Akademgorodok, Western Siberia, Summer 2001

 

To continue advancing my language skills, and to determine a research plan surrounding rural experiences during dramatic social change, I participated in an individual study abroad experience through ACTR/ACCELS. Akademgorodok is a small city that was planned as a place where top academics in the Soviet Union could congregate in a tranquil, natural setting. The town is nestled in a deep forest of pine and birch trees, which sway like blades of grass in strong winds. The forest scene below was my daily view along the trail I would walk to reach the University.

Rural life in western Siberia

Above is one of my acquaintance's grandmother showing me her prized bell pepper plants. Throughout the former Soviet Union, people raise food in their own gardens: kitchen gardens (such as the type shown above, which are right next to tenement dwellings), dachas (or, summer gardens, to which people travel from urban locations), and subsistence family plots (personal gardens tended by rural dwellers). Amazingly, the combination of these types of gardens provide the lion's share of vegetables available in places like Russia and Ukraine. For example, over 90 percent of potatoes in Russia are raised on small, garden plots.
Super Siberian Cabbage   http://www.webpages.uidaho.edu/~lhormel/research/akademgorodok_2001.htm