Vast Taiga lures Russia’s drop-outs

Press, 14 May 1981, Page 24

Vast Taiga lures Russia’s drop-outs

By

RALPH BOULTON

of Reuter, through NZPA Moscow

Bands of vagrants or, to use the official Soviet term “parasites”, have rejected modern society and are living wild in the vast open spaces and forests of the Siberian Taiga. Living in caves and holes in the ground, they roam the forests stalking deer, .fishing, hunting game and gathering berries.

“They have no desire to engage in socially useful labour and they simply live on what they can take from the Taiga,” one Soviet newspaper correspondent wrote. The Taiga is a harsh land. Vast and daunting, it describes a wide band

across northern and cental Siberia. The winters are bitterly cold and the land is frozen much of the year. Like the American West, Siberia has always been the great “pioneering country” of Russia, and has a _ long tradition of lawlessness.

The men who live in the Taiga soon lose touch with the refinements of urban society.

“They .retain too little in the way of human nature,” the correspondent remarked after a brief meeting with a small group of vagrants. Visitors to the Taiga are often warned not to wander in the forests alone. The innocent explorer is easy prey for bands of vagrants in search of warm clothes or food. “All true Taiga-dwellers agree that the days have gone when there existed a touching code of ‘Taiga hospitality’, when the traveller could take refuge in the small cabins and expect to find provisions, matches and dry wood,” a villager said. Nowadays, local people say, their hunting cabins are regularly plundered by the vagrants and food, clothing, firearms and ammunition taken. Three or four times a year the “parasites” are forced to come into the towns and villages by the cold, hunger or ... a thirst for vodka.

On the Taiga a variety of larch tree grows, containing a resinous sap that can be refined to make a form of chewing gum pop* ular with local villagers. This resin is a great prize for the Taiga men. Two rucksacks, crammed with the ■ substance, can be traded off in the villages for one rucksack brimming with vodka bottles — enough to tide over the vagrant for a month or more.

The vagrant thinks nothing of cutting down the best trees to obtain his bounty and he can cause irreparable damage to the forestland.

In some official quarters there is still a reluctance to come to terms with the problem of the vagrants. But for most people in Khakass, in central Siberia, the problem is too acute to ignore. The police can do little. to ally their anxieties.

Occasionally vagrants are brought to trial for murder or theft but few crimes committed on the Taiga ever come to light. The vagrants’ diet, such

as it is, is also assured ba law which states that ah the riches of the Taiga are the property of the gatherer.

Suggestions have been made to introduce a

licensing system to con-

il the exploitation of the ,aiga’s resources. But, by their very life style, the “parasites” have shown that they reject the documents and permits which loom so large in the life of the average Soviet citizen.