Galina is now 72, and her dreams are long since faded. Her face droops. She shares a cramped, two-room Moscow apartment with her son, daughter-in-law and granddaughters. They hurl abuse at her and allow her to use the kitchen only when they aren’t home. Galina is confused and alone. “In my life now,” she says, “everybody hurts me.”
Galina’s plight is the plight of Russia’s babushkas. These squat grannies, bundled in kerchiefs and padded clothes, were once Russia’s anchor. Even in the cruelest years of Stalinist oppression, they imparted a blend of peasant wisdom and socialist ideology to their offspring and grandchildren: work hard, respect authority, take care of your own, honor your elders. They were the ones who stood on lines and kept food on the table. Child care was their domain. But Russia’s encounter with market values has thrust the babushkas into a new and seemingly heartless world. For 15 years, Galina enjoyed a comfortable retirement. She got 111 rubles a month in pre-inflationary times: plenty fro food, trips to her dacha (a ramshackle cabin outside Moscow), clothing and occasional treats.
Now she gets 53,000 rubles-500 times as much-but has nothing left after food purchases. Galina can’t afford the imported chocolates at the kiosks near her apartment. Nor can she understand why racketeers drive around Moscow’s streets in Jaguars while workers wait for months to receive their ever-shrinking pay. “They stood everything on its head,” says Galina, a retired seamstress. She says things were better under Stalin. Says Oleg Bogomolov, a prominent economist and member of Parliament, “The government has been full of young, pitiless people who read fancy books but knew nothing of real life.”
Galina’s life is archetypal. Her father died of starvation during the Ukraine famine when she was 11, six years after her mother died. “He couldn’t eat grass because of a bad stomach, so he died,” she says. Galina married her husband, a widower with two children. not for love but because she was crippled-a sheet of steel cut off her leg when she was working an airplane factory-and needed a place to live. But if housing was a motivation during socialist times, the stakes are much higher now. With privatization, apartments have become like gold. For a one-room apartment, real-estate agents will pay $20,000 in cash-20 times the average annual salary. In the newspapers, companies advertise that they will privatize old people’s apartments for them and take care of them in their retirement-in exchange for the right to buy the apartments. Confused old people sometimes sell for far below market value, then get abandoned. Police are investigating dozens of cases involving babushkas who have been murdered for their apartments. “A person lives alone, her circle of acquaintances is narrowing, the state has stopped helping and understanding of spirituality and morality are gone,” says Mikhail Deldyuzhev, a Moscow prosecutor. “She is living alone like a wolf in the forest. When she is approached and promised mountains of gold, she is easily fooled.”
Galina has escaped that fate, at least. A few years back, after her husband died, she agreed to swap her and her son’s one-room apartments for a two-room apartment where the whole family could live. Her son said he would take care of her, but now she thinks he just wanted the extra space once she died. “They thought I would die soon,” she says, “but I am still alive.” Galina shares one laundry-draped room with her son. A religious icon hangs on the wall. Flies buzz around a breadbox. Her daughter-in-law and two granddaughters share the other room, but their relations are far from neighborly. Housing in the cities is in such chronically short supply that couples usually have to live with parents for a decade after marriage; people abuse their elderly relatives out of sheer frustration, says Natalya Rimashevskaya, a leading sociologist. “The social crisis is working to break up the family, and positive values like taking care of Your parents-are being lost.”
Galina was never a Communist Party member, but she once felt a part of something. When her aircraft plant was evacuated from Moscow to Stalingrad during the war, she went where the state told her. “There was a society then,” recalls Galina. “Now I am alone.” Galina is considering moving out of her son’s apartment. But she can’t go back to Odessa: her brother is dead; his daughter remarried and moved away. Besides, Odessa is in Ukraine, now another country. Galina’s next-door neighbor has offered to take care of her-if she will sign over her dacha. Babushkas like Galina were once Russia’s conscience. Now that their voice is fading, Russia has no moral anchor to steady its drift.
Babushkas and other Russians on limited budgets have a hard time. Here is the problem:
Average monthly Pound of old-age pension $31.40 Russian chocolates $1.60 Cheapest Pound of butter $1.35 winter coat $47.00 Rent, monthly $1.15 Cheapest pair of boots $18.00 Pound of meat, lowest grade $0.75 Electricity, monthly $4.70 Gallon of milk $1.80
