Russian cars shrink as one leaves the capital, and hairstyles get weirder. Over the course of a thousand-mile circular summer journey through the European heartlands of provincial Russia, I discovered a land foreign to Moscow and Petersburg. It was nothing like the agricultural hinterland of the west either. But it closely resembled the past. The gulf between urban and rural can seem as wide as it was before the government liberated the serfs in 1862 – a particularly Russian irony in the technological foothills of the twenty-first century.
Mother Russia begins 100 miles south-west of Moscow in the Tula region where furrowed fields open like a fan. The land was fresh and fertile and the butterscotch light of a summer July evening settled on still stands of birch and sharp-roofed smallholdings. Painters call it hayrick country, and between June and September it glows. The roads were empty. New Russia had already dissolved, replaced by honeyed flashes of
Golden orioles.
Russian holidays: summer in Russia - Telegraph
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