> Outside the quaint collective farmers will toil in the
> fields using nothing but manpower and wooden implements.
On the train from St. Petersburg to Moscow in 1998, we saw this very thing for many miles. Not a car or tractor or telephone pole in sight. Not even a donkey. Everything was done by hand. Nothing but ramshackle, run-down huts made with rough sawn lumber and log slabs, and people in groups hoeing common gardens and fields by the side of the tracks.
NO signs of modern civilization until we were about 50 km from Moscow.
What you describe sounds like 1918, not 1998.
Didn’t know that western Russia was still that backward.
I was deployed to Uzbekistan in 2004. Along the road to Samarkand we saw villages, power lines, tractors, and houses with electricity. More trucks on the road than cars. Even schools, factories and farmers’ markets. Yet Central Asia was said to be much poorer than Russia proper.