Russians Learn the Ways of the Cowboy From American Ranch Hands (MIRATORG HOLDING)

VALUETS, Russia — A visibly tiring but stubborn Aberdeen Angus cow sank all of her four feet in the rich black mud of central Russia, refusing to budge. Try as they might, the two Russians yanking on the rope lassoed around her wide, wet neck could not pull that massive body out of the icy December slush.

The cowboys on this new Russian ranch here still have a few things to learn. And unlearn. In a throwback to the old Soviet way of doing things, while the two were trying to move the recalcitrant cow, four others were standing idly by shouting advice.

Watching the greenhorns from afar was Ashley Chester Corlett, one of 10 American trainers brought in by the ranch’s owner, the Miratorg company. It chose them over Brazilians and Australians in large part because of the similarity between the climate in Wyoming and centralRussia, where temperatures can drop to 20 degrees below zero Fahrenheit (minus 29 Celsius).

“At first people always want to use pressure to handle the cattle and don’t realize how much like a predator they seem to the cow,” said Mr. Corlett, a thickset fourth-generation cowboy from Riverton, Wyo. “If you want to get the best out of that cow, you have to understand how it thinks. It opens so much understanding.

            The aspiring cowboys also have to get used to working long days in harsh conditions, a concept that often seems novel to many of them.

“Working here is hard. Many people cannot stand it, especially the need to stay sober,” said Viktor P. Buivolov, who installed elevators in Moscow before becoming the manager of the ranch. “We even have a Breathalyzer here,” he said, navigating a Russian UAZ Patriot sport utility vehicle through a herd of cattle.

Agriculture all but disappeared from this and many other parts of Russia years ago, after the final screw was turned into scrap metal at the last surviving Soviet collective farms. But as oil prices have collapsed and Russia has imposed retaliatory sanctions against Western food products, reviving the economy with import substitution has become a priority for the Kremlin. President Vladimir V. Putin has said Russia has the potential to become a world leader in food production, and has set a goal of self-sufficiency by 2020.

The ranch is part of the Miratorg company of Viktor and Aleksander Linnik, brothers who since 2010, have amassed an empire of more than 1.5 million acres of Russian rangeland and are on track to gather up one million more. At that rate they will become the largest landowners in Russia, owning territory the size of Lebanon.

Some in the industry attribute Miratorg’s remarkable success to connections to high-ranking officials in the Russian government, with the company having enjoyed lavish subsidies and generous loans over the last five years. Viktor Linnik dismisses those allegations as the product of envy.

“Our rivals have nothing else to do but tell people fairy tales about our mysterious connections,” Mr. Linnik said, sitting in his sleek office in Moscow, in the prestigious district of Ostozhenka. “Any other company could get the subsidies we got.”

The prosperity evident around Miratorg’s operations stands in stark contrast to other areas of the Russian economy, which has been in free fall since oil prices plummeted last year. Most of the things that have dragged down the economy in the last year or so — Western sanctions and a crashing ruble, for instance — have helped the company’s operations.

“I don’t like sanctions as such, but they forced the Russian government to change the paradigm and start developing domestic production,” Mr. Linnik said. “The ruble devaluation made us only more competitive.”

This Wi-Fi-enabled ranch here in the middle of the Bryansk region, 270 miles southwest of Moscow, is just one islet in the Miratorg archipelago. A few thousand head of Angus graze wide fields of the Russian pasturelands celebrated by the country’s poets and novelists. A few generic white buildings with red-tile roofs stand beside a corral where the cattle are eventually collected, examined for good health, and then shipped off to an Austrian-designed beef processing factory, one of the most modern in Europe.

Mr. Corlett travels among 51 Miratorg ranches like this one, scattered around central Russia, to train and oversee Russian cowboys. Over all, the Americans are training 1,000 of them to eventually watch over more than 360,000 cattle — what the company calls the largest herd of this type in the world.

Mr. Corlett communicates with his students via arm-waving conversations, telling them how to be patient and how to calm the cow. Russian cowboys yearn to understand more, but a lot of what Mr. Corlett knows can be taught only by experience, which they are just beginning to get.

Mr. Corlett says training Russians is not all that different from training anyone else. “Very seldom I am treated as a bad guy because I am an American,” Mr. Corlett, 38, said, sipping tea in the ranch’s office. “People at home ask me if I am scared, but the American media blows it out of proportion. In their average needs and desires, Russians are no different from us.”

Nevertheless, wearing ushankas, the traditional fur caps with earflaps that can be fastened at the chin, instead of Stetsons, these Russian cowboys still seem unfamiliar with the sturdy horses they have recently learned to ride.

“This is a tough, dangerous and stressful job. The cattle are wild,” said one of the men, Nikolai Barbashin, 31, who used to work as a carpenter.

When asked about their trainers, the Russians keep on marveling at the American’s capacity for work.

“We come to work and they already drive a herd somewhere. Americans are very hard-working,” said Viktor I. Golanov, 37, who worked as a butcher, in a typical comment.

The Russians have a strong incentive to keep the nose to the grindstone. Most were born and brought up in the area but were forced to migrate to Moscow to find work. For them, the chance to come home for a good job was a godsend.

Back in the slush puddle, the cowboys finally got the cow moving, and began shuttling her to the corral, where she would be checked for diseases.

Last year, Russia’s agricultural exports exceeded its arms exports for the first time in decades. This year, they are expected to reach $20 billion.

More than 12,000 pounds of Miratorg’s beef is consumed every month at Farsh, a hip burger restaurant on Nikolskaya, one of Moscow’s upscale streets, leading straight to one of the Kremlin towers. This is an equivalent of 17 steers. Muscovites are ready to wait a half-hour for their burgers to materialize, one of them called Bryansk Boy.

“We have a lot to learn from the Americans,” Mr. Linnik said. “I saw how their farmers work 12 to14 hours per day. This is the basis of the nation’s prosperity.

“One day agriculture will replace oil in terms of importance for the Russian economy,” he added, hopefully. “If we do everything right, I am sure it will.”