The Backbone of Russia

Babushkas in Modern Russia

Mention babushka – the affectionate Russian term for grandmother – to Russians and their eyes may mist up, succumbing to a wave of nostalgia. Some might recall summers spent berry-picking and mushroom-hunting at babushka's dacha, or perhaps just listening to her stories around the kitchen table while eating buckwheat blini with wild strawberry jam. Others might remember going to church, learning folklore, or having their homework reviewed by babushka.

Russians love their grandmothers. After all, Russians were often raised by their grandmothers as well as by their parents. This familial reliance on grandmothers continues today.

Yet beyond love and nostalgia there is an untold story about grandmothers and the bedrock of support they quietly provide. During the transition to capitalism, Russia's "institution" of babushka support is changing in unexpected ways. Although most families need the support of grandmothers more than ever, modern babushkas don't want to be taken for granted. They want to explore new opportunities for working beyond retirement, travelling, or just enjoying some leisure in their older age. Many grandmothers yearn for active lives beyond the traditional expectations that they will care for their grandchildren and adult children.

One sunny August afternoon, I sat drinking tea with Lidia Mikhailovna* in her living room. "No one helps me. I rely on myself alone," Lidia, a 43-year-old single mother of nine-year-old Kostya, said. Life for many ordinary Russians with children is hard, but single mothers face the added challenges of being primary breadwinners as well as caregivers, all while enjoying fewer state supports than their Soviet counterparts had.

A few minutes later, a platter of freshly-baked pirozhky emerged from the kitchen, placed on the table unobtrusively by Lidia's mother, 63-year-old Antonina Vladimirovna. A retired schoolteacher, Antonina juggles several private tutoring jobs for extra money. Lidia's son Kostya, meanwhile, sat doing homework in the kitchen. Whenever stumped, he asked his babulya for guidance.

I wondered out loud whether perhaps Lidia receives some help from her mother, her son's babushka. "Well, she loves Kostya and she feels sorry for me since I work so much and Kostya's father rarely sends us anything for child support. So, yes, my mom does help out. I do some shopping on my way home from work, but I seldom have to worry about dinner and I know that Kostya will get help with his homework." On a separate occasion, Antonina confided: "I wish I had more free time. And it would be nice to feel appreciated once in a while. But I see Lidia is doing what she can. I'm not sure I have much choice really, but to help."

Variations of these conversations abound in Russia. Digging beneath the surface of "going it alone" stories reveals older women doing a great deal more than baking the occasional batch of pirozhky. Babushkas provide child care, pension money, home-cooked meals, cleaning, shopping, produce from the dacha and canned goods, homework help and tutoring, and many other contributions essential for family well-being, helping their own adult children and helping to raise their grandchildren. Grandmothers do much unpaid work and teach many skills of value in the post-Soviet world.

As a result, many single mothers – and a large number of married mothers for that matter – are not exactly alone in raising their kids. Without access to a babushka's wide-ranging support, many more families would struggle. While adult children also care for their own parents, as in the West, support generally flows from the older to the younger generation. Grandmothers are essential in providing support to adult children, but especially to their adult daughters, once they become mothers.

Grandmothers, indeed, are the backbone of Russian society.

 

There is a long legacy of grandmotherly support in Russian family life. Most historians date the ubiquity of this form of "extended mothering" to the Great Patriotic War. After the Soviet Union's catastrophic loss of some 27 million soldiers and civilians during the Second World War (about half of all World War II casualties), men were in short supply. Several generations of men and women were raised without fathers.

Frequently mothers were responsible for primary breadwinning while grandmothers took over responsibility for housework and child care. Regardless of family status, women typically received most of the tangible support for carrying out domestic duties from their own mothers. Soviet mothers routinely describe either moving back in with their own mothers before giving birth or shortly after having a new baby, in order to receive extra help not provided by husbands. Some either chose to stay with their mothers or insisted that their husbands move in with their mothers-in-law.

One Soviet single mother, Zoya, described how hard it was working and caring for a sick daughter. Even though she was not especially close to her mother, she found her mom's support invaluable: "My mom took the first train to Moscow, at 4:30 in the morning, and she got home at 11 at night. She'd get to Moscow at
9 a.m. and she stood in different lines all day, until 6 p.m. This was just for food, because if we needed clothing we would all go, so we could try things on. Shopping for clothes required a separate trip." Although Natalya, a Soviet mother, faced fewer material difficulties, she found time for party committee work and got a second higher education degree thanks to her mother's help raising the children and doing the family's shopping and cooking.

Even when fathers were present, women could not necessarily rely on their support at home. The Party encouraged men to focus on primary breadwinning and service to the state, supporting a home front policed and managed by females. Due to the shortage of men, the postwar Soviet state extended some support to single mothers, while at the same time encouraging men to impregnate women without assuming any familial responsibilities. Fatherhood became defined as merely a legal obligation related to official marriages, for if a woman was not married to the child's father, she was not entitled to receive any child support from him. Although these policies changed with the passage of a new Family Code in 1968, the legacy of the marginalization of men in families, as well as heavy reliance on grandmother support in family life, continues to reverberate.

Women – then as now – are typically responsible for the majority of housework and child care in addition to paid work outside the home. This so-called "triple burden" frequently includes managing the household's money and ensuring the family's survival.

 

However ubiquitous this form of intergenerational support, frequently babushka support is nearly invisible and underappreciated. Grandmothers do tremendous work in holding families together, in providing a safety net of material and emotional support for grandchildren and adult children grappling with the state's deficiencies and gaps. But this behind-the-scenes labor of grandmothers is far too often taken for granted by children, the state, and society, at times reduced to the mere "spoiling" of grandchildren.

Of course, grandmothers' labor is not uniformly invisible. Article 256 of the 2001 Russian Labor Code gives some recognition to grandmothers' provision of child care. Still, Russian state and society are relatively silent about the contributions grandmothers make to family life. Grandmothers care for half of Russia's preschool-aged children and more mothers have been living with their parents since the difficult economic shifts of the 1990s.

With the important exception of the pro-natalist "maternity capital" program introduced in 2007 to provide incentives for women to have a second or third child, other tangible supports for families have dwindled since the collapse of communism. Child care facilities have been cut dramatically and the enforcement of child support has declined. Furthermore, labor markets favor workers with no child care responsibilities, putting many mothers, and all kinds of women as potential mothers, at a disadvantage.

For many mothers, having access to a babushka's support is a secret weapon in combatting gender-based discrimination. Masha, a divorced marketing manager at a vodka factory, explained: "I haven't experienced discrimination, because I have someone with whom I can leave my child – my mom… I trust in her 100 percent and she'll look after my son even better than I can at times. And we get along very well. She never hindered my professional growth or job searches."

Grandmothers are considered ideal mother-substitutes, as long as they refrain from hindering their children's careers or intervening excessively in child care or household matters. In fact, grandmothers do not necessarily even live with their daughters while providing wide-ranging support. Sonya has an apartment one block away from her mother, but she prefers to live with her mother most days: "My mother has many household problems on her hands…. And so for me things are simpler."

Of course, it is not only grandmothers who contribute so much to the families of their adult children. Grandfathers also provide support. But Russia has the dubious distinction of having the largest gender gap in life expectancy in the world. Russian women, on average, live much longer than men (to an average age of 76, versus 64 for men). Thus, there are simply many more grandmothers than grandfathers available to help. But, even more importantly, it has long been Russian women who have specialized in family caregiving and support in addition to paid work. While men are expected to contribute to families through primary breadwinning, women juggle breadwinning in addition to unpaid care work. So when it comes to the social safety net system for families, it is primarily a story of grandmothers.

 

In Russia's growing number of single-mother families, the critical nature of a grandmother's support is magnified. Russia still has one of the world's highest divorce rates, and with premature male mortality and nearly one-third of all births occurring outside of marriage, the number of single-mother families is likely to continue growing. Single mothers must find paid work at all costs, and, especially if she has young children, without a grandmother's support this feat is nearly impossible.

Mothers without babushka support speak poignantly about this hole in their lives, regardless of marital status and differences in material wealth. Tamara, a mother of two married to a Russian businessman in Kaluga, lamented: "For me, the event of 1991 was not the end of communism. It was the death of my mother. She provided me with such support, it's impossible to really explain the loss of it."

Some women even express a kind of babushka-envy for mothers who are able to rely on a grandmother. Svetlana explained: "You see those mothers who calmly go to work, focused on their careers and developing themselves? Well, they have babushkas to rely on when their kids get home from school! I have always felt alone here, without relatives nearby, and without my mother. It's an entirely different situation. But nobody talks about these differences in family support."

 

Among mothers and grandmothers in contemporary Russian families, negotiations for mutual support are far from straightforward. While some adult daughters do appreciate the help their mother provides, grandmothers do not generally see their support as unconditionally as do their children.

Mothers, especially single mothers, tend to speak of a grandmother's "love" and her "lack of choice" in the same breath. One mother, Ksenia, explained that her job entitled her to more leisure, explaining: "Babushka is the one most occupied with raising the kids, because I'm forced to earn money. I have to relax and get rid of tension after my job. I can't do this at home because there's always noise with the kids."

Ksenia's mother, Nina, explained that she was happy to help with the kids, but that she also felt as if she had no choice but to help. "Ksenia is younger, and I suppose she is currently in a better position to earn money. So what can I do?" Yet later that same afternoon, she grumbled: "Ksenia has no idea what mothers without babushka support face in this country," sighing as she cleaned up from a home-cooked, three-course lunch while her daughter relaxed with her boyfriend in the dacha courtyard before starting her shift at work.

Although her daughter is a single mother, Ksenia has considerable support. Babushka Nina, married for years to an alcoholic who passed away a few years before our interview, explained that although she was a married woman in the Soviet period, she felt a dearth of support. Her mother lived in a different city and could not help her very much.

Some experts suggest that the institution of babushka support in Russian society is dying out, or at least declining in the face of market-based options that allow mothers to hire nannies and babysitters on demand. But in provincial Russia, including the medium-sized cities where most Russians live, this judgment is premature. Life without babushka's support is unthinkable, or at least very painful to contemplate.

"But babushka loves Volodya!" one single mother exclaimed. Another grandmother pointed out that caring for her granddaughter, Masha, is not a burden, but is instead only "joy." Yet, while grandmothers love their grandkids and often willingly help their adult children, this is a profound oversimplification of the caregiving help that occurs between the generations.

Work is often sentimentalized as love when people, or society, refuse to grant labor – in this case childcare – sufficient credit. But perhaps we could acknowledge both the love and willingness to help one's adult children and their families, without ignoring the costs grandmothers bear for such devotion. By providing such support, grandmothers have much less time for their own work pursuits, friendships, attention to health, and leisure. What is more, the rise of market capitalism and decreased state support for families is putting new pressures on grandmothers' support for adult children and grandchildren.

Babushkas, for instance, increasingly try to set limits on their support –
something that is usually spoken about more than achieved.

Zhenya is one of several babushkas who described a complex process of negotiation over support with her adult daughter. "I can't say that I'm such an ideal babushka, that I do everything. No. But I can see for myself how [my daughter] is doing, and if it's really needed, then naturally I help. But if she simply wants to rest? Well, then, no! I raised you, enough, you raise your own kids yourself."

Values of self-fulfillment are ascendant in Russia. Some babushkas (and many are relatively young, given the retirement age of 55 for women), admit that they would enjoy continued work or some free time. But at the same time self-sacrifice, construed as the most feminine of virtues in Russian society, is delegated to older women. Grandmothers, meanwhile, admire women who help their children and grandchildren, as Zhenya said, "only when she considers it necessary." Other women say that the grandmothers they most admire take care of themselves as a woman should – reading, dressing well, and devoting time to themselves – while also helping out with grandkids.

Lyubov, another babushka who wanted to help her daughter without entirely losing her own identity, declared: "When my granddaughter was born, I clearly said to myself, yes, I'm a babushka. But not constantly… I also have my own plans!"

As they attempt to assert themselves, grandmothers are often fighting an uphill battle. In spite of their personal desires, many grandmothers cave to strong cultural pressures to embody feminine self-sacrifice, shunting their own desires aside. Socially, an older woman's personal desires are not expected to matter as much as those of a younger woman. This tendency is only exacerbated with the rise of market capitalism, where paid work is valued at the expense of caregiving.

Given the changes and varieties of crisis which Russian society has undergone in recent decades, many grandmothers also worry about their own futures and limited pensions, resigning themselves to helping their children in spite of feeling underappreciated.

Polina, a 59-year-old grandmother who worked full-time but also cooked, cleaned, and cared for her daughter's three-year-old Anya whenever needed, said, "What choice do I have? I worked my whole life for nothing. I have not even a penny to show for it. And what if I get sick? I cannot expect anything from the state. I can only count on my daughter."

One grandmother whose family lives in Kaluga moves to Moscow six months of the year, because she can earn far better money as a massage therapist in the capital. "I love my granddaughter," Alla explained. "But I'm only 56 years old. I need to maximize my earnings while I still can!"

 

When children lack access to a grandmother's care, time, and devotion, even successful professional women worry. An accomplished hair stylist in Kaluga, Tatyana described how she is doing fairly well compared to many others. With a financially successful brother in New York, and a thriving business of her own with an expanding clientele, she does not want much for money. But since her mother passed away two years ago, she has worried about her six-year-old daughter's emotional state.

"My daughter needs a babushka," Tatyana said, sighing as she rose to turn the kettle off on the stove. "She doesn't have enough of me." Tatyana often has to work well into the evening to keep her business going. Her breadwinning on behalf of the family, with no father in the picture, is also important for her daughter's upbringing. Tatyana reflected, "Galya has no babushkas to spend time with her. Because of this, I worry. I feel sorry for her when she goes to bed alone… she doesn't have enough kindness."

 

In a Russia where the values of the market and all that it promises are ascendant, grandmothers represent a kind of unsullied-by-the-market, and indeed, rather idealized form of care, mixed with kindness and love. As one single mother benefitting from the support of both her mother and her grandmother admitted, "In this country, parents give you power." In her case, "parents" refer to her mother and her own babushka. Although her 47-year-old mother walks 35 minutes to work each way to put aside money for her grandson's Pampers, Katya feels entitled to develop herself and her potential photography business, rather than working in "awful" minimum-wage jobs.

Some families do appreciate and recognize the babushka's myriad contributions. Yet when it comes to what older women want for themselves, that question is seldom posed. Grandmothers' own desires are often assumed to begin, and end, with "love."

But perhaps we have not been listening to the whole story. Women's firsthand narratives paint a more complicated picture. After all, grandchildren are often a source of pleasure, and doing for the family is part of doing something for oneself. Yet more grandmothers are describing the importance of setting limits on their support. Even the most helpful of grandmothers, willing to sacrifice their own leisure time or self-fulfillment at work in order to care for their adult children and grandchildren, are beginning to insist that their support be treated as a gift.

Today's grandmothers are pulled in many more directions than those who lived in the Soviet era, when there were fewer options after retirement. Today babushkas must navigate traditional cultural expectations of a grandmother's unwavering support and new opportunities for self-fulfillment. At the same time, the work that babushkas today do on behalf of their adult children and grandchildren is more critical than ever. Lera, a married mother who lacks a babushka's support, put it succinctly, "In this country, as long as you have your mother, you're fine. A mother is the closest person a woman can have."

Ordinary women like Lera know that grandmothers are irreplaceable. But the reality is that Russian state and society are freeloading on the support, labor, and boundless love of women of a grandmotherly age. These older women are expected to do a great deal of unpaid work with scant recognition, and no guarantees that their efforts will necessarily be reciprocated in spite of life's greater uncertainties under market capitalism.

No one is arguing that Russians don't love their grandmothers. But surely babushkas deserve better. RL

 

* The real names of individuals mentioned in this article have been changed to protect confidentiality and privacy.

 

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Buranovskiye Babushkas: Where Are They Now?

No discussion of Russian grandmothers would be complete without an update on the world's most famous babushkas. The grannies from Buranova (Buranovskiye Babushki) won over the world with their traditional costumes, cheerful dispositions, and upbeat ethno-pop music. Last year their performance of the song entitled Party for Everybody won second place in the Eurovision Song Contest held in Baku, Azerbaijan.

Wearing shawls and flowered peasant pinafores, the women began their act by getting ready in a kitchen onstage, baking bread and preparing to welcome far-flung children back home. Performing in both their native Udmurt language and English, the eight grandmothers (though only six performed onstage at Eurovision due to contest rules), ranging in age from 44 to 86, have more recently appeared in Sprite commercials. While the media dubs them "elderly grannies," the Buranovskiye Babushki keep audiences guessing by embracing some stereotypes about grandmothers, often to the point of parody, while defying others.

In spite of traditional props, these women are both savvy and entrepreneurial. Yet they are self-sacrificial and generous, too, using Eurovision cash (close to $250,000) to rebuild their village church, torn down by Stalin during the Second World War. Given that their fame has catapulted the village of Buranovo into the limelight, the town will soon have a statue to commemorate the women. And in Izhevsk, the capital of Udmurtia, May 26 has been designated the Day of the Grandmother.

Perhaps these grandmothers (or more accurately women, since two are not grandmothers at all) embody the labor of love that defines Russian grandmothers. They are clearly fulfilling themselves, but at the same time they are giving back much in return.