By Anna Yarmarkova, Associate Account Manager, The PBN Company, Moscow

As the crisis continues, Russians have started looking at ways of cutting their expenditures.  And with salaries falling and food prices rising, people are increasingly planting vegetables instead of buying them.

Dachas, or Russian country houses, have long been popular among city-dwellers.  The high season starts with the May holidays - generally kicking off with shashliki, Russian kebabs, and a good spring clean.  The summer dacha phenomenon, and the corresponding mass exodus from the country’s cities, is so popular that politicians have even been known to save unpopular decisions for this period when citizens are more focused on planting gardens than reading newspapers.

Dachas were originally encouraged during Soviet times as a way for people to help the state by feeding themselves by planting vegetables like potatoes.  With the fall of the Soviet Union and the corresponding improvement in quality of life, people from big cities started to treat their dachas primarily as places for relaxation rather than as sources of food - those with a hankering for gardening tended to prefer petunias to potatoes.

But as Russians cut holidays abroad and grocery bills, dachas are enjoying a resurgence as a place for spending summer vacations - and planting potatoes.

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By Adrian Erlinger, Account Manager, The PBN Company

On Monday, women were fêted with flowers as Russia celebrated International Women’s Day. On March 12, Yelena Skrynnik became the third female to join President Dmitry Medvedev’s cabinet, filling the post of Minister of Agriculture. With the economic climate negatively impacting Russia’s regions, Medvedev’s has chosen a proven manager to steer the agricultural sector through a difficult financial period.

“I know that today our situation is rendered that much more difficult by the financial crisis. It has exacerbated a number of problems that have been building up for decades in the countryside,” Medvedev said on a video broadcast on the Kremlin website.  “These involve issues concerning financing and obtaining affordable loans, the sort of problems that we have in fact been working on lately and with which we have had some success.”

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