Orlovka
Orlovka
The Soviet Union had produced a relatively efficient system of working the land. Family plots were small and the villagers worked in large collectives, seeding huge tracks of land with wheat, barley, buckwheat and even corn. Collectives owned literally thousands of heads of cattle. Land was privatized when Kazakhstan became an independent nation. If people took their individual allotments, and especially if there was a loss of population due to the departure of Germans, then the villages struggled. If, however, the collective stayed together, then the villages prospered. This was the case in Orlovka, where the village head under the Soviet system, a descendant of the original turn of-the-century Ukrainian settlers named Poliakov, kept the village together as a corporation in which each resident held a share. In Orlovka the streets are clean and in good repair. The fields are green and not fallow. The village owns 8,000 head of cattle, some beef and some dairy, and has worked out an interesting system of letting the herd stay in the steppe and trucking the milkmaids and milking equipment out to the cows. Needless to say, no one left a place like Orlovka and there are no empty houses.
