Orlof was another rather depressing village to visit. It's near Kirov, where Natasha was born as her mom had come down from Mutni Materik to visit her parents and sister when she was to give birth. At that time the village was called Halturin, a name ditched a few years ago. Apparently it referred to someone or something involved in the Communist revolution, and after the fall of Communism it went back to its pre-1917 name. It was a rather depressing visit, as was our visit to the village of Pomozdina (more pictures of that are on the link to our 1997 trip, or the Russian section of my photo gallery.) In both villages things have deteriorated since the fall of Communism. Schools are in disrepair, playgrounds broken down, people very poor. It wasn’t always this way, and most blame the ‘democrats’ or Yeltsin for neglecting the villages. Clearly, the transition in Russia focuses on big cities and people living in villages are finding life getting harder rather than easier. The youth are often angry, crime rates rise, and it’s sad to hear about how beautiful things used to be. Here, like in Pomozdina, you see children and women walking with yokes of water to and from the river. In Pomozdina cows would graze freely in town, Orlof didn’t have much of that. The villages are dying, youth have to leave to have much of a future, and the people left behind either struggle to just persist, or give in to the temptation to drown their troubles in vodka. (The women seem to be better at avoiding that – though I was told that female alcoholism, once rather rare, is rising – while male alcoholism in these villages is exceedingly high). How can you have a transition in a country struggling to get by in a way that doesn’t leave the villages behind? I don’t know. But so far, this is a glaring failure of Russia’s transition, and one that breeds discontent and anger amongst a significant part of the population.