Conor O'Clerymakes his annual visit to a family dacha, where Russians go to escape the city
In the warm afternoon of a mid-summer's day the silence of the Siberian taiga is profound. There is scarcely a noise of any kind in the vast forest of needle-leaf trees or in the occasional meadowland around the hamlet of Bulanovka. Inside the dacha where I am staying, nestled beneath spire-shaped pines, the quiet is broken only by the occasional clap of someone's hands catching a mosquito, or the electronic beep of an e-mail or text message on a mobile phone.
We are at the end of a long dirt road in the middle of a vast wilderness, but, like thousands of once-isolated Russian villages, Bulanovka is no longer disconnected from the modern world. Above the coniferous trees that envelop the landscape can be glimpsed mobile phone transmitter masts, and even here, 60km north of the city of Krasnoyarsk, by a village so run-down its shop has long closed and its rutted paths are choked with weeds, one can read The Irish Times - if one feels so inclined - on a wafer-thin BlackBerry. The taiga has been wired up, the pristine air is full of static, and "roaming" has been adopted as a Russian word. Visitors no longer drop by without notice: they call ahead as they leave town in their Toyota SUV or Ford Focus.
Otherwise little has changed in the 18 years I have been coming here. The dachas scattered throughout the forest serve the same purpose they always have, allowing Russians to escape their urban apartments and pollution during the short summer to breath clean air and cultivate fruit and vegetables for the winter.
Nearly two decades after the end of Soviet power, when there are no longer any food shortages in Siberian towns and the hypermarket on the main road out of Krasnoyarsk is as well-stocked as any Dunnes Stores, it is still in everyone's DNA to make provision for the winter. Even the richest surviving oligarch in Russia, Vladimir Potanin, heads for his modest dacha near Krasnoyarsk in the summer, the only concession to his wealth being the helipad in the garden. One of the most popular writers in post-Soviet Russia, Vladimir Megre, has become a best-selling author through his novels about life in rural Siberia that strike a chord with Russians who feel the importance of communicating with living nature and growing things.
The strip of land on which sits the red-brick dacha where I am staying is a veritable market garden. There are black and red currants, strawberries, raspberries, plums, potatoes, lettuce, cabbage, cauliflower, cucumbers, leeks, onions, peas, beans, radishes, garlic and herbs, and in the greenhouses, tomatoes, peppers, cucumbers and egg plants. The tomatoes and cucumbers will be pickled, the potatoes stored in a cellar, and the fruit used to make jams and compotes.
We all get stuck in, hoeing between the rows of onions and potatoes, planting out seedlings and exchanging gardening lore. Afterwards we enjoy a sauna in the wooden banya, and then a leisurely dinner in the still-light evenings, with several vodka toasts. The tradition is that no one drinks unless someone proposes a toast, so we are constantly raising our glasses to friendship, to family, to health, to the tomatoes, whatever.
The only impediments to this blissful existence is the kamar and the kleshch, the mosquito and the tick, that make the forest and the garden inhospitable unless we drench ourselves with anti-insect spray. The mosquitoes are impossible to escape, and cloud up the forest air in the mornings and evenings. They penetrate the dacha despite fine mesh curtains hung across the doorway. The ticks lie in ambush on leaves or long blades of grass. One of our number notices a tick on her arm and is driven immediately to a hospital in Krasnoyarsk. If not extracted quickly, the parasite can cause encephalitis, a condition with flu-like symptoms that can be fatal.
This part of Siberia has had one of its mildest winters on record - that is, there were days when it was only minus 23 instead of minus 33 - and the news announcer also informs us that 20 more forest fires have been registered in the Krasnoyarsk Territory since the beginning of the year .
However, it is not only nature that is threatening the forest. One afternoon I go for a walk through the Scots pines behind the dacha - having sprayed myself all over with the Russian version of "Off" - to see where a well-trodden path led to: it ends in a clearing littered with rubbish dumped by the villagers. The despoliation of the taiga is not a recent phenomenon, as Vasily Polenov's famous 19th-century painting The Burnt Forest shows, and there is little evidence that modern Russia is giving any more attention to conservation than did Soviet Russia.
On another path I find that an abandoned nuclear missile site, a deep concrete silo with underground tunnels and a command room, which I stumbled upon during a previous visit, has been filled up and bulldozed over, leaving just a few overgrown marijuana plants that had once been cultivated by the Red Army soldiers who guarded it. It had been protected by rings of barbed wire and notices warning, "Go back! Arms will be used without warning!" The silo was destroyed as part of an anti-missile treaty between Moscow and Washington.
As always in the evenings, the conversation at the long kitchen table turns to politics, and the future shape of Russia and its relations with the United States. Feelings towards the US, once idolised by many Russians as a model of efficiency and democracy, have become more complicated. Here, where Stalin located the gulag, people see George W. Bush's policy towards a free Russia as threatening and aggressive.
Around the table there is approval for President Vladimir Putin's comment, reported on the radio one evening, that while they have black spots in their history, "at least we never used nuclear weapons against civilians, or dropped more bombs on a tiny country than were dropped during the entire second World War, as was the case in Vietnam". It makes for lively debate, but as the next day begins and we absorb again the silence and the beauty of the taiga and resume our gardening, the only violence on everyone's minds is directed towards the old, ever-present enemy, the mosquitoes.