by David Greene
The room is quiet again.
Sergei and I have always had an arrangement. If we are in an interview and things get uncomfortable, I have told him to dive in on his own, leaving me behind. Forget taking the time to translate if it makes things go more smoothly to speak in Russian. Sergei gives me a look, and I know what he is asking. I nod back. Sergei, who so often looks to me to take charge as the “boss,” takes the reins impressively, pulls his chair a little closer to Galina, looks around at the other women, and begins a long, emotional conversation.
I am left in the dark, unable to focus on what these women are saying, but able to focus on how Sergei is growing as a journalist before my eyes. The Soviet legacy in work environments here is for everyone to accept his or her lot, do a day’s work, look for cues from the “boss,” never take charge, and never, ever make waves. I always encouraged Sergei to take charge whenever he felt the urge. And here, in this conference room in a health complex in rural Russia, I am watching Sergei leap the barriers put in front of him and other people in this country. I see a determined confidence I haven’t seen before.
Sergei talks to each and every babushka about everything—including their husbands, based on the little Russian I can understand. He and Galina talk for maybe a half hour.
Sergei is respectful and compassionate, as Galina—this strong woman with an attitude—descends into tears. I run to find a Kleenex and some water.
. . .
ONLY LATER, WHEN Sergei translates for me, do I learn the stories.
Zoya Dorodova, seventy-two, lost her son to war—he died fighting for the Soviets in Afghanistan—and her husband in an accident that is all too common in Russia. “He drowned in the river. He was coming home from work. Maybe he was drunk. It was October, and the ice was thin. He walked straight over it and drowned. We looked for his body for a week until it was found down the river.”
Natalia Pugachyoya, at seventy-seven the oldest and tiniest in this group, is the rare babushka with a living husband. “Soon it will be fifty-seven years together.” Sergei asks if their marriage is happy. “You know, it’s a husband and a wife. Things happen. We have been together a long time.”
Ekaterina Shkliayeva says she was married for six years. “My husband got sick. He had epilepsy. It happened during the night. He just couldn’t breathe. He was sleeping, didn’t have enough air. He was lying on the pillow. I didn’t notice until the morning because I was sleeping in another room, with our children.”
Sergei asks exactly what I would have asked—if these experiences had formed the characters of these women.
“We work. We work the land,” Galina says. “We work our vegetable gardens, so they are not neglected.”
“Galina,” Sergei says, “can you tell me a story that will help me understand your character?”
“I can’t. I’ll start crying.”
Sergei is respectful, not pushing, talking to the other women. Then at one point, Galina turns to Sergei.
“Would you like to hear my story?”
Sergei says yes.
“My father went to the army when I was three. Thank God he wasn’t killed. He was wounded twice but returned home alive and lived to sixty-four. He got sick with tuberculosis. I was the oldest of six children. We sawed and chopped firewood. We took care of the vegetable garden and milked cows. I went to school and became a kindergarten teacher and got married to a Russian guy. We had a baby. And somehow life changed. He started drinking.”
Looking back at the transcript later, I believe this is when Galina is taking pauses and fighting tears.
“He got ill-tempered. Once, when I was pregnant with our second child, he shot at me with his rifle. Now, I was athletic. I skied and ran track in the summertime. So I was able to jump out of the way. But he had a serious rifle that was loaded to hunt wolves. Another time, he started coming at me with an ax. And . . . one time, he hit me on the ear and on my head. That is when I said ‘I won’t forgive you for this.’ And I sent him out of the house. I said the world is too big for this. ‘I’m pregnant with our second child—five months pregnant. I’m twenty-two years old.’ I told him, ‘You run. You’ll run all over the Soviet Union, but one day, you will come back to me to die. You will crawl on your knees back to me.’”
And Galina was right. He returned thirty years later.
“He crawled back, with diabetes. He had been sick for a long time. I told him, ‘My children might accept you, but not me.’ My children kept saying, ‘Mom, he doesn’t drink anymore, he doesn’t drink.’ I did feel sorry for him. And you know, I guess a woman has long hair but a short wit. I took him back. He worked another four years, but then because of the diabetes, he lost his legs, went blind, and got weak. I was supposed to retire then, but I told him, ‘You help as best you can, and I’ll keep working.’ I buried him nine years ago. I took care of him for thirteen years. That was my fate.”
As Sergei finishes listening, he asks if there’s anything more. I tell him this is his interview, he can decide. “I think we’re good, David.”
The babushkas are not sure when their next big concert will be. I tell them I hope they’ll come to America at some point.
“When we went to Eurovision,” says Valentina, “we had only one thought. Let’s just not disgrace our little native land, Udmurtia. We will perform and do our best. We got first in the Russian qualifiers and got to Baku. Then we are thinking, let’s not disgrace our Russia. This was our only thought.”
“We just cry sometimes, onstage,” Galina says. “When people stand up for us. At Eurovision, all of them stood up and greeted us and applauded for so long. We were just crying not even understanding what was happening.”
She goes on.
“You know we have our land, our soil, our dreams, our goals. We have this goal, to build a church. This is our goal, and hopefully people will remember us for it. Our children, our grandchildren, our great-grandchildren will say, you see who built this? They have already laid a stone there that says this was initiated by the Buranovo Babushkas. And the stone will stay there forever. We sing about it in one of our songs—that we shouldn’t praise ourselves. Let other people praise if they wish. Let our names stay with people. Now the time has come for us to sing. There was a time when we had to work. Right now? It’s time for us to sing.”
. . .
It’s time for us to sing: Those words have stayed with me. These women are tired. So too is Russia. Decades of war, work, alcoholism, death, upheaval. These women are relishing what they have, and decided that it’s just time to sing.
We all walk into the auditorium, where Marina is on stage, singing a karaoke song, and dozens of guests from the sanatoriy are clapping along. Sergei and I and the babushkas take seats in the back rows. In between songs Marina announces that the Buranovo Babushkas have come in, and the crowd applauds.
Sergei and I say farewell to the babushkas. I give Galina a kiss on the cheek and tell her I’ll see her in America, when they come for their first U.S. concert.
Before heading to the hotel to sleep, I want to thank Marina for her help and to say good-bye. Then, tomorrow, Sergei and I will be on our way to Izhevsk for a quick stop at the Kalashnikov museum, then back to the train and east to Siberia.
We catch Marina by the side of the stage, in between karaoke songs. (It was karaoke night, but she didn’t seem to be giving up the microphone).
“Zavtra? she says. [Tomorrow].” This was my fear.
Unbeknownst to us she has nailed down all of tomorrow’s details. The sanatoriy driver—and herself, of course—will accompany us to Izhevsk for all our interviews. Had I heard this news earlier in the day, I might have cringed. But having spent that magical sunset in the forest with Marina and the babushkas, I am enjoying her company more—of course, with no idea what the morning may bring.
10 • MARINA
THE NEXT DAY, shortly after 8:00 a.m., Sergei and I are walking out of the hotel when his cell phone rings.
“Marina,�
� he announces, seeing the number.
“Zdravstvuyte, Marina.” After offering this greeting, Sergei doesn’t contribute much more to the conversation, just listening to mouthfuls and offering brief responses. All I hear on our end is “Da . . . , Da . . . , Da, da . . . , okay.”
Marina and her driver are already waiting for us at the entrance to the sanatoriy. We find her, not expecting such a cramped seating arrangement. It turns out that Marina is going to Izhevsk with us. And we are taking Tatiana, the color-therapy psychologist. The car is cozy. Sergei and I squeeze into the backseat with Tatiana. Sergei is in the middle, I am to his right, with my knees up against the back of Marina’s seat.
First stop, an office in Uva that runs the hotel where we stayed. We have to return our keys and check out. The process is not so simple.
Inside, the desk clerk tells Sergei that she received a call from the local immigration authorities asking about me, and requesting that we call him back. Sergei and I are suddenly nervous. We return to the car, and Sergei calls the number, with Marina listening.
I hear him tell the person that we were interviewing the Buranovo Babushkas.
“Babushkas—hoorah!” Marina says, hearing this. I’m glad she is optimistic, as I am contemplating my imminent arrest.
Sergei speaks for a few more minutes, then hangs up. The man on the phone asked how long I was staying in the region, and when we were leaving. “I told him we were leaving from Izhevsk tonight,” Sergei says.
“What was his name, Sergei?” says Marina.
“Dennis Alexandrovich.”
Marina quickly calls her friend, who works in the region’s immigration department.
“She’s never heard of him. Maybe he called from a different department.”
I’m convinced it is the FSB, or some related agency, just following our movements. My only worry is we have not been too careful in registering me each time we stop. It is an annoying and time-consuming process. But foreigners are supposed to register with the local immigration authorities whenever they arrive somewhere new. The most aggravating part is, it is never clear when you actually have to register—like so much in Russia, the law is ambiguous, often changing, and never available to read anywhere.
“Sergei, I guess my only worry is if we give them some lame excuse to come after me. We should make sure to have every hotel from here on out register me.”
“I agree,” Sergei says.
After an hour we are in Izhevsk, a pleasant city of just over a half million people. The city center has a vast promenade, with a waterfall and food stands, that slopes down a hill to a picturesque lake. I always had a fond feeling for this city, having seen it the first time in the summer when families were taking afternoon walks, teenagers were eating ice cream while walking their bikes along, and bar hoppers were dancing. It all makes it so easy to forget that the place is best known for producing a killing machine.
One heavily industrial section of the city is home to a weapons factory that has produced more Kalashnikovs than any other factory in the country.
Marina has a well-planned itinerary that involves a very quick stop at the city’s Kalashnikov museum. We enter, pay for tickets and are confronted by a museum employee. “You must put these on,” she says, pointing to a box full of something resembling purple shower caps.
“They’re for your feet,” Marina says. I am aware of this—every museum in Russia attempts to keep floors clean by making visitors wear shower caps on their feet—but I was hoping to avoid the things just this once.
“We simply don’t have time to see everything,” Marina says, rushing us into the museum.
This is one of those moments where we are all rushing—for no apparent reason. Our train is not until 11:00 p.m. But Marina has a plan. Sergei and I may not be abreast of the plan, but we are inexplicably held hostage to it. We spend about five minutes moving briskly though exhibits dedicated to the history of the Kalashnikov. Marina’s high heels have pierced her shower caps. I have nearly slipped and killed myself about a dozen times. Sergei, repeating his gymnastic performance from the train, seems to be floating through the museum unencumbered.
“You know, there is a special room where you can shoot,” Marina says. Shoot?
She rushes us to the basement of the museum, where there is a high-tech shooting range. A woman is behind glass, aiming a deadly Kalashnikov semiautomatic weapon at a target—and firing. Multiple shots.
I can think of no museum like this at home.
Off to the side, there is a small gift shop selling T-shirts and model Kalashnikovs, which resemble the real thing to the naked eye but are presumably less lethal.
“These are . . . for sale?” I ask the clerk.
“Oh, yes. But if you are flying, it is not possible to carry them.”
Oh, right. The whole thing about not carrying look-alike semiautomatic weapons on airplanes. I nod in appreciation for the tip.
Marina quickly rushes us out of the museum, tossing our shower caps in a box before going out the door. We jump in her car (more spacious now, as we dropped the psychologist off for a meeting) and take a ten-minute drive to a museum that is very similar, though attached to the gun factory itself.
We walk inside, and are directed to sit down in front of a glass case featuring different versions of the Kalashnikov and also some very menacing-looking knives. We come to learn that unfortunately Mikhail Kalashnikov is not available, but his seventy-year-old son, Viktor—also a gun designer—has joined us.
He’s a quiet man wearing a gray sweater under a black suit that all but swallows his small frame—he’s about as nonthreatening a guy you could find, but for the fact that he’s designed some of the world’s most lethal weapons.
Sergei seems a bit nervous by the high-profile nature of the interview. “David, let’s do it this way. You ask questions. He answers. I translate. Okay?”
“Sure.”
“Okay, your questions, please.”
Sergei is all business.
I ask about how his father came to invent such a weapon.
“In 1941 my dad was wounded in the war,” Viktor says. “In the hospital he spoke about the kinds of armaments he saw on the battlefield. The kinds of guns the Germans had, and the kinds of guns the Russians had.”
While serving as director of the weapons factory in Izhevsk after the war, he set out to design an automatic rifle that could be produced en masse and match the automatic weapons the Germans had been deploying. And so the Kalashnikov, as it’s also known, was born. The AK-47 has gone through many iterations and been used on battlefields and also by gangsters and terrorists around the world.
“My father’s slogan was to create a weapon that could protect the motherland,” Viktor tells me.
I ask if his father has any regrets, given how many people have been killed—including countless numbers at the hands of criminals.
“Sure, it has been used by criminals. It is a reliable weapon. But I would like to emphasize, the constructor is not guilty in that—politicians are.” He says his father does tell himself that a lot, because there are moments when he thinks about the impact of what he invented. “Yes, Dad thinks about it and talks about it.”
He sure should. The gun he invented is used by armies, child soldiers, criminals, terrorists. And it’s available everywhere. According to C. J. Chivers of the New York Times, who wrote a book about the Kalashnikov called The Gun, so many of the guns have been produced that there is one for every seventy humans on earth. “The Kalashnikov is the most common weapon you will see,” he told my colleague Terry Gross on NPR’s program Fresh Air, suggesting that if you find yourself anywhere in the world that’s unstable or unsafe, chances are these weapons are not far away. The AK-47 “gets used in those places in the commissions of crimes, in the commission of human-rights violations. It is often used by governments as a tool of repression. It’s the weapon of the crackdown and has been for more than half a century.” But the market has become so flooded
with the guns that orders are beginning to fall off—and that’s bad for Izhevsk, Chivers said in another NPR interview.
This is, in the simplest sense, a struggling factory town that’s looking for more orders so it can keep more people at work. There’s also sort of something psychological at work here. The Kalashnikov is, in many ways, Russia’s Coca-Cola. It’s their brand. It’s the one thing that they made that we all know of and that has had global saturation. You know, we don’t buy Russian pacemakers, or Russian watches, or Russian perfumes, or Russian automobiles in any significant numbers. But the Kalashnikov is the thing.
There’s something melancholy about this—not exactly the fact that gun orders are down, which is a good thing, but that Russia is so desperate for its brand to be respected again. There was a time when Russian citizens felt an enormous sense of pride—like when the cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin became the first man in space.
“America could not do that, okay?” Yuri Karash once told me. The Russian commentator often writes about the space industry. “Western Europe could not do it. No other country in the world could do it. But the Soviet state could.”
That was then. Today, there’s far less pride—even at moments when there should be more. When the U.S. Space Shuttle program ended, NASA began paying Russia to carry Americans into space for an undetermined period of years. Like many Russians I spoke with, Karash was less than impressed. He described the moment as similar to a Mercedes breaking down in the middle of the desert. “So you suddenly see a Bedouin riding a camel on the shoulder and you ask him, ‘Hey, guy, do me a favor, give me a lift to someplace?’ And he says, ‘No problem. Pay me $63 million and I’ll take you there.’ Does it mean camel is better than Mercedes?”
For a country whose people are already prone to fatalism, you can imagine a loss of pride only piling on.
