry disowned the place and dumped it into the hands of the Railroad Ministry. It then became a so-called "transsovkhoz", raising food for railway workers and railway restaurants.

Then, in 1998, just as a deadly new strain of bovine tuberculosis swept through the region and the bottom fell out of the Siberian grain market, the railways washed their hands of the farm, and Tolstikhino was privatized. It is now officially called an "SPK", or "selskokhozaistevnniy prodovolstvenniy kooperativ", a type of agri-business in which every farmer is given a nominal share in the enterprise. In English "SPK" translates literally as an "agricultural production cooperative", but in reality it's just a fancy term for a type of economic ghost ship that now spots the Russian countryside in the thousands-- farm enterprises that are de facto owned by no one and manned by unpaid laborers who stay on the job out of habit.

From the moment Tolstikhino entered the SPK netherworld the thieves appeared, from inside the farm and out, like sharks rising to a wounded marlin. In 1998 alone the cooperative lost 51 pigs to thieves, retaining just 250 at year's end. By the end of the grazing season last year cattle head were disappearing at a rate of about 2-3 a week; then, when the cold weather came, the horses started vanishing in earnest. 11 full-grown horses and 3 colts have been stolen since November, leaving only 46 in the stables today. At the present rate, the farm will be literally burgled out of existence sometime within the next 2-3 years.

"In 10 years," said Valery Berzen, deputy director of the cooperative, "agriculture won't exist anywhere in Russia. We'll be gone long before then."

Tolstikhino's march to extinction has been slowed only by the relative unattractiveness of its thievable assets. Whereas the cattle-rustlers and horse thieves of the American Wild West were the carjackers of their day, high-rolling daredevil criminals with violent dispositions, the Siberian horse thieves driving in from Uyar are more like lukewarm-blooded pragmatists in the spirit of Sam Walton. The horses they steal from Tolstikhino are ultimately sold on the cheap as meat to local kielbasa-makers at about 10 rubles a kilogram, meaning that the average stolen horse only yields about a hundred bucks. A stolen calf, like the one Volodya Zatilok watched a half-drunk teenager somehow drive off with on a motorcycle last month, earns the thief about $25-30 total. Not much of a haul for a bounty that not only kicks and screams and defecates all the way to the butcher, but costs money in gasoline and time in travel to steal in the first place.

But they're stealing the animals anyway. Why not? They're there.

The May 8 heist was the latest insult. Thieves backed a big truck right up to the gates of the stable, smashed a window just around the corner of the building, jumped in, led the horses out, and calmly drove away. Now they don't even bother to hide the getaway car in the woods. Two days later, Volodya Zatilok stood next to the empty stables with his 60 year-old calfherd friend, Sasha "Boldalai", and stared blankly at the gently swinging chains on the wall which had only recently been fastened to bits in their horses' mouths. The looks on their faces spoke of the eternal truth that following every rough night, there comes a morning after of bad news. I asked Sasha what he thought could be done about the thefts. Though it probably wouldn't discourage a thief, his answer was a solid piece of Russian peasant wisdom:

"I don't know," he said, shaking his head. "There's problems of all kinds everywhere. People are basically different by nature. Take Tatarstan. If you go up to any kiosk in Tatarstan, there's tea on sale there. But if you go up to a kiosk around here, is there tea on sale? Is there?"

"No?" I guessed.

"There you go," he said, and then walked away.

In the finest traditions of the old Wild West, Tolstikhino is a one-gun village, policed by a lone, overmatched constable named Alexei Morozin. In his person the Law appears here as a curly-haired kid in his early twenties, with a face perpetually covered in dirt and fertilizer, and only a red vinyl-covered badge buried deep in his coveralls to identify him as a policeman. He cuts such a funny figure as the local "sheriff" that the older people in town all insist on calling him by his diminutive name "Lyosha", despite the fact that even the cafeteria manager in old-fashioned Tolstikhino generally commands a name and patronymic. Helpless, quixotic Lyosha is another local adherent to the Gogolian school of communication. When I stopped by his house one night to ask about the horse thefts, he answered:

"You'll have to come back, as it were, tomorrow," he said. "Until I speak with the investigators from Uyar, I won't have any concrete information, so to speak, to give, so you'll have to wait, so to speak, until I speak with them. That is, if we talk now, what could I tell you, really? Nothing. But on the other hand, if we meet another time, that's a different story. For instance, let's say tomorrow--"

I cut him off and agreed to come by another time. The next day, when I went to look for him, Morozin, was off "working" with a team of investigators from the Uyar OVD [police] to "solve" the May 8-9 horse theft case. What exactly the team was working on, however, was a mystery to most people in town. Tolstikhino is no exception to the general rule that problems seldom occur in the profession of rural law enforcement which require great leaps of deductive reasoning. Everyone in Tolstikhino knows who's stealing the village's animals. It's stopping them that's the problem, and one apparently beyond the narrow powers of the police.

Take the horse thefts. The locals claim there's really only one way to profitably dispose of a stolen horse in the Uyar region-- they say branded horses stolen for farm use are quickly spotted and reclaimed-- and that's to sell it for meat. But horsemeat has a limited appeal; in this part of the world only Muslims eat it, and even then only as kielbasa, particularly if it's tough meat from old Kolkhoz workhorses like the ones taken from Tolstikhino. The locals say there are only five places in the Uyar region that slaughter horses for kielbasa. In a normal world, monitoring five butchers for deliveries of stolen horses would be a task even the Uyar OVD could handle with ease-- particularly since, by law, a butcher must obtain proof of ownership stamped by the regional administration from everyone who comes by with a horse to sell. But there's a catch. According to Pyotr Vinter, deputy police chief in Uyar, the horse-butchers in the nearby Pyatninsky village and in Uyar itself insist that their purchases are on the up and up, and they generally have the papers to prove it. Somewhere between the theft and the sale, Vinter says, the local horse thieves usually manage somehow to get their hands on genuine ownership papers.

According to the Tolstikhino farmers, what all this means is that the thefts of their horses are... sanctioned. They won't say by whom, but it's worth mentioning that all of the food stores in Uyar, as well as the department store, are owned by the Uyar Regional Administration Chief-- one Sergei Tyumkin, who declined to be interviewed for this report. All livestock documentation is stamped in Tyumkin's office.

Animals are being stolen from Tolstikhino for the very simple reason that theft is the only growth industry left in the region. As is the case with almost any provincial Russian city, literally nothing else here makes money. The region's two industrial factories, both cement/construction materials plants in Uyar, are still semi-functional, but their workers haven't been paid any money in a full five years. Employees there are instead given a company tab extended in the amount of their salaries to shop at the factory commissary, which is stocked with esoteric assortments of the various goods received in bulk in exchange for construction materials-- sausages, drill bits, etc.

The factories owe so much in taxes that they would actually lose money by making any. While barter deals for their products still bring a return, any dividends from cash sales would be immediately swallowed up by both the Federal and regional tax inspectorates, which have liens on the factory bank accounts. As a result, factory directors in the Uyar region won't sell their products for anything except barter.

The farm is in the same position. In its short tenure as a private enterprise, the Tolstikhino SPK has racked up such monstrous tax debts that it's been forced, deputy director Berzen says, to actively avoid cash sales. Its usual clients are similarly broke enterprises like the big slaughterhouse in Uyar, which compensates the farm in finished meat products like kielbasa and crates of frozen pelmeni. The cooperative earns what cash it can in small under-the-table deals, but the management knows no amount of hustle will change the fact that you can't sell grain out of the trunk of a car. It's no coincidence that the farm last year invested what little money it had into the construction of its own flour mill, the first in its history. Tolstikhino doesn't expect to sell its grain anymore. It expects to eat it.

The result of all this is that actual money is rarely seen in Tolstikhino, which is fifteen kilometers from Uyar and a three-hour drive from Krasnoyarsk, the nearest big city.

"The only people who have money are the pensioners, and even they only get about 400 rubles (about $17) a month," says Maria Chayanova, the farm manager. "Almost nobody else ever sees any, except for what they can get from selling food from their own gardens."

But even on the farm, people need money-- if only for liquor, one of the few things on sale in town. As times have gotten harder in the last few years, the people in the village have taken to drinking more.

"A lot more," notes Berzen, rolling his eyes.

The shift in the village's drinking habits provides some insight into how bad things have gotten here. Real vodka or beer is too expensive, so most people in town save money by drinking industrial alcohol, which is sold illegally out of a home a few houses down from Morozin's. The local booze dealer I was introduced to is also a one-person pawn shop; I was shown an impressive collection of used clothes, shoes, fake jewelry and other stuff which had been traded for the rotgut "spirt" (which is imported by dealers from Uyar, who charge a 400% markup, to 10 rubles per quarter liter).

But since the local dealer likes money more than swag, the unpaid laborers in the village are doing whatever they can to get their hands on cash-- which ultimately means stealing absolutely everything in town that can be converted into money. On the day I arrived in Tolstikhino, in fact, the town's running water had just been turned back on; thieves had shut the plumbing system down a few days before by stealing a 5-meter length of copper pipe from the local water tower. This was the third copper theft this year.

Later, a farmer I looked up to ask about a privately-owned horse of his that had been stolen, Gennady Begel, answered his door with his hands covered in mud. He was rearranging his garden after a row of his potatoes had been uprooted and snatched during the previous night, presumably by neighbors.

"They got me again," Begel said, laughing and pointing at his garden. "The bastards!"

Man- and child-sized holes in and around fences and walls have been appearing all over Tolstikhino for over a year now. The 30-inch wide window in the barn where the swine are kept still hasn't been boarded up; it was knocked out this past March on a night when 3 pigs disappeared. Other farmers in town have holes dug under their wooden plank fences, virtually indistinguishable from the kind dug by the village dogs, which allowed thieves to sneak in and steal their private calves and sheep. These are all the work of locals, who, Morozin says, started small a year or two ago. But now the more desperate and enterprising local thieves are on to bigger things, loading trucks instead of jumping fences, acting as sherpas to the cattle-rustlers from Uyar and beyond.

"The usual system with the big animal thefts involves a group of outsiders who are shown the best livestock by a local looking for a cut," said Morozin. "They're the only ones who ever get caught. It's not hard to figure out. A horse gets stolen, and suddenly someone in town is, as it were, buying drinks."

But just as no one blames Vuikov for losing the horses on his watch, most people in town are sympathetic to the thieves.

"We all understand it," said Berzen, who says he doesn't even consider stealing potatoes a crime. "People here are only stealing because they don't have any money."

"Yes, the theft problem has gone beyond all reasonable limits," sighed the manager Chayanova, for whom a head count is the first order of business every day. "But nobody's angry. It wouldn't be Christian to get angry about this."

All the cowboys in Tolstikhino are young. They have to be; it's not a job for an old man, even a fit one. As Berzen led me on a slow tour of the farm in his spacious, well-heated Kamaz truck, we passed a cowboy, called a "skotnik" in Russian, emerging from the woods behind the village. Behind him trailed fifty or sixty head of lowing cattle. The sky was darkening, and before the skotnik's face came fully into view an icy rain started to fall. As the hatless, grimacing teenager drearily trudged toward us I shuddered, listened appreciatively to the dashboard heater, and silently thanked God for my employment in a warmer profession. Berzen, a former physicist, was apparently thinking along the same lines.

"Awful work," he said, shaking his head. "Dampness, mud, cattle..."

But not everyone agrees. Most of the younger people here have chosen to stay because they like the life, which makes it all the sadder that the farm is disappearing.

Sergei Zabelin, a 23 year-old skotnik with a wife and a newborn son, just moved back to Tolstikhino. He's part Tatar, a real-life cowboy with Chinese eyes. He was born here, grew up here, but moved away to Rostov Na-Donu when he was seventeen. He didn't like Rostov, couldn't get used to it; so he moved back. Now he tends cattle and also shares time as night watchman with old Volodya Zatilok. "The people here are better," he said, smiling. "Rostov was awful. It was really just as mean as everyone says it is." He paused and added: "At least people work here."

Sergei is distressed that the animals are disappearing, and says he knows Tolstikhino won't last long, the way things are going, but he doesn't think there's anything anybody can do about it. "If a group of thieves come on my watch, there's really only one thing I can do," he said, laughing slightly. "Give them a hand."