And the reality is when you get out there, this is who you get.
Posted on 07/14/2016 12:42:46 PM PDT by Trumpinator
KAMEN-RYBOLOV, Russia — Standing ankle deep in mud in a swampy grassland more than 4,000 miles from his home, Yuri A. Bugaev surveyed a mosquito-infested wasteland that the Russian government is offering to would-be pioneers under its own modern-day version of the 1862 Homestead Act in the United States.
“This is not really what I had in mind,” said Mr. Bugaev, who had traveled across seven time zones from St. Petersburg, Russia, to scout the possibilities for settlers in the country’s sparsely populated Far East, a territory roughly two-thirds the size of the United States.
The nine Far Eastern regions targeted for settlement in the government’s land giveaway, which began on June 1, encompass more than a third of Russia but are home to only 6.1 million people. This is just 4 percent of the country’s population and compares with the 110 million Chinese living across the border in the three provinces that make up Manchuria.
Mr. Bugaev is a dedicated, if largely sedentary, Cossack, a centuries-old fraternity of Slavic warriors, freebooters and freedom-loving rebels. A romantic throwback to earlier generations of Cossacks who settled and secured the borders of the Russian empire, he sees getting his Cossack brethren and other Russians to move out east as the only way to keep mostly empty Russian lands safe from China.
For years, he said, he had dreamed of Russia embracing, or rather re-embracing, the pioneer spirit, and he was delighted by the Kremlin’s backing of a program meant to reassert the country’s manifest destiny as a continent-straddling power.
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
If I read the article they want groups of Russians to team up co-op style - that is the idea. They don’t want individual homesteaders separated miles apart.
In a co-op isolated from other towns and places sounds like a cool way to live to someone who lives in a pretty isolated area like I do-but not without enough arable, non-swampy land...
It explains it in teh article - the idea is to have people - families group together. It kind of makes sense now that I think about it - you want to have a lot of people move and build a community quickly. The USA imported people from all over the world to populate the west. The Russia on the other hand is an ethno-state so that option is not on teh table.
Back in the U.S.S.R or back to the U.S.S.R.?
You have a way with words.
And the reality is when you get out there, this is who you get.
I think local bureaucrats are going to register forested plots to some homeless guys, clear-cut it and sell the timber to the Chinese.
“The water code, you have to abide by it; town planning code, you have to abide by it; land code, you have to abide by it; border area rules, you have to abide by them; prescriptions of the Federal Service for Veterinary and Phytosanitary Surveillance, you have to abide by them; forest regulation, you have to abide by it,” the district chief said.
How on earth are you supposed to make a go of it on 2.5 acres of taiga?
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