Pentecostal Switzerland in Western Belarus
The article speaks of the material prosperity of the Pentecostals of southwestern Belarus. It does not admire spiritual achievements. Was there a feat of faith in resisting the AUCECB (All-Union Council of Evangelical Christians-Baptists) or Pentecostal autonomy in the USSR? Did church leaders compromise during Soviet times? What spiritual distortions came from fornication with the AUCECB? Unfortunately, the worldly measure is prevailing over the spiritual in evaluating success…
Republic of Belarus. Gomel region. Zapesochye. Near the village store, two drunks are staggering around, sharing a bottle of wine between them, and ranting about the republican authorities. On both sides of the dirt road, the huts of residents of Belarusian Polesie lie in ruins. Through a sparse picket fence, a cold autumn wind bursts in and shakes the shutters barely hanging on the log walls. This is how the average village lives in Eastern Belarus.
We drive into the Brest region. The difference in living standards is obvious. Here the sun even shines brighter and the grass is greener. Across the fields, combine harvesters, tractors, seeders and mowers scurry everywhere, harvesting corn, rye, sowing winter crops.
Just 30 kilometers from dying Zapesochye, we discover a rather extensive island of prosperity and industriousness. Through the window of our Honda Civic, well-tended fields, farms and little houses resembling Switzerland flash by.
We walk into the first house we come across. Outdoor toilets? Forget it, just not in this village. Inside, there’s Italian plumbing, German household appliances, and stretch ceilings from Finland.
“Bribes?” the residents of this eco-village ask again, “No, we haven’t heard of that. If a person works the land, nothing and no one can stop him from living decently here.”
“The main thing is to pay your taxes on time and be at ease,” they tell me. “The local authorities (thank God!) don’t interfere much in our affairs.”
However, the locals are not overly interested in politics. Their entire philosophy of life boils down to “if you work with your hands, you’ll have everything you need for life, and those who have nothing to do get involved in politics.”
But the villagers are quite good at mechanics, construction, animal husbandry, and agriculture.
Olshany City. Almost every house has a huge big rig with a very long trailer. If you go about it wisely, you can earn up to 8 million rubles (1,000 bucks) a month from cabbage or cucumbers. Considering the subsistence minimum in the country is 2–3 million Belarusian rubles.
This young man’s parents gave him an almost brand-new BMW as a reward for finishing school successfully. At least, that’s what he told me. I must admit, I haven’t seen many teenagers in California who would own a Beemer at that age. By the way, many Olshany residents have relatives in the USA who emigrated there 10–15 years ago. But today, people from this area are no longer rushing to work in distant foreign lands: you can often earn no less back home than in the Golden State.
Unlike the neighboring drunkards and boozers, the local men gather on Saturdays in a Finnish sauna and discuss the advantages of Dutch seeds, the thickness of water pipes, as well as who is “playing a wedding” today. And what dowry the bride’s parents will give the groom.
In the local church this Saturday, two weddings were being celebrated.
Some lucky ones, along with their beloved, receive as inheritance the keys to a Mercedes or even a sturdy European house on their wedding day.
I cannot refrain from sharing some statistics from the religious life of this region: out of the 7.5 thousand residents of the village, at least a third are Pentecostals, conservative believers.
Getting drunk here is shameful. A frivolous lifestyle is publicly condemned. Yet both young and old work here. That is not shameful.
“My faith does not allow us to regulate fertility,” explained fifty-year-old Nikolai Kardash, who has 15 children in his family. “However, we have never had problems with food supplies.”
Kardash’s yard boasts several huge sheds with cows and pigs. In the vegetable garden, well-fed hens cluck underfoot. As I was told, this is the only district in the Republic of Belarus where the birth rate exceeds the death rate.
The Orthodox church in these parts remains on the margins of public life. This “historical monument of the BSSR” has been lying in ruins for many years, and it seems no one cares about it.
But the Protestant “House of Prayer” on Sunday morning is packed to capacity. Men on the right, women on the left, young people exchanging glances on the balcony.
After a lengthy worship service, people drive off through the streets in solid Mercedeses. I was slightly surprised not to find a “Starbucks” or, at the very least, a trendy Russian “Shokoladnitsa” in the center of this village.
In the yard of every self-respecting farmer, you’ll find a couple of Mercedes, Lexuses, or Highlanders of the latest hybrid model. This is earned through hard daily labor and often bloody calluses, the working folks here keep telling me at every turn.
Polesian businessman Sergei lives in this small tidy dwelling, in the satellite village of Olshan. All the paths around the house, which resembles a German bungalow somewhere in southern Bavaria, are neatly paved with tiles, and every room has parquet flooring and modern furniture of European quality.
Sergei was one of the first to take up pickling cucumbers and cabbage for sale in Belarusian and Russian cities. Today he already has several warehouses with agricultural products and a staff of five. “Our production is expanding day by day,” the entrepreneur says with a sparkle in his eyes, showing the workshop for pickling vegetables that is under construction.
Sergei never tires of repeating that all this wealth was earned by daily labor and that “under a lying stone no water flows.”
From the fruits of his labor, he even gives to needy Russians.
After the collapse of the Soviet Union and the depression that followed, Belarusians rushed to buy select seeds from Holland, adapt Italian cheese-making technology, and purchase some equipment from Germany, yet they continue to diligently work their own land with the help of “Belarus” tractors.
The local state farm stands lonely on the outskirts: people are reluctant to go work for someone else.
We go from house to house, tasting cucumbers from the garden, sauerkraut, apples, the most tender pork fat with streaks of meat, home-canned tomatoes with a special brine, potato pancakes with natural sour cream, fresh milk; for a whole three days I completely forgot about indigestion!
Finally, we arrive at the largest private farm in the Stolin district of the Brest region. For a moment it feels like you are on a California ranch: everything around so much resembles that American state.
Thousands of head of prime livestock, enormous barns piled high with potatoes, carrots, beets, onions. Every day, hundreds and thousands of tons of agricultural products are shipped from here to Pinsk, Minsk, and St. Petersburg. It is here that, for the first time in many years, I stopped feeling ashamed of my native Belarus.
Alexander Lukashenko, who dropped by recently, said that the most efficient owner should work the land. And he promised to help farmers develop the region’s infrastructure and build a cannery for processing and exporting Belarusian vegetables. “Let them process, sell, and share the profits themselves,” the president said.
The thing is, farmers have run into a problem: Russian resellers buying up Belarusian products on the cheap leave producers with no choice. Let’s hope that this problem will soon be resolved and that the Polesie farmers will earn even more!
Hold on, Belarusian village, you will survive without American iPhones!
Ruslan Gurzhiy,
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