"Village citizens" /Butovka/
_____ Bituminous coal is black gold, around the deposits of which practically all settlements of Siberia were built up in the middle of the 18th century. The village # Borovoy, or as everyone calls it # Butovka, was no exception. In 2004, happiness literally fell on its inhabitants - a settlement of about six thousand people entered the city of Kemerovo. Now every citizen of Butov bears the proud name CITIZEN!
Citizens of Butovo became citizens, but they have not felt any significant improvements in the life of their village for sixteen years. Despite the fact that a gas pipeline passes through Butovka, the newly-made townspeople are still heated with coal and firewood. The population lives exclusively in the private sector, where slums built at the beginning of the century are adjacent to rare remakes, completely unlike those stately cottage dacha complexes that dot the entire Tom bank around Kemerovo. These are very strange streets. Or rather, not even streets, but some incomprehensible paths, with a completely absent design logic. You can try for a long time to find an alley in order to go to the next street, but you will never find it, but quite by accident you stumble upon an unsightly path, which is equipped with a real bridge over a stinking river. Rumor has it that there are problems with transport, in the evening it is possible to get from the city only by taxi.
_____ The residents of Butov themselves do not create any special illusions about complex solutions to create an urban image and a comfortable urban environment in their village. Most just live one day, sincerely rejoicing in what they have.
#Tamara and #Olga are pensioner neighbors. They live in a barrack for ten owners. Despite the antiquity of the buildings, they like it here. In the courtyard, at a large table, they celebrate the holidays with a friendly company. There are small vegetable gardens, bathhouses. Olga even refused a comfortable apartment. I was scared that the neighbors in city high-rise buildings do not even know each other by sight, let alone by name. Older women are satisfied with the social sphere of the village. The only thing that worries them is the absence of a branch of Sberbank and the need to stand in the valley line to the exit point in order to make utility payments.
# Children in the village we rarely came across. The only company was found at the Palace of Culture. Of the entertainment, only an unprepossessing snowy hill covered with dogs and a new-fashioned playground in the form of a ship with the inscription "300 years of Kuzbass" on which no one plays. When asked why, no answer was heard. After communication, she advised the children to study well, to which one nimble girl wished them luck in their work and said that I was good at it. One of the sweetest compliments I've ever received!
# A grimy guy from whom literally stinks of conflagration several times we met on our way at different ends of Butovka. Passing by, each time he stopped and looked after him for a long time. I was terribly interested in how he got out so dirty and sooty, but I was ashamed to ask. I'm sorry ...
#Sergey, the owner of a hut with original carved doves above a low door, which has grown into the ground, surprised me. I thought she would complain about fate, but when asked if he was ready to give up everything here, including five dogs picked up from the street, if the state suddenly provided him with comfortable comfortable housing, categorically stated that he did not need anything from anyone. The minimum pension is 9600 and potatoes from their garden do not allow the animals to starve to death, the TV is on, the stove is heated, and does not complain about life. Despite his more than unkempt appearance, Sergei does not drink or smoke, he is 63 years old, worked as a surveyor before retirement.
# Victor came out to us when we were filming a funny hare in his yard. Deaf, blind, but sociable. I gladly took a selfie with Theodore Otsel, smiled on her live broadcast and said that a good house is an officially unformed summer cottage. A comfortable apartment has been empty for a long time, they live on the edge of the village and they go to the city only on holidays.
# There were two Alekseevs. They greeted us with a smile and a question on whom we were spying. After talking, we learned that one of them is a businessman, and a couple of years ago he moved with his family to live in a village. When asked what contributed to this decision, he pointed to two girls and an alabai, threw up his hands, hinting at the open spaces for raising children. At the same time, the man categorically does not trust the village education and did not give his eldest daughter to the village school. Carries the child to a prestigious city lyceum. My wife and I work in the city. The second Alexei regularly comes to the parental home, which he now keeps as a dacha. He then told us an amazing story about how, even before the war, the entire forest was cut down for construction needs, after which the village of Borovaya was named. Today the village is surrounded by only birches. By the way, they say - mushroom places.
_____ It seemed to me curious that already in 1782 (fifty years before Shcheglovsk was renamed to Kemerovo) almost all the inhabitants of this village bore the name Kemirovs. How Stepan Kemirov, who lived at the end of the seventeenth and the beginning of the eighteenth centuries in the Verkhotomsky prison, the father of Afanasy Kemirov, who founded the settlement that was the name of the village of Kemerov and the grandfather of Pyotr Afanasyevich Kemirov, one of the founders of that Butovka, deserved such an honor, remains a big question for me.
In addition to the consonant surname, Butovka is also famous for its bloody battles with the Kolchak people. In one of these battles, 33 Red Army soldiers were killed at once, their bodies were buried in a mass grave in the center of the village, but we never found the surviving monument erected by the pupils of the orphanage in 1947. None of the surveyed local residents know about him. And this is already a fat minus to officials from culture and education, for who, if not they, are obliged not only to write the chronicles of their native land in their beautiful reports, but also to effectively carry it to the masses.
Throughout the existence of the village, one of the fundamental enterprises was the # Butovskaya mine, named after the Russian geologist Pavel Butov. Beginning in 1924, over the course of sixty-four long years, she employed a larger male population. In 1998 it was mothballed and reopened only in 2013. Today the situation with it is incomprehensible ... The management of the mine declares that the enterprise is working, and someone says that the production is frozen again and is hastily selling the last equipment.