by David Greene
My story about the babushkas was produced in 2011 with support from the Kitchen Sisters, veteran independent radio producers who made the piece part of an on-air special called The Hidden World of Girls, hosted by the actress Tina Fey. I was honored and touched. But I never felt any sense of finality. I never felt as if I asked these women questions that truly got to their pain. I always wanted to revisit them.
In 2012 these tiny women—never having traveled much beyond their small village—represented Russia at Eurovision, the international music competition held that year in Azerbaijan. It’s as if the babushkas of Buranovo—and greater Russia—were collectively sending a message to the world: We may seem like some relic dying off, but don’t count us out yet. Maybe, somehow, that’s Russia’s message today: We may be misunderstood, we may seem like we don’t know where we’re going. But given our rich past, given where we’ve been, what we’ve endured, what we’ve accomplished, and how we’ve influenced the course of history for better and for worse, don’t discount us. As Zarbatova testified, out of the darkness can come something beautiful.
Sergei and I walk into the lobby and tell a receptionist that we are here for a scheduled meeting with the Buranovskiye babushki. The man says we must see Marina. I did not yet realize the impact of his directive.
Marina is the exuberant, overhelpful activities director for the complex. Think annoying tour director whom you want desperately to scream at, but you can’t because he or she so innocently thinks he or she is being sweet and helpful.
Thing is, there are a lot of Marinas in Russia. For so long, life here was bleak, days were monotonous, travel was restricted. There were few chances for vacations, or relaxation—a word that has a most-unpleasant translation in Russian: Otdykh. So when it actually happened, nothing about it was casual. It was a big moment. Families expected—at least hoped for—over-the-top treatment. What’s more, the Soviet government kept a watchful eye on citizens’ movements. So many tours were rigidly organized, in order to fit code. Take all that together, and a culture was born. When you arrive somewhere to see something—on vacation, or say as a journalist or writer innocently trying to do his work—nothing is casual. A tour, or a trip—an “ekskursiia”—must be arranged. And there must be a guide. In this case her name is Marina.
As a reminder, Sergei and I are here with a sole purpose—to reconnect with the Buranovo Babushkas. Marina is not allowing access to them at this moment.
“Mozhet byt ekskursiia?”
“Maybe a tour?” Marina says at her desk, with me and Sergei facing her in two chairs. Marina is in her forties, with jet-black hair, small eyes, big lips, and quite an outfit: A tight, long-sleeved leopard-print top that doesn’t at all go well with her bright turquoise ski pants with suspenders.
She speaks very loudly, as if there is a tour group of hundreds gathered, not just Sergei and I sitting in her office.
“What is your purpose?”
Sergei explains our previously arranged interview with the babushkas. They have a producer who does their music and publicity. We’d talked to her. Said we’d meet them here. In and out. Nothing complicated. Or at least that is what I imagined Sergei telling Marina in Russian.
She yells back. Sergei translates.
“David, Marina would like an hour of your time to talk about the Udmurt people and give you a tour of the sanatoriy.”
“Okay,” I say, smiling at Sergei with gritted teeth.
Sergei translates my okay. “Okay,” he says.
Marina smiles. “Plan.”
In Russia that word is as frightening as ekskursiia, or vodka. A plan is translated into English as “plan” but means so much more. It means that Maria has devised a schedule that will be hard to alter once it comes out of her mouth. She begins rattling off times to Sergei.
“Okay, David, Marina says now we have lunch in the cafeteria of the sanatoriy. At 3 p.m., you meet with Marina for an hour. She wants to spend time showing you around and talking about the sanatoriy complex and the Udmurt people. At 4:00 p.m. you may meet with the babushkas. After, you will have dinner in the cafeteria. Later, at 9:00 p.m., Marina will be available to answer any more questions you have.”
My head is spinning. I can’t help but notice we’re spending a lot of time with Marina now, but this must be separately allocated time with her, not part of my additional hour in the afternoon. She’s still yelling at Sergei.
“David, Marina would like to know if we want her help tomorrow.”
Pangs of fear.
“Tell her—um—we’ll see.”
“She wants to know our plan.”
“Okay, tell her our plan.”
Sergei tells her we are trying to go to the Kalashnikov museum in Izhevsk. Quickly, Marina is on the phone, speaking to the Kalashnikov museum, working up our plan for tomorrow which now seems to include her.
With that, Sergei and I are dispatched to lunch in a sunny dining room that feels in every way like the cafeteria in an American hospital or nursing home. On the buffet line is borscht, warm noodles, stewed meat in gravy, and an array of Russian salads swimming in thick cream. I go for the noodles. Sergei and I finish up and return to Marina’s office, where our ekskursiia commences.
“Come,” says Marina, who has added blue pearls to her outfit, almost matching the snow pants. She takes us on a dizzying tour of the complex. We see mosaics of Udmurt cultural scenes. “You know,” says Marina—the jewelry on her hands and wrists clanking whenever she points at something—“there is an old Russian tradition of welcoming someone into your home with bread and salt. For the Udmurt people it is honey instead of salt. Okay, come.”
Now we’ve stopped in a room where you can rent skis, sleds, roller skates, guitars, movies—seems all purpose. The man behind the counter is standing, almost at attention, almost as if Marina had told him she would be bringing some folks by on an ekskursiia.
“David, Marina wants to know if you have any questions.”
“I’m good, Sergei.”
Marina is leading us on. “Come into this office. This is Tatiana. She is our psychologist.”
It appears that Tatiana was also warned that we were coming. She is standing in front of a wall of little bottles, each containing a liquid of a different color. I am suddenly transfixed trying to find the exact tone of turquoise that matches Marina’s snow pants. “We work with color correction—color therapy. Nontraditional methods. We can tell what a person lacks in his or her life based on color therapy.”
We thank Tatiana and move on to the library; then it’s another stop at the cafeteria to see it as tourists, not diners, then back to Marina’s office.
“She’s like a fast train,” Sergei whispers to me. Marina is now putting her coat on with a jaunty smirk: “Let’s go outside.”
“Aren’t we talking to the babushkas?”
“You can talk to them later. Let’s go for a walk outside.”
Then an idea arrives. Marina’s eyes widen.
“Actually, I will go get them and see if they want to come!”
We arrived three hours ago with a single purpose, and it has not been achieved. But as much as I am done with touring, and really eager to interview the babushkas, a walk in the forest with them seems enticing. Marina asks if Sergei and I have snow pants. Mostly out of fear of her loaning me a pair, I say we will be okay, Sergei and I both really like the cold.
Minutes later we meet Marina outside the complex by the lake, and here are the babushkas, with all the warm memories. These half dozen women, ranging in height from maybe four foot seven to five foot four, are bundled up in coats and snow boots, with head scarves covering their gray hair.
Elizaveta Zarbatova, the eldest member of the group, has not made this trip. But there is Galina Koneva, who hosted me and Sergei in her home in Buranovo in 2011. I remember her as the toughest one, a seventy-four-year-old woman who squints her eyes and purses her lips when she’s not pleased. She once told me she wasn’t ready to be “interviewed�
� at the moment. “Right now I am hungry,” she said, waving a finger at me. “And when I’m hungry, I might eat you.”
She is standing in the snow next to seventy-four-year-old Valentina Pyatchenko, a woman whose smile is so broad and dramatic it forces her cheeks to balloon outward. That smile has overcome a lot. Her alcoholic husband died in 1984 and she mostly got along by herself—but lost her right arm using an electric saw to build a new porch. The prosthetic she has is heavy and uncomfortable, but she wears it whenever the babushkas perform—including when they were unlikely stars of that Eurovision contest in Azerbaijan in 2012.
As it stands, there is little chance to chat because Marina is strutting, leading the babushkas and us on a tour of the outdoor portions of the sanatoriy complex. We all walk together into the forest, and slowly the natural beauty of the scene melts away my impatience.
Loud as she is, Marina is so sweetly holding hands with the babushkas, pointing up at the tall trees, describing the nature around us. They are giggling, almost hopping along on the snowy path, as an old man passes by on cross-country skis and waves. The sun is getting low in the late afternoon, casting a warm glow through the giant evergreens lining our path. The snow is almost orange.
I don’t know if my impatience with Marina was unwarranted and I’m now relaxing, or if I’m just blending into this mosaic that captures a culture so unfamiliar to the outside world.
I’m reminded of a New Year’s Eve with Rose outside Moscow at a friend’s dacha—or summer home. Nearly every family who lived in the city in Soviet times had a dacha—for some it was little more than a shack outside the city to spend time and plant a garden in the summer. More prominent people with higher positions in the Communist Party were given spacious vacation properties.
That New Year’s Eve we spent hours inside a house cooking and chatting and drinking. Then, when midnight neared, we joined dozens of other local dacha owners in the forest, as a light snow fell. I was standing with a glass of champagne, looking at Rose, who was ten feet ahead with her back to me. Suddenly I saw what looked like a fiery rocket illuminate directly in front of Rose, then soar up in the air. I honestly thought for a split second that I had lost my wife in some fiery accident. She was okay—and watched, as I did, as this rocket reached the sky above us and exploded—it was industrial-scale fireworks, the kind you see at a baseball game, the kind where in the United States there are strict limits on how far a bystander must be from the launch site. On this night someone set it off within feet of my wife.
“I think I almost died,” Rose said, a bit shaken but smiling. This place can be so crazy and loud and unregulated and dangerous. Any worry melted away quickly, though, as Rose and I stood in the forest and kissed at midnight. We agreed that snowy New Year’s Eve in the Russian forest was one of the most poetic evenings either of us could remember.
So is this night, walking in the forest in Uva with the babushkas. Marina is standing near a log in the snow—the babushkas are listening intently—explaining that it is a special piece of wood, that sitting on it can be good for men’s “health.”
“Health” is how Sergei translates, but I can tell by all the laughter there is more to it. “Sexual health,” Sergei clarifies quietly. Everyone is still laughing.
“David and I are both fine,” Sergei says amid chuckles. “We are both married men.”
Galina suddenly grabs my right hand and looks at Sergei. They exchange words in Russian.
“Galina says you have no wedding ring. I explained to her that in America, you wear your wedding rings on your left hand, not your right.”
I show her.
Galina offers a warm smile, then is back to finger waving.
“You promised when you visited us that you would bring your wife next time.”
“Oh, Galina, I’m sorry. I will bring her the next time.”
She gives a stiff nod that communicates You’d better.
We all walk quietly back up the path, and return to the sanatoriy building. Marina has set up a conference room for Sergei and me to meet with the babushkas. She won’t be far, right outside in the auditorium, leading other guests in karaoke.
The babushkas have found seats around a long wooden table. We are all quiet at first. The subject I really want to talk about—how they survived losing husbands and found the strength to move on—is the one they were least happy to talk about last time. These women don’t like to boast about survival skills.
Galina reminds me only half-jokingly that my leash is short: “I once drove away two journalists who asked the wrong questions. They said, ‘We have a list of questions, and we’ll get started.’ The guy started reading to me his questions, as I sat with him, alone in my house. He says, ‘So do you have “intrigues” when you travel? Do you fall in love with anyone when you travel?’ I said, ‘Get out of here now!’”
Everyone in the room is now laughing but me.
Galina reaches into a bag and pulls out two little babushkas—knitted versions of themselves. “We sit and knit these together,” she says. “They are for good luck and happiness. Here is one for you and one for Rose.”
This is incredibly sweet. I also get the feeling they are not expecting any of the more sensitive questions I danced around last time.
I ASK GALINA how construction on the church in Buranovo is going. Restoring the church is vitally important to these women. Their village, like so many across Russia, became a sad and barren place during Soviet times. Their Orthodox church was destroyed—along with thousands of others under a regime that eschewed organized religion. Roads are not paved. The women walk to each other’s houses on mud paths. The money they have made performing around Russia has all gone to rebuilding their small Orthodox church.
“The brickwork is done,” Galina says. “The bell tower is ready. Now we need to do the roof, but we don’t have the money yet.”
“Can I ask, how important is the friendship you all share?”
The Soviets got rid of religion—and also languages that were not Russian. The women of Buranovo could not legally speak their native Udmurt. So in 1990 they tried to do something about that. These women met in the village hall, knitted, and began singing Udmurt songs together.
“We are one family. One family. It is impossible to separate us. We’ve been together for a long time. More than twenty years.”
I knew that part of their fellowship came from the pain of being alone. I am treading delicately: “I guess women need to find their strength, especially after losing husbands.”
Galina and I are now in a stare-down.
“When there is a man, it is easier to live for a woman.” She pauses. “We have all had different fates.”
Many of these women had fathers who fought and died in World War II, and watched their mothers make it alone: “There was a war, and the entire burden was laid upon women’s shoulders,” another babushka says. “And so we children had to work too, weeding the fields.”
Galina: “I have this mark”—she’s showing me her hand—“from a sickle. I wasn’t even going to school at that time. I was a child, working in the field, and cut my finger with a sickle.”
“May I hear more about your husbands?”
We had started the conversation in Buranovo several years ago but didn’t get very far.
“I don’t really want to talk about it,” says Galina. “My life has been . . . interesting. But I don’t want it in your book. Why write about it? All of it has passed. I will just tell you there’s a saying in Russian, ‘I am a mare, and I am a bull. I am a woman, and I am a man.’”
Many Russian women have had to be both in their older years. Until recently the life expectancy in Russia for men was barely fifty-nine. It has inched above sixty, while the average woman lives to be seventy-three. These numbers are alarmingly low for a country as developed as Russia. As my friend Kathy Lally wrote in the Washington Post in 2013, “Russia bears a staggering load of risk factors for disease, with 60 percent of men smoking an
d each citizen consuming, on average, more than four gallons of pure alcohol a year. Half the population is overweight.” The Russian government has been taking steps—small ones—to improve the situation. In 2013 they finally classified beer as an alcoholic beverage, which brought new restrictions on its sale. Until then beer was considered a food in Russia.
This is a country where women in their older years know how to go it alone.
I turn to my left, to Valentina, the woman missing her right arm. She has a beautiful round face, and an infectious, youthful smile.
“Valentina, I remember you started telling me last time about how you lost your arm. May I hear the full story?”
“I came to Russia in 1984 from Turkmenistan. My husband had started drinking. A lot. So I went away. My children came with me. He died a long time ago. I had many friends in Turkmenistan. But after the Soviet Union broke apart, it was hard for them to come to Russia, because we are different countries now. So we stay in touch. And exchange letters. But we women, we had to do everything by ourselves. I was working on my porch. I could have waited. My son was at school. I could have waited for him to come home. But those boards, they were just standing there—standing there. So I decided I would try to work on the porch while he was gone. I forgot to take my sweater off. I didn’t even notice when it happened. The circular saw just caught it together, the sweater and my arm. I guess we women deal with a lot.”
Galina has an approving smile. “She was panicked, I remember. She said, ‘How will I live without my arm?’ I told her, ‘You are not the first, and you won’t be the last. People do everything without their hands. They embroider, they do everything. And you will learn to do everything.’ Those words bucked her up. I gave her a scolding. I think it helped.”
Valentina is nodding that it sure did.
“I can do everything. I dig with a shovel in the vegetable garden. I mow. I dig for potatoes. I plant vegetables. And you know, without the prosthetic, it’s better. That thing disturbs me. It’s rather long, not very good. If I could get rubber, maybe it would be better. But I do everything. I was sixty when I lost my arm. Now I’m seventy-five. These women—they don’t leave me alone. Without their help I would have been weaker because of this. It’s friendship, support, mutual help. We all live near one another.”
