A Village School

Paganism is alive and well here in the Mari El Republic. Every year, beginning in October, all across the republic’s boundless expanses, vehicles thread their way to the sacred groves that serve as the Mari people’s temples for their annual ritual. No village is without a grove, and they all have a priest, a kart in the language of the Mari. Preservers of time-honored traditions and held in the highest regard by their fellow villagers, these priests preside over the autumn observances, reciting the ancient prayers and tending to the smoking bonfires to which believers stream to sacrifice geese, rams, or bullocks to their gods.

I’m learning what I need to know from Grigory Serafimovich Ivanov, a local kart. No animal, he tells me, can be slaughtered until the gods give the sign that they are prepared to accept the sacrifice. The kart pours water over a goose, dousing its neck and back, and if the goose stretches to its full height and spreads its wings, that means the gods are ready. The ceremonies usually last from early morning until five or six in the evening (often with an audience of mesmerized children perched on logs).

Grigory then switches the conversation to his family, his home village of Sardayal, and the school of which he is a proud alumnus. Hearing that all this is news to me, he invites me to spend the night with him, so he can take me there the next day. Sardayal sits at the very edge of the republic, he tells me, has been pagan from time immemorial, and has a school that’s over 120 years old.

I’ll hear a lot more about it on the trip, from Platon, a thickset man of 45 or so, who’s waiting for us the next morning behind the wheel of a small green truck and eager to be on the road. Platon is a local entrepreneur who owns a chain of small grocery stores in several villages, including Sardayal, where he was born and raised. My two Sardayal-graduate traveling companions regale me on the way with tales of their school, as Platon maneuvers among the crevices and potholes in the broken asphalt pavement that is apparently par for the course in Mari El. On either side stretch endless fields sprinkled with tiny villages, sacred groves, and solitary pines. It’s a uniquely melancholy landscape.

There are Russian, Tatar, and Udmurt communities here alongside the native Mari, Platon points out. He really didn’t have to tell me, though: the names of the villages – some cozily Russian (to me, anyway), others obviously Mari – make that clear enough, as Mari-Vozormash is hardly in the rear-view mirror before we’re passing through Alexeyevskoye.

And so, the school. It was founded in 1884, which makes it one of the republic’s oldest educational institutions. In Platon’s telling, it had only two grades and one teacher until 1892. In 1909 it expanded to four grades and stayed that way for 20 years, when the next grade was added. At that time, students who wanted to continue their education beyond the fifth grade would have to transfer to a neighboring village, but most didn’t. The sixth grade came in 1935, and the seventh a year later. At that point, graduates with a good record could at least go on to technical college. In 1940, enrollment hit 150, and there were eight teachers. It serves the communities of Sardayal and Sarda (two kilometers away), but there are no school buses or any other kind of transportation linking the two villages, so the students have to find their own way. And how does Platon know all this, and about the school’s day-to-day problems (about which much more later) too? Because the principal is his wife.

But I’ve forgotten to mention another member of our excursion – an elderly man wearing a light jacket over two multicolored sweaters. His shining eyes are an astonishingly bright blue, and his rich voice reminded me of the narrator on records of fairy tales I listened to as a child. This is Stepan Stepanovich, also from Sardayal, which had been the center of his entire life, from his first post-graduation job as a tractor driver all the way up to his last position of senior engineer. He’d even been involved in building the village club, which was a grassroots village project that “the authorities” knew nothing about. He’d also been one of the first to graduate from the school after it moved into the building it occupies to this day. That move was a New Year’s gift to the entire community.

The old building had been a trial – so small that classes had to be taught in two shifts, and the only light came from kerosene lanterns. “The new school was our pride and joy,” Stepan tells me. “There was nothing like it in the entire district.” There had been talk prior to 1917 of bringing the railroad to Sardayal, but all that ever came of that was a large log building that in 1960 was handed off to the village to meet the crying need for ways to accommodate the postwar spikes in enrollment. It took a year to build out, with timber hauled in by literal horsepower. Just about everyone pitched in.

Stepan misses the old days. Back then, there was plenty for the youngsters to do – school, of course, and lots of heavy farm work, and dances at the club, and hockey using improvised sticks and a chunk of ice or frozen horse manure for a puck, and skating, and, last but not least, a fair share of mischief to be made. In the evenings, they would bring in wood so that the stoves that stood in every classroom would be nice and toasty for the morning classes. Those wood stoves weren’t taken out until 1990, when the switch to coal was made, a switch that seems to have become permanent. Electricity is expensive, Stepan says, and it would cost too much to have the school piped for gas.

There was more than enough water, though. One time, Stepan tells me, they were digging a well for the school, and when they hit water, they found fish swimming in it. This ravine-etched area is riddled with seeps and springs, and the school must have been built over a subterranean lake or river.

Sardayal occupies a sort of peninsula in the southeast corner of the oddly shaped Mari El Republic, but instead of water, it is surrounded on three sides by Tatarstan, which is just a couple of fields away from the village on one side. And its pagan roots run deep; for the longest time there wasn’t a church or a bell tower anywhere in the vicinity. This distant, forested land was just too much of a challenge for even the most intrepid of Orthodox priests.

The jury, according to Platon, is still out on the origins of the town’s name. Some believe that it was named for its founder, a man called Sarday; others, that it got its name from the Sarda, the river on which it stands. Still, consider this: sarda is an edible plant (the common ground elder) and yal means “village” around here… But names notwithstanding, Sardayal has always been one of the largest villages in the district. In the seventies, it was called The Second China, and even today it boasts seven streets and 150 households with upward of 500 residents.

After a bone-rattling hour or so on the road, here we are. And the closer we get to the school, the more convinced I am that time machines exist. The school building is an elongated log edifice fronted by a vegetable garden. In back there’s a huge pile of coal and a soccer field, a magnet for the local youngsters, now crisscrossed by fresh ski tracks that lead round to the school’s front entrance. And once we’re inside, the sense of being a time traveler just intensifies. This place would be perfect for filming a movie set in Soviet times, with its turquoise walls, hefty carved doors, and patriotic posters on the wall. My eyes dart from place to place, eagerly taking in this world from a past life.

Since classes are still in session, I stroll down the long corridor, past one classroom after another. At one end, nestled between the emergency exit and the cloakroom, is the school museum. The door is open a crack, and I peer inside to see a display of Pioneer banners. At the other end is the room where shop class is taught and next to that, a passage that leads to the gym. And midway down the corridor are two enormous carved doors topped by a poster that reads “School is your mooring and the first of all beginnings.” What surprises me is that not a single detail dispels the illusion of having been transported to another time: the color of the walls, the carving on and around the doors, the creaking plank floors, the smell of wood, the rural vistas from the big windows in wooden frames – it all belongs.

The bell for the end of class rings. The space I’m in is suddenly filled with noise, laughter, and the clatter of feet, the voices merging into a chorus, the chorus of childhood, spontaneity, and freedom. Two girls – sixth or seventh graders at a guess – emerge from the workshop. They’re wearing linen aprons over their school uniforms, which have lace collars and cuffs, and their hair is tucked under simple linen caps. I introduce myself and ask their permission to photograph them. They stand side by side, looking straight into the lens, waiting for the shutter to click, and after it has, they race back into the workshop. I would later be struck time and again by the way the children reacted to my requests to take their pictures. I didn’t even have to pose them: they just knew how to stand – naturally and with no primping or preening.

In the corridor, I come across a teacher who’s on a break between lessons. He’s of average height, about 40 years old, wearing sweats and around his neck an amulet that turns out to be a whistle, because Vladimir Albertovich teaches shop class and gym. I start questioning him on the school’s history, but we’re interrupted by an elementary grader with a book titled Happy English under his arm who wants to know where the English class is going to be. Vladimir Albertovich points to the workshop, which makes me wonder if there’s a classroom shortage here. Later I would find out that there certainly is, and that’s just another reason why both teachers and students are so looking forward to having a new school building. On top of being a strange place to hold an English class, the workshop isn’t quite big enough to accommodate all the students; some end up spilling out into the corridor.

Classes are about to start again, and now the principal, Polina Vladimirovna Sorokina, wants to see me. Her tiny office is jam-packed, with only enough room for a cabinet chock-full of papers against the wall, a coat rack, a desk, two chairs, a little stove, and in the corner, a large turquoise safe topped with a vase of flowers. Back in the seventies, Principal Sorokina tells me, this was a projectionist’s office, from which movies were screened in the classroom next door through an opening in the wall – mostly educational material but sometimes feature films like Chapayev. In the mood to reminisce now, she tells me about the Pioneer team-leaders’ office, which was opposite, and about the teacher turnover, which was never-ending. New college graduates were assigned to Sardayal and had to work there for at least three years. Her current staff now comes from neighboring villages.

The principal isn’t happy, and she’s not expecting anything to improve until the government revises its attitude toward the problems of relatively low-enrollment rural schools. She’s no fan of the Western-style education system, either, and wants to see a return to the Soviet system, which, she declares, provided a high-quality education with a coordinated curriculum that combined the imparting of knowledge with character development.

She takes me to the school museum, which was founded in 1982. Here, fading photographs show scenes from the history of a country that is no more. There are over a thousand exhibits in these two small rooms – the oldest a spear tip unearthed by some local lads – embracing subjects such as village history, the history of the school, its students over the decades, its choir, harvests of years gone by, and the Great Patriotic War. (There’s even a soldier’s helmet.) The school managed to stay open during the war, although it was down to one textbook for some subjects, and the children wrote between the lines of old books because there were no notebooks to be had. Their ink was soot dissolved in water or beet juice.

The school’s Pioneer troop features prominently here too, with those Pioneer banners I had noticed earlier and a full Pioneer uniform, red tie and all. That red tie changed everything, says Yelizaveta Petrovna Nikitina, who graduated in 1968. It made her proud of herself and her family, gave her a feeling of belonging, of acceptance, of self-worth. Fortunately, those who failed to get in the first time around were assigned a Pioneer mentor to give them a better chance when they tried again.

“But now,” Yelizaveta Petrovna laments, “life has changed. Or not even changed but become completely different.” She isn’t talking only about the school, either, but about the entire village. It’s hard to live, she says, hard to raise children. There’s no work, everything has been shut down, and that’s why everyone’s leaving and families are falling apart. “If there were jobs,” she asks me, “would anyone want to pick up a backpack and head off to Moscow or Kazan to scrounge around for work?” “No,” she answers herself. “They’d stay here, graduate, find work, get a house – not a room in someone else’s house, but a house of their own – and a wife and children.” To Yelizaveta Petrovna, work underpins everything in the countryside, and she pines for the days when “we were needed and so was our work,” the days before agriculture was given the kiss of death. Now, though, the school is actually shoring up the village economy – there are jobs there, and the children are safe, and everything’s above board. She thinks it might well be the one place where parents and children are still on the same page.

It’s a dismal picture and the prospects aren’t exactly rosy. But I cheer right up again when a gaggle of youngsters running by invites me to come watch them and “Albertych” play basketball. (It’s heartwarming to hear them call him by that endearing nickname instead of the formal “Vladimir Albertovich.”) On my way there, I meet Sandra and Valeria, ninth graders who are both on track to graduate. Thinking about what some actual graduates have already told me, I ask about their future plans and discover that Valeria wants to study design, while Sandra’s talking about a medical career. Next question: what do the young folks do around here in their spare time? Sandra says that in summer and spring they hang out on the soccer field or go swimming, but in fall and winter there really isn’t much to do except make the rounds of each other’s houses.

The bell rings, and I don’t want to miss the basketball, so I take off. The boys have split into teams already and are shooting at one hoop (because some girls with no classes to go to right now have commandeered the other, not even bothering to change into their gym clothes). After a while, the bell rings again, the classrooms empty, and everyone high-tails it out, even leaving their coats and jackets behind. A teacher tells me that the students’ favorite place – the cafeteria – is only a stone’s throw away. And it’s lunch time.

The heavy wooden tables and benches, the sturdy oilcloth with flower designs, and even the smell of the walls trigger unique memories of childhood. There are two sittings – the little ones first, then the senior grades – and the teachers and students eat together. The cook knows everyone’s preferences (thicker soup for some, thinner for others), but the favorite dishes are mashed potatoes with meat patties, griddle cakes, and dumplings, and the most mouth-watering of all, for students, teachers, and guests alike – pancakes that a former cafeteria staff member still cooks on a truly rustic wood-burning stove, for special occasions. Those pancakes are famous not only in Sardayal but throughout Mari El. The vegetables come from the school garden, and I hear tell that the school used to make its own jams, but that’s against the rules now.

And there goes the school bell again, loud enough to be heard far outside the building itself. On my way back, I fall in with Ivan Ivanovich, who now keeps the school’s furnace system running. Forty-five years ago, though (at the same time as Platon, my traveling companion), he was scampering around this place, a little kid like any other. Over a glass of tea he launches into a eulogy for his childhood. Though modest and even poor, he says, it was happy and it was real. It deserves a monument, he says, because there’ll never be anything like it again. And from the stories he tells me – feeding the geese, hauling water, briefly ditching his farm chores to join the Komsomol, squeezing the homework in somehow, digging a tunnel to the street from his snowbound house in winter, riding ice floes in spring – I believe him.

Once back in the school, I hear machinery running in the workshop and finally realize that this is where the calming scent of wood that permeates the school is coming from. I look in: it’s a small room crammed with work benches. There are safety posters on the walls, and the teacher’s desk is on a low podium at one end. Everyone is busy hand-planing pieces of wood to make pointers, except for three girls who are working on a written assignment on… well, on hand planers.

Back with Principal Sorokina, I ask for more of her thoughts on the contemporary rural education system. The rural school, she says, has always been of central importance, and she doesn’t see that changing any time soon, because the rural culture, the rural way of life, isn’t going anywhere and has a lot more developing to do. But the education system in modern Russia leaves a lot to be desired, because it’s all just too complicated, with its alphabet soup of final exams and its truckloads of red tape. Far worse, she says, driving home a point she made before, than the old Soviet system. In the eighties and nineties, principals were issued a single spreadsheet to record four- or five-years’-worth of government instructions; now four thick files cover only a single year. But the procedures are still essentially the same, and the work is really no different. The Pioneers and the Komsomol have been taken away, though, and nothing has been devised to replace them. Today’s generation, she fears, is being raised with nothing to hold onto.

There are, as I learned during my week’s stay, problems on an epic scale. The leaky roof, the aging classroom equipment, the shortage of the most basic athletic equipment, the chalk and the printer ink that the teachers have to pay for themselves, the repairs they do with help from parent volunteers only scratch the surface. The impression I took away with me – from everyone I interviewed, from the turquoise walls, the Pioneer banners, the familiar aromas in the workshop and cafeteria, the linen aprons, and all the rest of it – was deeply moving but also unsettling. At the very beginning of our trip, Grigory Serafimovich had given me my orders: “What you have to do is write it like it is,” he said. “That they need a new school. That the place is 60 years old. And it isn’t even brick; it’s made of logs. That the children need a modern school, a warm school, not one with stoves for heat. The promises keep coming, but it’s all talk and no action.”

There’s a lot at stake here. The teachers were very clear that if nothing is done, the village and its school will not be able to continue in their roles as champions of the native language and traditions. And when you immerse yourself in the situation, as I did, and see how our country has turned its back on these miniscule pieces of the very large puzzle that is Russia, an uneasy feeling takes hold that is hard to shake.