Babaeva raced to Father Andrei’s house when she heard about the fire on the freezing night in December of 2006. “It smelled of burning flesh, but I hoped the family had gotten out and the smell was of their cats.” Her voice dropped to a whisper. “It’s very bad for us now.” Remembering Father Andrei, she mentioned an operation her young daughter was scheduled to have on a day she wasn’t permitted to leave work. “He was the only one I could ask for help, and he took her, he didn’t abandon us.”
“They all got on well,” she said of the priest and his wife. “Mother and father loved their children, and I never heard a sharp word from anyone.” She also discounted the theory that drunks wanted to steal the church’s icons. “They’re drunk, but kind. Everyone loved Father Andrei. I think it was…” She broke off, choked with tears, then resumed in a clear voice. “Only God almighty knows what happened.”
Priamukhino lies in the region of Tver, whose capital is the medieval city of the same name on the upper Volga River. More important than Moscow in early Russian history, it was called Kalinin under Soviet rule. Tver’s residents like to cite Nikolai Gogol’s famous quip about Russia’s two great misfortunes: fools and bad roads. In the 1990s, one of the region’s representatives in parliament tried to reverse Tver’s disintegration by rebuilding the roads. Sergei Yushenkov was a well-liked former Red Army officer who had taught Marxism-Leninism at a Moscow military academy before giving key support to Boris Yeltsin during the coup attempt in 1991. He became a liberal icon, crusading against corruption and in favor of individual rights, often on television. But the lawmaker died when a gunman shot him outside his Moscow apartment in 2003 in one of Russia’s many unsolved high-profile murders, and his region’s roads remain in terrible shape.
As for fools, residents say people smart enough to leave did so long ago, after the region’s main employers, obsolete Soviet-era factories, had closed along with its collective farms, part of a dramatic series of changes that transformed Russian society. Elena Orlova, the head of the surrounding Kuvshinovo district, said its population dropped from twenty thousand to sixteen thousand in a few years. “Nothing is being produced here,” the earnest, middle-aged administrator lamented. “People have lost their connection to the land, and it’s frightening. There’s nothing to keep the young here anymore.”
Kuvshinovo is named after Yulia Kuvshinovo, who founded a local paper factory that employed three thousand workers at the turn of the twentieth century. Under Soviet rule, the factory doubled as a social welfare system, building schools, a theater, a hospital and a sports complex. Now its seven hundred employees work and live amid a rotting infrastructure it no longer supports. Orlova warned me not to try to equate life in provincial towns with the big city because the two are “completely different.” Kuvshinovo’s transformation mirrored changes throughout Russia, where the GDP fell 34 percent between 1991 and 1995—a larger contraction than in the United States during the Great Depression—while wages plummeted along with employment. Crime, including murders, doubled.1
Some of the direst conditions can be found in a number of Russia’s four hundred so-called monocities, whose residents largely depend on single industries. Their plight exploded on national television soon after the global financial crisis of 2008 during mass protests in a small town near St. Petersburg called Pikalevo, where the closing of a factory belonging to one of the richest oligarchs, metals magnate Oleg Deripaska, disrupted the lives of nearly everyone. After the local utility cut hot water and heating, residents blocked a highway, demanding that Putin intervene. He swooped in by helicopter to be filmed calling the plant owners “cockroaches” and forcing a chastened Deripaska to restart the factory. Elsewhere, protesters braved the blows of riot police at small, isolated rallies in the far-eastern city of Vladivostok, the exclave of Kaliningrad, on the Baltic Sea, and other regions to less effect. Although the government said it would help more than three hundred monocities diversify their economies, there’s very little evidence of anything having been done there.
The poverty and despair are contributing to a national population crisis that a tiny increase in birthrates in 2009—thanks partly to financial bonuses for baby-producing parents—hasn’t resolved. Reluctance to conceive children whose lives would be difficult and possibly short is a major cause. Another is the high mortality rate sustained by poor diet, persistent smoking, rampant alcoholism and crippling disease. After seven decades of enormous Soviet sacrifices in pursuit of a better life, three times more Russians now die of heart-related illnesses than do Americans or Europeans. The life expectancy of the average Russian male in 2012—when the population declined for the twentieth year in a row—was sixty-four years, up from fifty-nine a few years earlier but still fully a dozen fewer than for an American. In that respect, the country ranks 166th in the world, one peg above Gambia.
While the Kremlin says it considers the country’s shrinking population one of its most serious problems, officials have done almost nothing to tackle poverty, one of its main causes. According to the government’s own reports, seventeen million people, more than 12 percent of the population, live below the poverty line, which it sets at monthly earnings of less than $220. But critics say those numbers are misleading in the way Kremlin figures usually are, and not only because the minimum assortment of consumer goods the government deems necessary for survival would leave people ravenous if they tried to hold down a job paying that amount. Although incomes rose several times during last decade’s oil boom, inflation grew as fast or faster, especially the price of staple goods. That erased the gains in many people’s incomes, while average monthly pensions rose to only roughly $300 and the gap between rich and poor yawned ever wider. One recent study showed that while the richest Russians doubled their wealth in the last two decades, two-thirds of the population are no better off than they were in 1991, and the poor only half as well off than they were then.2 All in all, the World Bank has calculated that roughly a quarter of the population is “highly vulnerable to poverty,” with more hovering just above the poverty line.3
Standing off a deeply potholed road, the maternity clinic nearest Priamukhino looked little different than it did a century ago. Charmingly quaint as its two-story wooden facade may appear, the floorboards and peeling paint inside inspired little confidence even before I noticed the ancient look of the medical instruments. But the director proudly announced that her clinic continues to host several births a year despite the fall of the national birthrate to a third of its level in the 1980s, the last decade of Soviet rule. The numbers remain worryingly low, partly because infant mortality is very high.
A short drive away, the minuscule village of Lopatino, its slumping cottages lining another muddy dirt road through wooded hills, had sunk to being almost moribund, even tinged with apocalypse. All but two of the houses were empty during my visit. Tree branches had broken through the windows of some of the abandoned structures, several of which had gaping holes in their roofs. Tatyana Yevseeva lived alone in one of the occupied houses. Small but hardy-looking in her old housecoat and black shawl, the elderly woman’s sparkling eyes and warmth of spirit belied her struggle to survive. Like her few neighbors who remained in the region, she lived mostly on what she grew, preserved and raised, including potatoes and pigs. To help plant and harvest the vegetables, her five children visited periodically from Estonia and Ukraine as well as elsewhere in Russia.
Yevseeva insisted I stay for tea she could hardly have afforded to share. Unlike many of the region’s elderly, she was neither dejected nor angry. On the contrary, she displayed a cheeky wit in the singsong lilt she gave to a dialect that had survived nearly a century of communist conformism. “We live not badly; I can’t complain, dear.” Ne khudo, her archaic term for “not badly,” sounded almost poetic. But when she stopped chuckling and turned serious, it was to say, “It’s just that everyone has left, there’s nowhere to go for a chat and of course it gets very lonely. But what can you do?”
Yevseeva�
�s heartbreaking poverty and isolation was stark proof that life for many used to be at least materially richer under the USSR. She was born and lived her entire life in Lopatino, where the local administration employed her as a “work brigade” leader. Now eighty years old and plagued by eye problems, she had to walk half a day, mostly uphill, to a neighboring village to buy medicine. The town authorities helped by supplying wood for cooking and heating to supplement the logs she bought from local woodcutters. “The biggest problem is that young people steal my wood,” she said with a sigh.
Several incongruous magazine photographs of teenage pop stars were pinned to the stained orange wallpaper of her tiny house. Although an outhouse served as her toilet, Yevseeva was fortunate to have running water in her kitchen. That might boost the price of her house to several hundred dollars if she succeeded in selling it, but she said she’d be left with nothing if she did. “There’s no money to fix anything but how could I leave my home? I built and built it, mostly with my own hands. And when my time comes I’ll die here, lying on the stove”—the tiled source of heat and comfort. “What’s wrong with that?” she said with a smile.
Despite its crisis, the Tver region could have been thriving. Its land is arable and its climate temperate, at least relative to most of Russia. More important, it’s close to Moscow, the nexus of a highly centralized economy that’s the source of up to 80 percent of the GDP, according to some estimates. Tver would almost certainly prosper in other circumstances, under a different kind of government with different priorities.
Dramatic upheaval almost decimated the tsarist economy’s agrarian foundation in the early twentieth century, when communist policies forced the rapid industrialization and urbanization that transformed Soviet society. My great-grandmother Polina Stepanova was among the uprooted, driven partly by famine from a two-story house in her native Volga River city of Kazan during the tumultuous early 1920s, when poverty was nearly universal. The former seat of a powerful khanate of Turkic Tatars—one of the successors to the Mongol Empire that ruled over what became European Russia from the thirteenth to fourteenth centuries—Kazan was racked by the civil war that followed the 1917 Revolution. It wiped out the landed gentry and battered the small bourgeoisie to which my ancestors belonged, having pulled themselves out of serfdom barely two generations earlier.
Leaving behind her husband—a school inspector whose grain-merchant father was the family patriarch—Polina took her two daughters, my grandmother Serafima and her sister Kaleria, to the fertile southern Krasnodar region. There they eventually moved into a large room in a communal apartment with Polina’s second husband, an accountant like her. A meek, intelligent child, Serafima was nine when the Revolution took place. Never taking to her new home or her alcoholic, bullying stepfather, she was lucky to be enrolled in medical school. On graduating, she was assigned to a tuberculosis ward in a former palace thirty miles outside Moscow, where rural villages would soon become suburbs. Serafima began specializing in radiology.
Her broad face gave her a distinguished if not quite beautiful appearance. Generous and forgiving by all accounts, she was a saintly figure whose turbulent childhood reinforced her highly cautious nature and susceptibility to bouts of despair. Working under the socialized healthcare system suited her, and she soon earned a reputation for being expert at reading very poor-quality X-rays to determine whether patients had contracted tuberculosis. Soon after arriving, Serafima fell in love with a student at an aviation research center, an institution of great Soviet pride, in the neighboring town of Zhukovsky.
A gifted draftsman, Georgy Leimer—nicknamed Zhora—was handsome, with thick, fair hair, a pointed nose and a furrowed brow that added to his serious demeanor. His German surname came from his grandfather, a Bavarian beer brewer who had settled in Russia in 1855, one of the so-called Volga Germans recruited under Alexander II to help modernize the country. Although Georgy’s surname was the only thing about him that was remotely German, it was a liability during those murderous years. In the early 1930s, Stalin launched the first expulsions of Communist Party members, known as purges, and the authorities began filling the Gulag in earnest. The randomness of victims’ selection and guilt by association helped spread fear. And the worst was still ahead.
Still, Serafima adopted Zhora’s name when they married. After he joined the nearby Central Aerohydrodynamic Institute as an aircraft designer working under the legendary flight pioneer Andrei Tupolev—whose group would create the famous planes bearing his name—the young couple moved into a two-room apartment in a simple clapboard house, along with Zhora’s mother and, soon after, a baby daughter.
Disaster struck in 1936, when little Natasha died of meningitis at the age of four. Although she had no proof, Serafima blamed herself for infecting her beloved daughter with bacteria from her tuberculosis dispensary. Stricken with guilt, she was unable to sleep until Zhora prevailed upon her to travel to the Crimean Black Sea shore, where she was treated at a sanatorium—treatment she could afford, thanks to her medical union. Zhora’s letters to her included tender admonishments to stop crying, intimate little jokes and insistence that the past couldn’t be changed.
A year later, on a freezing night in November 1937 at the height of Stalin’s Great Terror, a knock sounded at their door. The NKVD secret police, predecessor to the KGB, had accused Tupolev of plotting to organize a Russian Fascist party, an obviously, even ridiculously, fabricated charge. His protégés and subordinates were also being targeted, including Zhora, who was arrested that night. Like countless other wives and mothers of the millions who disappeared, Serafima joined long lines of desperate women who were queuing in vain at prisons and NKVD buildings for information about their loved ones. After more than a year waiting outside the Leningrad prison where her son Lev Gumilev was held, Anna Akhmatova described their despair in her poem “Requiem.”
I learned how faces fall,
How fear looks out from lowered eyes,
How suffering inscribes cruel pages
Of marks like cuneiforms on cheeks,
How curls of dark and ash-blond hair
Suddenly turn silver,
The smile fades on submissive lips,
And fear trembles inside a hollow laugh.
I pray not for myself alone
But all who stood there with me
In bitter cold and July heat
Under a blind red wall.4
Pregnant with her second child, Serafima suffered a miscarriage.
After the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941, she and the rest of her clinic’s staff were relocated to the Siberian city of Irkutsk, where some of the worst of the war’s wounded were being evacuated for treatment. Provided accommodation in a tiny wooden shack barely kept warm by a small cast-iron stove during a bitterly cold winter, she worked long hours in a military hospital. Having lost hope of ever seeing Zhora again, she caught the eye of a dashing surgeon, a Tatar from a distinguished family of doctors and intellectuals who happened to be from Serafima’s home city of Kazan. The Revolution had scattered Mutakhar Khuzikhanov’s family, and he, the eldest—a highly skilled doctor who published in Soviet medical journals—had settled in the North Caucasus city of Nalchik, where he married an ethnic Russian woman and started a family.
Desperate for another child despite her straitened circumstances, Serafima gave birth in February 1943 to a daughter after a romance with Mutakhar. Keeping little Tatyana alive was another struggle. To warm the baby on the coldest nights, Serafima stayed up so she could keep turning her to face the stove. No doubt stress was responsible for Serafima’s failure to be able to nurse her. With no baby formula available, she was lucky to find a temporary wet nurse. Often poorly nourished and sick, Tatyana cried constantly, but she survived.
As war made already dire living conditions worse, Stalin reversed the few gains society can be said to have achieved under Soviet rule. Despite the turmoil of its early years, communism did help to level previously vast inequalities. Co
untry estates were taken over by peasants, housing in cities was allocated to the poor and salaries were made more equitable. Under Stalin, however, inequality rose, and housing remained especially scarce.5 After the war, Serafima returned to Moscow, where she had no job and nowhere to live. Mother and daughter were forced to stay with various friends and relatives in a succession of communal apartments already crammed to capacity. They spent six months sleeping on the floor of a room belonging to a cousin of Serafima’s named Olga Kiva. Two-year-old Tatyana cried and shouted for days, keeping everyone up many nights “as if in anger,” Olga told me. Serafima and Tatyana later moved into a tiny basement room with the wife of Zhora’s only brother, Anatoly, who had also been arrested, and the couple’s daughter.
Serafima eventually found work at a tuberculosis dispensary in an old neighborhood of central Moscow. Given a room measuring all of eighty-six square feet, she felt very lucky. A former nursery in a once elegant apartment building with thick walls and large windows, the room was cozy and sunlit, and it overlooked the street. It was the first home Tatyana now remembers. My mother’s first real memory of herself is of screaming there at the top of her lungs and not knowing why.
In his 1897 short story “Peasants,” Chekhov—whose first career was as a doctor who often treated patients too poor to afford medical care—introduces a character who describes the effects of widespread destitution. Conditions were most deplorable in the countryside, where people lived “worse than cattle… they were coarse, dishonest, dirty, and drunken; they did not live at peace with one another but quarreled continually, because they feared, suspected, and despised each other.”6
A century later, for many people, outright poverty was just a short jump from communist deprivation after the Soviet collapse in 1991 removed what little remained of a social safety net. Among the many millions left to fend for themselves was the family of my second cousin Ulugbek Khojaev. His grandfather, the brother of my mother’s surgeon father Mutakhar, settled in Uzbekistan after their family fled Kazan. Although he soon disappeared without a trace after marrying an Uzbek woman, his enterprising son Taufik rose from construction worker to become the Soviet republic’s transportation minister. “I was no dissident,” the gregarious, down-to-earth former bigwig told me in the late 1990s at his house in the Uzbek capital, Tashkent, where he owned an electronics factory and cargo planes that hauled goods from Dubai. “But I could have risen to the very top if I’d kept my mouth shut.”
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