‘We’re not part of Russia at all’ How a new law from Moscow turned neighbor against neighbor in a remote Siberian village

Original story by People of the Baikal. Abridged translation by Sam Breazeale.

The village of Vershina Tutury only has about 180 residents, many of them ethnic Evenks. Since the Soviet authorities forced the village’s original inhabitants to give up nomadism a century ago, life there has, in many ways, remained unchanged: residents survive primarily by hunting, gathering, and fishing. Then, several years ago, in a move intended to reduce deforestation, the federal government banned individuals from cutting down trees for personal use. For a while, residents went on using wood as they had been for decades, taking only what they needed. Then, after one villager killed another, the victim’s wife realized that reporting her neighbors for illegal tree felling was an effective means of revenge — and others followed suit. In English, Meduza recaps People of the Baikal's dispatch from the remote village.

Content warning: Some quotations in this story include offensive, hateful language.

In July of this year, 39-year-old Viktoria Shchapova noticed a UAZ off-road utility vehicle slowly driving by her home. In the front seat were two of her neighbors: Andrey Nupreichik and Andrey Kornakov. The vehicle was pulling a cart of fresh-cut pine logs. When they parked at Nupreichik’s house across the street, Viktoria walked over. “Is this all being done by the book?” she asked. Nupreichik’s wife nodded: “We have all the documents.” Unconvinced, Viktoria returned home and called the local authorities.

‘It’s torn our village apart’

In the last year, residents of Vershina Tutury, a village in Russia’s Irkutsk region, have twice reported their neighbors to the authorities. In both cases, the crime was illegal tree felling.

In one case, Vera Khorishchenko, the director of the village’s recreation center, called the forestry station after her neighbor Valery Kuznetsov cut down roughly a hundred trees to build a new house; authorities proceeded to launch criminal proceedings. The second case was the result of Viktoria Shchapova’s report against Andrey Nupreichik, who cut down two dozen pine trees to build a new bathhouse.

Thirty-eight-year-old Kuznetsov was sentenced to a year and a half of probation and a 1.5-million-ruble ($23,200) fine. The trial against 45-year-old Nupreichik is still ongoing. Neither Khorishchenko nor Shchapova has made any secret of the fact that their denunciations were motivated by personal vendettas.

A seven-hour horse ride from civilization

Vershina Tutury was established in the late 1920s; in the beginning, all residents were Evenks — indigenous people whom the Soviet authorities forced to abandon nomadism and settle in one place. People of other ethnicities have since moved there, but the village is still officially considered an “Evenk” settlement.

In the USSR, villagers raised reindeer and hunted sables for their pelts. In the 1960s, however, the authorities exterminated the local reindeer population after it stopped turning a profit. After the Soviet Union collapsed, the fur farm where hunters used to sell their pelts shut down. Now, dealers travel to the village to buy the furs. Today, Vershina Tutury has about 180 residents; only 20 are officially employed, while all other adults in the village survive by hunting, fishing, and gathering, as they’ve done for decades.

The nearest bit of civilization — the village of Atsikyak — is 37 kilometers (23 miles) away. Getting there requires traversing mountain passes and swamps; the road hasn’t been leveled in recent memory. Some Vershina Tutury residents haven’t left the village in years because the journey out is too arduous.

In the spring, summer, and fall, getting to Atsikyak from Vershina Tutury takes 7–9 hours and requires an ATV or a horse. In the winter, getting out is easier: the road freezes and gets covered by snow. Men in the village never travel without a weapon, because the forest is home to both bears and wolves.

‘Do you live there or something?’

Andrey Nupreichik walks over to the pile of wood lying next to his old bathhouse. Every log is wrapped in tape and labeled “Confiscated.” “The wood’s lying there just like when we first brought it here!” says Andrey. “They can’t take it away, but they won’t let me build my bathhouse.”

Vershina Tutury has no police precinct. When Viktoria Shchapova turned Andrey in to the authorities, it took them several days to reach the village. Nupreichik was out hunting when they arrived. “The cops didn’t ask permission — they just opened the gate and went straight to the timber,” says his mother-in-law, Galina Kornakova, who lives next door and was home when the police came. “I told them, ‘What, do you live there or something?’”

Because Nupreichik didn’t have a permit to chop down the trees, the officers officially “confiscated” the wood. But since actually taking it would be expensive and difficult, it’s still lying in his yard.

Many Vershina Tutury residents look back on the police visit with annoyance. The officers traveled to the village on a tankette, which uses a continuous track, like a bulldozer, rather than wheels. According to villagers, on their way out of the village, the officers broke a wooden bridge over a creek and crashed into an area between two larch trees that many locals consider sacred. For years, people have left coins and cigarettes in return for protection from local spirits on the treacherous roads. Now, the area’s covered in broken branches.

“Everyone wants to drive us out of here,” Nupreichik says with a sigh. “They want to take our forest, our fish, and our animals.”

In the 1990s, private investors began cutting down trees around Vershina Tutury on an industrial scale. Naturally, local residents were upset. “Half of the forest was destroyed, with only stumps left behind, and the animals didn’t return for years,” says Nupreichik. Villagers wrote complaints against the loggers, often addressing them to Vladimir Putin himself.

In 2013, Russian authorities declared the area a Territory of Traditional Natural Resource Use. Then, a few years ago, they outlawed felling trees altogether, banning it for villagers as well as for businesses. By law, anybody seeking to cut down a tree must now submit an application to local forestry officials, fill out a contract to purchase the wood from the government, and pay a fee.

The entire process can take as long as two years.

‘Our village is not Russia’

When Andrey Nupreichik cut down the trees that later led to his criminal charges, he wasn’t acting alone: he had help from his brother-in-law, Andrey Kornakov. But because Nupreichik has two young sons while Kornakov has no children, he decided to take the blame, hoping the court would give him a lighter sentence.

Seventy-one-year-old Galina ​​Kornakova, Kornakov’s mother and Nupreichik’s mother-in-law, calls the laws banning Evenks from cutting down trees “idiotic.” “This is our land — nobody’s going to take more timber than they need. We’ve always known how much wood to take,” she says.

As she vents, Galina pours batter into a cast iron mold. Today, she’s baking bread — 15 loaves of it. Outside companies don’t supply bread to the local stores; it’s too expensive.

“Russian laws are just not acceptable!” she cries, filling the last mold with batter. “How do people in Moscow know how we live [in Siberia]?”

Galina goes on to list her grievances: her pension is only 11,000 rubles ($170) per month, while prices in the village are even higher than in the city. There are no real roads in Vershina Tutury, and electricity is only available from 1:00 pm to 1:00 a.m. Meanwhile, men in the village struggle to make a living, because sable pelts cost a tenth of what they used to.

Galina’s son, Andrey Kornakov, believes the Evenks’ traditional way of life has been ruined — and that the Russian state is to blame. “Our people are losing their morals,” he says. “They drink, they smoke marijuana, they use hashish. We don’t have shamans, we don’t have deer, and only the old people know how to speak the Evenki language. We live in regular houses; nobody even knows how to build chums.”

Kornakov believes the Russian authorities “destroyed [Vershina Tutury] in several stages”: “First they took our reindeer,” he says. “And that was the Evenks’ main income source. Who are we now? You can’t say we’re Evenks anymore.” The second step, in his view, was when the Russian government began granting social benefits to locals and paying subsidies to the indigenous community. “That was it. Before, we were in it together — poor and equal. Then people started getting that money, and people got envious,” he says. “People started turning on one another.”

Still, Kornakov thinks the village will survive if Moscow simply leaves it alone. “We’ll handle everything ourselves: we’ll just live like our ancestors,” he says. “We were born here — this is our forest. We cut down timber here, and we’ll continue to, no matter what happens. We’ve [always] hunted, and we’ll continue to hunt, even if it’s illegal. We have this mentality that we can do whatever we want. We have our own laws. In that sense, Vershina Tutury isn’t Russia at all. It’s a different country!”

‘Kompromat!’

Vershina Tutury is officially considered an Evenk village, but according to Andrey Nupreichik, “there are almost no pure Evenks left here.” His own father, for example, is from Belarus.

Nupreichik points out that Viktoria Shchapova, who reported Nupreichik to the authorities, is also “not pure.” “Her mother is an Evenk, while her father is a khokhol,” he says, clicking his tongue as he speaks the derogatory term for Ukrainians. “A Ba-a-anderite!” Shchapova’s father died before she was born; he froze to death while traveling by bicycle from Atsikyak to Vershina-Tutury after drinking.

Other village residents are eager to talk about Viktoria Shchapova. Andrey Nupreichik’s mother-in-law, Galina, calls her a “bitch” and a “pig” who has “no brain.” Marina Zuyev, the head of the local medical clinic, takes longer to choose the words she wants to use to describe Shchapova: “With the alcohol use, she’s not the sharpest knife in the drawer.”

Viktoria Shchapova herself, meanwhile, says that she has a “good” relationship with her fellow villagers, and that her decision to report Andrey Nupreichik to the police didn’t change that. Nupreichik and Andrey Kornakov are the only two people she says she tries to avoid: “They caught me in a secluded place once and verbally attacked me.” In the Andreys’ telling, they just wanted to know why she decided to “rat them out.”

Viktoria tells People of the Baikal's correspondents that she wouldn’t have reported any other villagers to the police, even if she caught them illegally felling trees. “Just those two,” she says, turning towards Kornakov’s and Nupreichik’s homes.

“They shouldn’t run their mouths so much,” she says after a minute-long pause. “They act so sweet with you [journalists], but in reality, they’re terrible people. They spread gossip about me, and they needed to answer for it.”

Viktoria believes that Andrey Nupreichik’s wife, Olga, told other villagers that she, Viktoria, was also responsible for the first denunciation (the one against Valery Kuznetsov). “But I’m not a snitch!” she says, nearly shouting.

That evening, Andrey Nupreichik jokes to his relatives that somebody ought to report Viktoria Shchapova for building a bathhouse using illegally cut timber. “There’s kompromat [compromising information] on her!” he says. Then he shrugs his shoulders: “Just like on all of us.”

The murder case

Last year, local recreation center director Vera Khorishchenko asked the authorities to check if two villagers, Viktor Dorofeyev and Valery Kuznetsov, had received permission before cutting down some trees. Initially, Vera tells People of the Baikal’s correspondents that the men “went crazy and chopped down half a mountain range of free pine.” Fifteen minutes later, however, she admits that her main motivation for filing the report was to get revenge on Dorofeyev for murdering her husband.

In 2018, Viktor Dorofeyev shot and killed Viktor Khorishchenko in the forest. According to witnesses, Khorishchenko was drunk and had begun firing at people. A court convicted Dorofeyev of “murder committed in excess of necessary defense” and sentenced him to two years of “restrictions on freedom.”

Vera Khorishchenko wasn’t satisfied with that sentence. “Dorofeyev and I became enemies: He killed my husband and didn’t go to prison for it,” she says. “If something else turns up, I won’t hesitate to file a report against him. And I told him that.”

Ultimately, only Kuznetsov faced charges for the illegal felling; he took the blame, while Dorofeyev served as a witness. That left Vera frustrated. Still, she has problems with Kuznetsov, too: She believes he wanted to build a prayer house in Vershina Tutury and bring in “sect members from the city.” “They’ve already been here once — they made their way here when my husband died. They offered to cut firewood. They said, ‘Let’s pray together — it will make you feel better,’” Vera recounts. Afterwards, she says, she talked to some students from Irkutsk about the visitors. “‘These sect members invite people to rallies against the authorities and pay them 500 rubles [about $8] each,’” she recalls them telling her.

Nonetheless, people in Vershina Tutury don’t refer to Vera Khorishchenko as a “snitch” like they do Viktoria Shchapova. “Viktoria was a school lunch lady. Whereas Vera’s somebody you don’t want to cross,” one villager tells People of the Baikal, echoing a common sentiment in town. “Vera’s an important person, a director. Who knows what could happen.”

‘I could go to war’

“I love Putin,” Vera Khorishchenko says. “When I look at Putin, I see a real man who’s really handling things in our country. And in other countries, too. In Ukraine, there are only Nazis left. We need to shower it with bombs.”

Andrey Nupreichik’s nine-year-old son, Dima, has trouble defining the word “patriotism.” Nonetheless, he dreams of going along with his father to fight in Ukraine — and his father likes the idea, too. “Our young people are dying in Ukraine,” Nupreichik says over dinner one night. “Meanwhile, I’ve seen death multiple times. Hungry bears have gone after me, wolves have tried to chew me up, and I’ve almost drowned in the river more than once. I’m no longer scared of anything. I could go to war.”

In Nupreichik’s view, joining the war in Ukraine would have several benefits. First, he says, he could get the illegal tree-cutting conviction expunged from his criminal record. The second reason is the money: he only makes 300,000 rubles (about $4,600) a year hunting sables and gathering pine nuts.

His wife, Olga, agrees that the family is poor. But she doesn’t want her husband to go to Ukraine.

“It’s only right to go, to help my compatriots,” Andrey tells her, sitting down to drink tea by the stove. “After all, we’re going to take Kyiv and Lviv. We need to take all of Ukraine. It won’t be Ukraine anymore — it will be Russia.”

Dima tells his father, “I’ll climb into your bag and go with you to Ukraine. I won’t be scared.”

Olga rolls her eyes. “There’s probably a good reason our country started the ‘special operation,’” she says, fiddling with the tablecloth. “But I just don’t understand why Putin is helping the DNR and LNR [the two self-declared separatist republics in eastern Ukraine]. I mean, we’re drowning out here. No money, everyone’s in debt. My gosh, are we backward.”