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- "They looked and look like a weirdo": how a descendant of princes revives the Russian countryside
"They looked and look like a weirdo": how a descendant of princes revives the Russian countryside
150 km from Moscow, there is a small urban—type settlement of Lotoshino, which once housed the estate of the ancient family of the princes of Meshchersk. A few years ago, his descendant Sergei Samygin returned here not only to tell the locals about the past, but also to help — in addition to an improvised museum in the vicinity of Lotoshino, he founded the Prince Boris Vasilyevich Meshchersky Charitable Foundation and a small farm, which should continue the traditions of the Meshchersky. Izvestia traveled to Lotoshino and saw how the future can be created from the past.
Two Lotoshinos
The Meshcherskys are an ancient princely family, whose possessions included the estate in Lotoshino until 1917. The owners tried to think progressively. In the 18th century, one of the first cheese farms was established here and the first in Russia to produce hard varieties, and soon an experimental school of cheese makers was opened. To attract students, the Meshcherskys did not charge tuition fees, but paid those who came to study and at the same time work in production. In 1911, the first power plant in the Moscow province was built here, which has not survived to our times.
According to one legend, Emperor Alexander I stayed here on the estate and Alexander Pushkin visited (the Goncharov estate is located in the neighboring Volokolamsk district, so there is little surprising). According to family legend, Prince Ivan Sergeyevich Meshchersky took part in Pushkin's matchmaking for Goncharova, and the poet and his future bride met in Lotoshino.
After the revolution, the estate fell into disrepair, was destroyed during the war, and its territory was later built up with low-rise apartment buildings. The Princes of Meshchersk emigrated, began to build a new life in Finland and Paris anew — like many, from working in taxis and factories.
Today Lotoshino is a modest urban—type settlement located in the fields near Volokolamsk. About 12,000 people live in the district, and there is little to distinguish it from many other similar towns and villages: the same quiet streets with well-fed speed bumps, the same squat school buildings and low post-war buildings along the roads. However, there is something special, or rather, there is someone here.
Sergey Mikhailovich Samygin meets us in the neighboring village of Novovasilyevskoye. It's hard to make a mistake — on a clean but summer-dusted village street stands a gray-haired man with a neatly trimmed white beard, wearing a dark blue blazer, shirt and light trousers. He is a descendant of the princes of Meshchersk through the female line. The last owner of the estate, Sergei Borisovich Meshchersky, is his great—uncle, his grandmother was born Meshcherskaya.
Sergey Mikhailovich's soft accent in Novovasilyevsky sounds, frankly, unexpected. Russian Russians were born in Munich, he spent his early childhood with his parents in Indonesia, and grew up in Belgium, in a close environment of Russian immigrants: with themed evenings organized by his mother's forces, and New Year's celebrations in the Russian style. Back in the 1980s, he began working with the Soviet Union (Sergey Mikhailovich, like all emigrants, prefers to say "Soviet Russia"), and in 1992 he finally moved to the country - now he has his own business in Moscow.
He remembers how in the mid-1990s he first came to Lotoshino, the homeland of his ancestors. He says he didn't like these places too much back then.
— It was very gloomy, it was raining, it was cold. My wife was with me, and she was in a hurry to get to Moscow," he recalls now.
Sergey Samygin
Gradually, relations with Lotoshin began to warm up — a local historian who dealt with the history of local Meshcherskiye contacted him, then Sergei Mikhailovich came once, again, and finally bought an old priest's house next to the destroyed church in Novovasilyevsky.
"I have archival documents that confirm that someone from Meshchersk before the revolution regularly visited this house in Novovasilyevsky and talked with the priest, who was quite a bright person," he says.
"Something new and interesting"
In the carefully restored house, Sergei Samygin organized a small museum dedicated to the history of the estate in Lotoshino and the memory of the Princes of Meshchersk. The house presents a variety of eras, there is even an Indonesian room with artifacts brought to Belgium by his parents in the early 1960s.
The cemetery in Novovasilyevsky is separated from the village not by the usual fence, but by a blank fence made of trapezoidal sheet. Two white tombstones now stand in a corner near the temple. Sergei Mikhailovich's mother, a Russian emigrant who was able to spend the last few years of her life in Russia, and his father, whose ashes were reburied in their homeland at the height of the pandemic, were brought from Indonesia itself.
The owner, who comes here at the end of every week, is ready to receive visitors and tell them about the past of these places and how the fate of the family, which is directly related to the history of not only Lotoshino, but also the whole of Russia, developed.
"We need to tell the locals what happened here," the Belgian citizen throws up his hands, standing in the middle of an urban—type settlement in central Russia. — Who knows about this today?
But the descendant of Russian emigrants did not limit himself to simply restoring his memory.
— When I first started building here, I was told that Lotoshino had a bad job, people earned little, and many were leaving, — he lists. — That's how the Boris Vasilyevich Meshchersky Foundation came up with the idea to help the most vulnerable people in Lotoshino. Then, so that the fund could somehow work in the future, we came up with the idea of organizing our own farm.
Today, he owns several dozen hectares, on which Sergei Samygin grows rare crops in places near Moscow, such as artichokes or chicory lettuce, as well as more familiar ones: fragrant tomatoes, eggplants, cucumbers. He employs only locals.
Sergey Samygin
Looking at the plantation of green bushes with neat dense cones of inflorescences, I ask how the idea came to start growing artichokes in the Moscow region.
"It's simple,— he shrugs. — I thought it would be interesting — it's something new and unusual, like when the Meshcherskys developed cheese making here.
In addition to artichokes, chocolate is produced here (no wonder Sergey Samygin lived in Belgium for many years) and freeze-dried berries. The owner basically insists that all this be organic.
— And how, — I have to choose my words so as not to accidentally offend a person in the best of feelings, — did the locals react to all this? When you arrived and started building.
"We've been watching," Sergey Samygin replies quite calmly. — And they still look at you as an oddball.
The Queen of the Fields
We carefully transfer the artichokes picked for shooting to the workers in the workshop, which is already located in Lotoshino. Olga, a thin woman with a pin-shaped earring, and a black-browed, smiling Nadezhda are conjuring over chocolate bars there.
Nearby there are refrigerators with shock-frozen berries and trays on which the same berries are sent for sublimation.
Even at the beginning of their acquaintance, Sergey Mikhailovich immediately admits that he did not know anything about agriculture by the nature of his main activity, and he does not know anything now. 14 employees from among the residents of Lotoshino are responsible for the implementation of sometimes unusual ideas — a total of 14 people. They recruited in different ways - someone was recommended by long—time members of the foundation, someone came after family members. Not everyone, like Samygin himself, had any experience of agricultural work when he joined the farm.
Olga, for example, was brought to the factory by her husband, who already worked on the farm. Before joining the workshop, she was a salesperson. Nadezhda is a food technologist. When they decided to start chocolate production in Lotoshino, Samygin sent her to Moscow for a chocolatier course at his own expense. Now she is in charge of chocolate production and teaches this to other employees.
We find the rest of the staff in the fields. There is an office, a small stone building, in a fenced—off area with a tractor-plowed entrance.
On the beds stretching behind the sturdy stone house called the office, everything grows — from sturdy, fist-sized onions to fluffy asparagus feathers and bushes of repair strawberries.
Two men on a red tiller drive noisily through the gate. A white dog with black ears and a black mark on its muzzle is barking angrily to the side.
— Bimka, that's enough! We have a shelter here," explains Miroslava, the manager, who came out to meet them. — They called us once, offered to take two dogs, they were injured by people, they say they were "played with" with a taser.
Everything is clearly fine with Bimka now, and it seems that he fell into the orbit of an unusual household on the same principle as the others — by accident, contrary to logic, calculations or expectations, but very timely.
Miroslava is a statuesque, laughing, middle—aged woman. Almost 15 years ago, she came here from Magadan — her mother was born in Lotoshino, and then ended up in the Far East, where Miroslava was born. When my mother got old, she was drawn to her native place. And Miroslava went with her.
"So you're a local, too?"
"It turns out that yes,— Miroslava nods. — This is my home and my roots.
Miroslava, the manager of all these possessions, had never had anything to do with agriculture before her arrival in Lotoshino. She worked as a teacher all her life, and after moving, she was in charge of culture in an urban settlement. Her only experience with the land is working in her own garden beds. She says her friends wondered how she, a city girl, would be able to settle into the countryside, but it turned out to be easy: "It's obvious that the time has come simply, and that's how it turned out."
When the settlements were united into districts a few years ago, there was nothing to manage and Miroslava was left without a job — here she was offered to help a descendant of local landowners launch an experimental organic farm in every sense.
A special pride here is the orchard planted with young apple trees, from the fruits of which they plan to make cider in the future. So far, there are apples only on a couple of dozens of young trees, like the whole farm. We go through the fields to look at them as a tourist attraction.
On the way, Miroslava collects a large bouquet of bright yellow tansy in the field. He says it helps with mice.
"Lavender also works, but it's probably not so easy to find in our latitudes," I sigh.
"And we have lavender,— Miroslava lightly points her hand somewhere in the distance. "We're trying to grow it over there."
While we're standing on the sidelines, I ask Miroslava how she's been working with Sergey Mikhailovich. I promise, if something bothers her, don't include the question in the text.
—Fine,— Miroslava replies without hesitation. — Very calm, very gentle, very polite. I'm just very explosive myself, and sometimes it happens, well... I'll snap. It immediately makes me uncomfortable that I'm shouting next to him.
Doing something by yourself
The semantic center of this rather large household, the Boris Vasilyevich Meshchersky Charitable Foundation, is located in two rooms of a small two—story house in the very center of Lotoshino. The place where the manor house once stood with a park in front of it, and now there is an apartment building and a pharmacy with a shop, is just around the corner. Across the street is the square in front of the administration, on the territory of which the Church of the Transfiguration of the Lord once stood.
In a small room with documents sits a dark—haired woman in a bright summer dress, Natalia Vasilyevna is the director of the foundation, a part—time mother of many children, the wife of a priest who also serves in the temple at Volokolamsk. He says that at first he and Sergey Mikhailovich went to all kinds of parties, told people about history, and then realized that this was not enough — they had to do something themselves.
Now she is methodically filling out the documents, noting something in a long list of names, surnames, addresses. In the next room, you can see a shelf filled with packages — the foundation is about to have another food distribution.
— In total, we have about 50 families on the list now, — says Natalia Vasilyevna. — These are all residents of Lotoshino who need help. There are single mothers with many children, those who have lost their husbands, and there are elderly people. Or, for example, people like Zhukov.
Zhukov, who is spoken about here almost with tears, but at the same time with pride, is one of the first wards of the foundation. A single man lost his legs a few years ago. The hospital either didn't think about it, or couldn't do anything in the absence of relatives — however, he was soon discharged, and he found himself in complete isolation in his apartment. He couldn't get out of it or solve simple everyday issues without outside help, and there was no one to help.
— I was giving a ride to a woman once and met an old lady, we started talking, she asked me who I was and what I was doing. I said that I work for the foundation," recalls Natalia Vasilyevna. — And she said: "Please help Zhukov, I feel so sorry for him."
That's how the foundation learned his story. Locked in his apartment, the man could not apply for a disability or even pay the bills — he had accumulated huge debts for communal services. The staff helped to close these debts, were able to find specialists who helped him arrange all the paperwork, found money for trips to carry out all the necessary examinations. The official status and the pension provided by the state became the foundation for his new, normal life.
"We also found out that he's supposed to have an assistant,— Natalya Vasilyevna says animatedly. — We were able to find a woman through the foundation. As a result, he has a man who cares for him, and she has a job.
More often, however, tasks are associated with temporary difficulties — often people themselves come a few months later, thank them and say that life has improved — this is the main reward, says Natalia. Many people exchange necessary things and help in the foundation's chat.
Several times a year, food is distributed here for the wards: not ready-made food, but things that people can make something out of at home, such as flour, cereals, and butter.
— August is, of course, the most expensive month for us, because we need not only to distribute groceries, but also school kits, — sighs Sergey Mikhailovich. — Can you imagine how much stationery costs today? What if it's a large family?
So far, both the fund and the farm are supported by him, but he expects that sooner or later the farm will reach full capacity and will be able to support the fund, making it independent: the income it generates today goes to the needs of the fund.
"We were asked to invite schoolchildren to the production so that the children would want to engage in agriculture and not go to the city," he says. — But does it really work like this: first you take a shovel, sign up for hard work and decide to stay for it? No, first you find out what kind of land it is, how much there was here, and then you decide to take a shovel and go to this hard work.
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