Baba Galya's Story

When you head out of wealthy, modern Moscow by car, it becomes immediately clear that the economic boom of the big cities is not reaching small rural communities. Villages are almost entirely based on agriculture, and young people are leaving in droves for greater job opportunities in Moscow, St.Petersburg, Tver, and other regional centers. As the elderly residents die off, their houses are left to the elements - for every intact, inhabited home in these small villages, there is another one that is abandoned and collapsing. One can't help but wonder about the future of such communities.

Last week Katya and I took a walk around the village of Lohovo, which consists of about seven homes and a main "street" that runs through the middle of town (an empty isle of grass, really). We were sitting down outside of an old and ornately decorated wooden house when an old woman in a head scarf leaned her head out the window and started chatting with us (by "us," I mean Katya). After saying hello, she invited us back into her courtyard for a conversation. Though bend with age, she had a quick smile and a nimble step, and soon we were all seated at a table on her back porch looking out over her large garden of carrots, potatos, and apples. It didn't take much prodding on Katya's part for her to open up and start telling us about her life.

Baba Galya ("Baba" is an honorific title given to elderly women) is an 80 year old who has lived in Lohovo her whole life, and none of it has been easy. During the Soviet era, she worked on a collective farm, but was never paid for her labor, meaning that she worked for free during the day and supported herself and her two daughters (her husband was killed in the war) through other means. Today, she receives a small government pension, but still basically supports herself through her small farm. "It is very difficult," she confided, with her children in the big cities miles away and the village population getting older and older.

The most striking tale of woe in her story, however, had to do with her expereince during World War II. During those terrible years over 60 years ago, Baba Galya lost all three of her brothers, her father, and her husband - all the men in her life were taken from her by German bullets. Sadly, this sort of story is not at all uncommon among the elderly in Russian, and especially with the residents of tiny Lohovo. The calm beauty and quietude of the village today belies the fact that a major battle took place here in 1942; Baba Galya herself is the care-taker of a small monument to the fallen soldiers that lies just outside of town in a forest where weapons and bullets from the fight are still routinely found. From the dirt road leading to the village, you can still see old trenches and concrete forts used by Soviet troops to defend the area (see picture). Last year, another old woman in the village told Katya her recollections of the German occupation: the Nazis hearded villagers into a barn, locked the door, and set it on fire. The agony of these bloody few years is still accutely felt among the population of Lohovo, 65 years after the fighting ended.


In Russia, World War II is referred to as "The Great Patriotic War," and we in the west often forget the immense, almost incomprehensible devastation that the Germans brought to the Soviet Union. In school, we learn about Normandy being the decisive turning point in the war, when in fact the whole Western Front was really very minor compared to the action out east. All told, the USSR suffered some 24 million deaths - the majority of which were civilian - as well as the complete destruction of its major cities; America, by contrast, lost 419,000 souls, only a thousand of which were civilians.

Traveling around Russia really makes you realize the catastrophic impact the war had on this country. There is not a single major Russian city (in European Russia, at least) that was not barbarized by the Germans, and a full telling of this story is more than I can comprehend, let alone write about here. Moscow was bombed into rubble; the ancient cities of Velikiy Novgorod, Pskov, and Smolensk were all flattened, and the vast majority of all 11th-12th century churches found in these places now are reconstructions; the battle for Leningrad (today's St. Petersburg) was the most devastating seige in human history, with some 1.5 million civilian casualties, many of them due to the Nazi's strategy of starving the city into submission. The picture below is a sign printed on a wall of a building downtown instructing citizens to stay on that side of the street to stay clear of the heaviest bombardment. It is hard to imagine today, walking around this charming and sophisticated city, that sixty-five years ago it was hell on earth.

I don't mean to get too dark with this post but it is an important fact to remember: Russia sacrificed more than any other nation to defeat the Nazis in Europe. All too often in American schools, the US is painted as a kind savior that stepped in to save the world from barbarism, when the truth is much more complex. When I looked into Baba Galya's eyes - or any very old Russian for that matter - it was amazing to imagine the hardship and instability she's experienced during her life. Very very old Russians today have seen the overthrow of the tsar and rise of the world's first communist nation in 1917; they have lived through their own government terrorizing them (Stalin perhaps killed more Russians than the Germans); they have survived the complete destruction of their society at the hands of the axis powers; and they have seen the Soviet system collapse in the late 80s/early 90s. If people talk about the quality of fatalism in Russian literature, perhaps this attitude is not unfounded.

Such seizmic changes and conflict over the course of a single human life are almost impossible for most Americans to understand. We have the fortune of being geographically isolated from many of the world's conflicts; our government is stable and powerful; our people are relatively wealthy. Perhaps the most traumatizing events in most elderly Americans' lives are the Great Depression, WWII, Vietnam, the JFK assassination, and 9/11. These were horrifying and destabilizing events, to be sure, but none of them amounted to the collapse of our government or the devastation of our population. The trials that the average Russian faced in the twentieth century are an altogether different order of tragedy. The only word I can think of to describe Baba Galya's perseverence is "Promethean."