Paradise in Russia, Plus Trouble

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/12/world/europe/paradise-in-russia-plus-trouble.html

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TARUSA, Russia — Little news pierces the translucent bubble of languid bliss that settles over our dacha in summer.

For Russians, this is a time for the “eternal,” a word they bestow on all things treasured. That includes their vast country, its very soil, landscapes and rivers. In this small town some 100 miles south of Moscow, perched since the 13th century on the banks of the “eternal” river Oka, nature offers lasting joys, like picking mushrooms in the morning, cleaning them on a sunlit terrace (with or without company, tea or vodka), then relishing the delicious culinary results.

All the while, the wind tickles the leaves of the surrounding silver birches and rustles through the pine trees, stirring what German composers and poets idolized as “Windes Rauschen,” the intoxicating sound of the eternal forest.

There is always some trouble, even in paradise. This summer, it was the theft of three paintings from Tarusa’s municipal gallery, nestled between the restored Orthodox church and the statue of Lenin on the town square.

The three paintings included one by an unidentified French artist and one each by two 19th-century Russian artists whose work has risen steadily in auction value, Ivan K. Aivazovsky and Vasily D. Polenov.

The latter carries special significance since his estate, Polenovo, lies just a short boat ride across the Oka. Consisting of several buildings surrounding a central main house and studio, it is a sprawling testimony to the talent, polyglot intellect and shrewd perspicacity of the artist, who devoted much of his creative force to chronicling the life of Jesus and traveled widely in Europe and the Middle East.

Polenov was the scion of a courtier’s family who included local peasants in his endeavors, in the spirit of a great-grandfather who argued for the liberation of serfs a century before Russia freed them, in 1861.

In the 1920s, Polenov negotiated with the new Bolshevik power. It was agreed that he would donate his estate to the state on condition that he and his descendants could live there, and that it remained intact. Local lore has it that volunteer brigades protected the estate-museum through the turbulent 1930s and helped transport paintings and thousands of artifacts to safety during World War II, when the Nazis reached Tarusa and threatened to bombard the estate across the river.

Today, the artist’s great-granddaughter, Natalia F. Polenova, runs the place, which attracts hundreds of thousands of visitors each year. Her new worry is an old one: how to protect Polenovo.

She and other museum curators across Russia fret that a government order to cut 100,000 jobs from the national police force by Nov. 1 will reduce or end the scant police protection they now enjoy. “What I can’t understand is that this is their property,” Ms. Polenova said. “They should guard what they own.”

The government has suggested that dismissed police officers can form private security services. But those services would bear no state authority. The government seems to be scrimping where it can to salvage an oil-dependent economy that has also been hit by Western sanctions; the museums’ pleas have so far yielded only promises from Culture Minister Vladimir R. Medinsky that he will investigate.

Meanwhile, those sanctions,imposed to punish Russia for its interventions in Ukraine, are again news. Most of our gatherings this summer skirted discussion of the war, or President Vladimir V. Putin, who continues to enjoy high popularity ratings. Russians seem resigned to a long haul of prickly ties with the West and looking beyond Europe and America for business.

But the burning last week of tons of cheese, meat and other produce deemed to violate Russian countersanctions on such Western imports stirred outrage. In a country where memories of Stalin-era and World War II starvation remain vivid, and food costs are rising steadily, this was too much. At least give the food to the poor, or to orphanages, rose the popular lament.

More than 340,000 people have signed a petition at Change.org asking Mr. Putin, the government and Parliament to stop the destruction. In the summer slough of a land of just over 140 million, whether the Kremlin stirs remains to be seen.