Galina Suvorova is the owner and salesperson at Khali Gali, a little store in the Karelian village of Vedlozero. And while her shop is not spacious and does not have as wide a selection as one might find in the major chains, like Pyatyorochka or Magnit, it has a distinct advantage. Here you can have a heart-to-heart conversation. You can get updates on the sick. You can gossip, laugh, and buy food on credit.
“If I see someone I don’t know, I ask them who they are, where they are from, why they are here,” Suvorova says. “During the pandemic, a couple of Muscovites – a husband and wife – holed up here. They came to my store and were so delighted! The woman says, ‘We haven’t had anything like this for so long, everywhere is so impersonal. But here you chat with me, you show me things, give me advice!’ I am actually always ready to talk about our inventory, and to suggest something. To let someone know if the bread is fresh or not so fresh, whether or not the sausage is good, and cut off a piece as a sample.”
Galina grew up in Suoyarvi District and graduated from school in Petrozavodsk with a concentration in construction. Her husband Marat brought her to Vedlozero, as it was his hometown.
“If you want to make God laugh, tell him your plans,” Suvorova says with a smile. “I was in eighth grade, we were already going to dances. We’re walking down a muddy street, our shoes under our armpits. And I saw girls just a bit older than me sitting behind cash registers. They couldn’t go to the dances, they had to work. Feeling sorry for them, I said that I would never work in a shop.
“And what was the result? Marat worked as an engineer in the sovkhoz, and I worked in the shop. We were both hired laborers. And one happy day they just laid us off. Marat shuttled passengers to Finland for about 10 years, and I finished up a degree at the Tourism Institute, worked a bit in the local shop, and then decided to start my own business. I always dreamed of being in charge, answering only to myself. I wanted something more from life, I wanted to see the world.”
In 2005, Suvorova bought an old building, renovated it, and then opened what was at the time Vedlozero’s fifth shop. She decided it would be a bit more expensive than the others, but that the items she sold would be more interesting, of higher quality.
“I took out a loan to get the shop furnishings and the initial inventory. At first, everyone in the family worked behind the counter. Me, my husband, the children. Then I hired a salesgirl. Business went well those first years. There were more people in the village, there weren’t any Pyatyorochkas dominating the market. Now they’re a real thorn in our side. It’s 50 kilometers to Pryazha, which has a supermarket. People drive there for their groceries. In the past, the days leading up to holidays were our busiest, but now it’s just the opposite: people stock up there.
“I remember how Marat and I went to buy inventory and one of the Magnit trucks was rushing headlong at us. He joked, ‘Look, it’s our destruction coming straight for us.’ It’s pointless to battle against the chains, you have to accept that. Of course, if a single large grocery store appeared in town, that would be far easier for the residents. But we probably don’t have the population to support it.”
Galina says that her store’s name, Khali Gali, is from Alyona Sviridovа’s song, “Shuby-dub-khali-gali,” which she had as her phone’s ringtone for a long time. And it’s also a question of mood. Suvorova is very musical. She previously sang in a local choir, Selyanochka (she would still be singing now, but the choir lost its director and for the time being is not meeting). When she works behind the counter, Galina often is quietly voicing some song or other. And in between customers she recounts, her eyes lighting up, how she recently bought a guitar in St. Petersburg, so that she could fulfill her childhood dream: to teach herself to play.
OVERHEARD IN THE STORE “Long ago, one of our policeman was murdered. Tied <br/>him to a tree, threw stones at him, and then drowned him. They found the killer, he went to prison, got out, and now heads up a local business. Recently they discovered the body of a young fellow who works at that business. He used to drink with that murderer, they were seen together. But so far nothing has happened, he keeps working as before.”
It seems as if Galina is always in a good mood. How that can be, is not clear: it is cold in the store, and unless you sit right up against the only heater, you might well perish. Spending the entire day behind the counter makes Galina incredibly tired. And there are problems enough to spare.
“It’s not easy working in a grocery store. The goods are expensive, and it doesn’t always pan out that people are good, honest, and upstanding. Taxes are high, there is the cost of electricity… Entrepreneurs don’t get fat here. Every year I tell myself that this is it, I’ve had it, I need to live for myself, take care of my grandkids. But I keep working.”
Galina calls her first years in business “the golden era,” noting, however, that it was never calm.
“If the demand from buyers increases, then the oversight bodies increase. The fire and consumer protection agencies never seem to leave. It’s never ideal in retail. But we often traveled to Petersburg with the kids, and were able to see Europe. It was always budget vacations: two-star hotels, low-cost accommodations. We always flew economy class to Europe out of Finland. And our business allowed us to build the home we always dreamed of.”
Galina’s husband helped her in the business for seven years, but it was really not his passion.
“I’m like a fish in water here, but my husband will bring back rotten tomatoes from the wholesale broker… So I was glad when he got himself a job as the head of a boiler room. My salesgirls, some of them left, then I hired new ones. But then sales fell and it became unprofitable to have hired help. And so, for the last two years I’ve been here alone again. On the weekends, my son comes down from Petrozavodsk, and gives me some relief so I can rest. And there is Irina Nifantyeva, who sometimes fills in for me when I need to go into the city or to the banya. For her it provides a bit of extra cash, and for me it’s all good.”
In the winter, Galina opens the store at nine in the morning and closes it at 10 at night. Sometimes she goes home for lunch, but some days she drinks tea all day in the back room. She has an office there, shelves stacked with goods, and a monitor connected to a video camera, so she can watch what is going on in the store. If the store’s alarm goes off after hours, Galina herself hightails it down there. “We don’t have any private guards here. We are our own rapid response force,” she says, recalling how she once had inventory stolen.
“Last winter a young man, not a local, came in. He asked for some pirozhki [savory pies], something else, a bottle of vodka, and a juice packet. I turned around for the juice and I hear a ‘clip-clop.’ He took everything and ran off. I ran out after him: ‘Hey, chuvak!’ But the chuvak was nowhere to be seen. It wasn’t a big sum of money, less than a thousand. But it was maddening. My husband says, ‘If you call in the police, you will spend the whole night making a statement, declarations, and what not.’ And I thought, ‘No, I cannot just leave it.’ So I call the duty officer in Pryazh. They say, ‘Wait.’ The police come and I describe the thief to them. Less than 40 minutes later, they call and say ‘Come down to make an identification.’ I arrive, and two guys are sitting in the back of the police car. In their laps are the uneaten pirozhki and un-drunk vodka. Turns out they were even more ambitious in their thievery: they stole some sewer covers. I didn’t bother making a claim against them in court, but I had a great sense of satisfaction.”
Even if she has few customers, there is little time for Galina to be sitting about. There are deliveries – bringing in beer, fruit, bread. These days, they can deliver anything you order. Yet still Galina goes at least once a week to the wholesale market in Petrozavodsk. She says there are goods you need to inspect and select first hand. And also she is always looking for more interesting items, seeking to maintain her brand.
OVERHEARD IN THE STORE “The local administration constantly says that they don’t have any money for anything. But I would like to ask the local head of administration about [state-owned] tractors. Why not use them to earn some money? Hook up a cart to them, and off you go! Carry sand to someone, logs to another, or haul away some trash. Privateers do that for money, so why doesn’t the local administration do it as well?”
“Of course, the basic things we are all taking from the same pool” she says. “But I am always looking for new possibilities.”
On the shelves at Khali Gali you can find good instant coffee, even some from Finland. In pre-COVID times, Galina would travel to Finland on buying trips. There are all sorts of tea here, and even chicory. There are candies for every budget, and good chocolate (above the Babayevsky she has hung the tag, “The World’s Best Chocolate!”). There is cat food (Galina says, with frustration, that she used to carry bags of livestock feed, but now she only buys food “for dogs and cats,” because people no longer keep cattle). The store carries vegetables, fruits, dairy, and a large selection of alcohol, along with toys, artificial flowers for graves, household chemicals…
It is rather strange in a rural store to see mandarin oranges with leaves and stems still on them. But Suvorova loves mandarins a bit too much to skimp on buying them. This has roots in her childhood.
“In second grade, I didn’t get a New Year’s gift under the tree at school,” Suvorova recalls. “They would call out each kid’s family name, then give them a present. There were candies and mandarins. They called everyone except for me. I waited until the last person was called, but there was no present for me. I was bawling by the time I returned home. It was very embarrassing. It turns out my father paid his union dues for many years, but never once asked for anything. And then he developed an illness in his spine, asked for a paid vacation, and they refused him rather rudely. And so he said, “Why the hell have I been paying dues every year?” He walked up to the little table where they issued union cards, and left his there. And that’s why they didn’t give me a gift. I have carried that feeling of injustice all my life.”
According to Galina, people have started buying less sausage, because they have been turned off by its quality – it’s better to buy some beef and make something of it. And good sausage has gotten more expensive. “A kilo of beef is 500 rubles, so how much should beef sausage cost? Not 170 rubles, if it’s really made from beef.”
They also buy less bread. “People are starting to pay more attention to their health. Many of us here go about with walking sticks. People are buying less white bread, fewer salty and fatty things… And others say that my prices are high. I don’t argue about that with anyone. People have a right to choose – mine is not the only store in Vedlozero. In the same way, people have a right to see quality products. Yes, many of my goods are bought mainly by dacha-goers and tourists, yet the locals also try them. I would like it if our folks would be open to brewed coffee and quality chocolate. I know who to talk to about such items. A person may listen, and not buy it today, but later they will buy it.”
OVERHEARD IN THE STORE “The Putin plan for housing is a good one, but not perfect. There are people who truly have nothing, and there are those who just drink all day and don’t want to work. They are given apartments, are moved into them, and then they just keep on drinking. They let their apartments go to ruin and soon they need to be moved again… And the people who don’t expect anything from anyone, they work and bit by bit build their own homes.”
It is with the same educational goal that Galina brings in various wines and, as much as she can, quality spirits.
“No point in hiding it – it’s hard liquor that drives sales in our village, whether we like it or not. Unfortunately, most choose cheap alcohol. Wine prices are rising and good wine is too expensive in the sticks. I study up on cognacs and wine in order to be able to make sense of the types and quality that is available. I wrack my brains and jump through hoops in order to bring in some good stuff and keep my prices reasonable.
“If someone comes in and says, ‘Give me some wine,’ I can immediately see that he won’t understand. No way I am going to recommend a dry wine for him. It will end with ‘Yuck, it’s very sour.’ You have to work your way up to dry wines. But if I see that someone is not indifferent, then I help them with their choice.
“When someone asks for the cheapest vodka, I cannot not sell it to them, but sometimes I will ask, ‘Maybe you’ve had enough?’ Just observing the volume of sales, I am certainly seeing that many in the village are drinking less. Many simply died from vodka. Previously, port wine flew off the shelves. And now people drink it sort of as a joke. It’s so low class, brrrr. Unfortunately, there is no sense bringing in expensive port wine.”
If you spend an entire day in Khali Gali, you will hear plenty of village residents pouring their hearts out. Some share personal problems (“Grandma fell and broke her leg. We need medicine, but there’s no pharmacy. What, are we supposed to simply die?”), others share opinions on more general public issues (“How much longer should we put up with that landfill? Even the wolves are ashamed to go there now.”)
“People open up here as if they were in their kitchens,” Suvorova laughs. “They criticize, propose, but never go to the town administration. Either they don’t want to get on bad terms, or maybe they just fear starting up a conflict. And so they say to me, ‘You go, then tell me how it comes out.’ Karelians are a very patient and peaceful sort. They can hold their tongues for a long time.”
Not surprisingly, therefore, Galina knows more about residents’ problems than does the district chief.
“When the pandemic began, I went to the town administration and asked them to open a VKontakte page for the town. So that people could learn the news, share their problems, pose questions. And this ‘head specialist’ said, while rocking back and forth in his chair: ‘They will write nasty stuff to us.’ To which I said, ‘Well, that is part of your job.’ They wanted nothing of it.
“Then they finally set up a page. But they turned off the comments. And so how are people supposed to communicate with those in charge of the town? It’s ludicrous! What are you afraid of? It’s the twenty-first century! Putin has opened up an office to meet with citizens, and so has Parfenchikov [governor of the Republic of Karelia], and all the other towns have one. But in our village it’s closed, no matter how much we try. They post different sorts of announcements, but there is no two-way communication.
“In the evenings we often have small meetings here,” Galina continues. “Everyone comes here after work and we discuss the news, and decide what to do. Recently we, ten women, joined forces and went to the office of the head of the town administration. We set down a list of problems, and we explained that we wanted to help him solve them, that we were considering creating a civic organization. He was very alarmed. I think that life is easier for a head, for a deputy, when there aren’t any movements, when people don’t ask things of you. After all, to get something done, you have to get off your backside. The quieter it is, the better.”
Marina Rybnikova, a local activist, comes into the store. She and Galina have plenty to talk about.
“Our lake has become so toxic that you can’t live alongside it,” Marina says indignantly. “There are bacteria and toxic algae. The people’s health is now our main problem.”
She explains: “On one street here we have some nice homes. They used to pump out their filth and haul it to the dump outside the village. But then they built a sewage treatment plant in the village. And not just anywhere, but on the riverbank. And the river flows into the lake. And now they discharge everything right there. The truckloads of waste come one after another, but the facility doesn’t have the capacity to treat it all. So the lake has been turned into a cesspool. It’s blooming, turning green. The fishermen say that we already have ‘dirty fish.’ So we knocked on every door possible and journalists came to visit… Our activists forced the government to set up a commission to discuss all of this. But the information is treated like some sort of state secret.”
Rybnikova suggests I walk with her to the sewage plant.
The air smells of spring. A neat row of fluffy pine trees – planted by local resident Nadezhda Zaitseva – stands along the lakeshore. Some women with Scandinavian walking sticks come toward us, old women in heavy makeup with ruddy complexions and wearing ski pants, who take a constitutional around the village every day. Marina says there are lots of athletic women like this here.
“It’s like in Finland!” I exclaim.
“Yeah, sure, Finland,” she replies sarcastically. “You could film a movie about the apocalypse here. Look to the left!”
To our left, a huge building has collapsed into the snow. Empty, without windows, it looks creepy, but no one is in a hurry to clear it away. There are several buildings like this in Vedlozero. Such “titans” are yet another problem that Marina and other activists have been struggling against for several years.
Were it not for such abandoned buildings, Vedlozero could be called beautiful. The village is clean, spacious, and there are nice homes and sights, for instance the Karelian Language House, built with Finnish support.
We walk to the sewage plant and there mark time stomping about. It’s not clear if they are working or not. I return to Khali Gali.
If you walk the perimeter of the building that houses Galina’s store you will see another roof. It is a bar, also called Khali Gali, and it too belongs to Suvorova. Inside are a counter, tables, a sound system, and a large dancefloor. It was shuttered during the pandemic, but prior to that it had an active role in the town, because there is nothing to do and nowhere to go in Vedlozero.
“When we renovated the space,” Galina explains, “we had yet to decide what it would hold. But people started saying, ‘So, is there gonna be a bar?’ And if the people speak, you have to listen. There were so many inspections to endure, so many signatures to obtain before we could open! The fire safety authorities, the health authorities… Between offices I’d stand in the stairwell and bawl like a baby, but then I blew my nose and marched on. And we broke through that wall.”
The bar opened just before New Year’s 2007. Some 150 people turned out for the opening. And at first the whole family worked there, then Galina handed the reins over to her sons, Nikita and Semyon. They were studying in Petrozavodsk and would come home on weekends. Galina got them their employment paperwork, and it turned out to be an excellent way for the young men to learn business and gain experience.
The bar broke even its first year, but of course not without problems. For example, Galina really wanted things to look nice, but that’s a whole matter until itself.
“We spent a lot of time thinking about how to set things up so that there would not be any drunken brawls. We did not sell cheap wine or vodka. Only cognac, rum, and liqueurs. And various wines. There was beer, but it was good, not the cheap stuff. People would ask, ‘So, ya got any 150-ruble beer or no?’ It was crazy. I mean, how are we going to make it on 150-ruble beer?
“We had a cover charge, in order to deter the cheap wine drinkers. If someone has just 100 rubles for cheap wine, he is not going to waste it on a cover charge. So that’s how we worked for a time, but when there started to be fewer people in the village, we had to drop the cover charge.
“The bar opened 30 minutes after the store closed. This was so we didn’t have people buying liquor in the store and then taking it into the bar with them. Those who showed up with bags, we would ask them nicely to check their bag at the entrance and take it when they left. I am generally a peace-loving person, but if you push me too hard, I have no problem tossing people out.”
Galina is now considering opening a summer café, and adding on a deck. Then, smiling, she adds that on its opening night the deck would probably be overrun by alcoholics.
Irina Nifantyeva, who sometimes covers for Suvorova at the store, wakes up at five in the morning in order to bake pirozhki filled with tvorog, berries, or cabbage. Sometimes she’ll do kalitki [a Karelian style pie]. She offers her pirozhki at Khali Gali, selling them to Galina for 18 rubles, who then retails them for 25. If she sells 33 pirozhki, she grosses 600 rubles (just under $10). After the cost of flour, fillings, and electricity, she nets about 300. It’s not much, but she doesn’t have to hawk them along the roadside.
People also buy pirozhki from Irina for holidays and funerals. If she sells 500 rubles worth, she nets 250. By baking two or three times a week for the store, and fulfilling a few private orders, she can earn a couple thousand per month.
Suvorova is not against selling her fellow villagers’ output. There was a time when a resident of Vedlozero sold their cucumbers in the store – they sold out in no time. In the summer, one old fellow brings in bunches of dried perch for eating with beer. But that’s about the limit of things.
Today, Galina has gone shopping for things to sell, so Irina and I open the store. No sooner has Irina stepped behind the counter than people start stopping by.
OVERHEARD IN THE STORE “I don’t believe in ESP. A woman here, her son went missing. They looked and looked, and then went to a fortuneteller. She told her that her son was alive. She <br/>was overjoyed, but then found him dead in her shed.”
A fellow who is buying bread pulls out 300 rubles. Irina takes the money and marks down something on a sheet of paper lying near the cash register. It contains a list of last names and, opposite them, how much they owe.
Perhaps this is the most significant difference between a chain store and this village store: here, if you are short on cash, you can purchase food on credit. I ask Irina to tell me something about the people on the list.
“Here’s Masha. She’s on pension, and buys vodka on credit. Lena is always scouring the woods gathering berries. And she came in one morning and took three bottles of vodka. And then she came back in the afternoon, and I asked, ‘Lena, you are taking so much vodka, have you started drinking?’ She says nothing. But she always brings in her pension when it comes in.
“Here’s Shuntik. The last time he came in I managed to get a thousand out of him. But this month he didn’t bring in anything, drank it all up. And this is Vanya. He’s two years older than me, but already looks elderly. Grey hair, can barely walk. It’s all because of vodka. This one, Vitya, also always gets vodka… And here’s Ivan. He works in the sovkhoz and doesn’t drink. They don’t pay him his salary, so he came in to get some groceries. A hard worker. He even uses his tractor to clear the roads of snow.”
Galina is back behind the counter the next day, which begins with a visit by an elderly woman.
“First, please excuse me, I wasn’t quite right in the head,” she says, speaking to Galina.
“And now you’re alright?”
“Yes, and I remember everything I said.”
“I forgive you, Tamara. And God forgives you.”
“When I got home, I cried to Kolya: ‘I said all sorts of things to Galya, and she kicked me out of the store…’ I can be such a fool… I will bring you my pension when it comes in April.”
“I’ve heard that before…”
“I spent all my money on firewood, electricity…”
“You need something?”
“Yes, some smokes. Thin and fat. These yellow ones. That’s it. And I will bring you money next month. There’s no getting round it! The main thing, please forgive me. My conscience ate at me, and I couldn’t sleep a wink.”
“You need bread?”
“No, thank you. Oy, s—, I am such a fool, forgive me. What a f— fool I am…!”
After Tamara leaves, Suvorova explains. “She is one of our debtors. A long-time debtor. One month she will give us a little from her pension, then next month nothing at all… When her husband, Vaska, was alive, their debt would go up and down. But after he died, it only goes up…”
Over 16 years running her store, Galina has seen plenty. By explaining how demand for different goods has changed, what people say, and how they behave, she describes how living standards have changed in the village.
“If you compare now with how things were ten years ago,” she says, “everything has gotten worse. There are fewer people, and their buying power has decreased. The standard of living has fallen radically, since they started indiscriminately giving people loans and credit cards, people have been sucked in by that cabal. People are always saying, ‘They deducted what I owe!’ There are more people unemployed. And not just because there is less work in the village. People have just become more irresponsible. If the pay is not high, people don’t want to work! Before, many people collected berries; nearly the entire village would take to the forest, then sell them. But now just a few people do that.”
I pick up the sheet of paper and look down the list of debtors for March. One person owes a thousand, another five. Lida has the biggest debt: 13,000.
“She’s a single mother with four children,” Galina says. “She borrows not for vodka, but for food. Bread, sugar, macaroni… They don’t give her any credit in other stores, because salesgirls work there, and it would be docked from their wages. Here, I am the sole owner and stand behind the counter. They can always make a deal with me. If someone is 10 rubles short, I will say, ‘Well, it’s your lucky day, today you got a discount.’ I can treat people like that. And people can even bargain with me… And she comes in with her children, so how can I not give her what she needs?
“On the 15th she gets her children’s allowance, but didn’t bring any money. Now she won’t walk by the store. I have an IOU from her, but what good is that? I of course am not going to take a woman with multiple kids to court.
“Or here’s Vitya, who came in on March 8. ‘Galina Semyonovna,’ he says, ‘I need some flowers for my wife!’ He borrowed 200 rubles to get some tulips, but has yet to pay up.
“Here’s Valka, also a debtor. Drinks. Lives with her husband, who doesn’t do a damned thing. She plants potatoes, grows vegetables. But he just follows her around. And she, even if she drinks, manages everything.
“Kristina and Vanya drink, but they also work. They took a bottle of cheap wine and some food on credit. But they disappeared last fall and won’t pay up.
“It’s really upsetting when workers like that start drinking. There’s an old woman here who has been selling cheap bootleg vodka since the 1990s. Old guys start showing up at her door in the morning. Everyone knows what she does, even the local cop! But no one inspects her, nothing is done. What has to happen to stop her from selling? An atomic bomb?”
If you scan the debt register and listen to Galina, you get the impression she possesses evidence of people’s fates. I randomly select a few persons from her notebook and visit them in their homes, in order to learn what is hidden behind the numbers in the register.
Lida and her husband and four children live in a comfortable rented apartment. She has three daughters, Alexandra (14), Agata (4), Adelina (10 months), and a son who is 12.
“I cope,” Lida replies when I ask how she gets by. “I live off of child support, and the day care is paid for by the regional fund to support mothers. When my father receives his pension, he stops by with presents and Pampers… Somehow or other we avoid starvation. The hospital gives us formula, social services provides kasha. And we can get groceries on credit at the store.
At 56, Lida’s husband is twenty years older than she is. He doesn’t have a real job and just chops down trees, but recently a tree felled him.
“A log fell from a trestle and broke his leg in two places, his arm in two places, and four ribs. He’s laid up at home now, and the children and I take care of him. But as soon as he is better, I will chase him off to work, because we can’t live off the cows alone.
“It’s tough keeping the kids in clothes, and September 1 [the start of the school year] also costs quite a bit. Last year, it cost about 50,000 to send two to school and one to kindergarten. We borrowed some from here, some from there… I didn’t want to embarrass the kids, for them to have everything they need. You’ve gotta buy skis, boots… It’s hard.”
OVERHEARD IN THE STORE “Recently there was an incident. A guy comes into the store: ‘Vera has died!’ he says. And there were people here that know Vera. One calls her friend. And that one starts crying: ‘How can it be, Verochka!’ And within a few hours, half the village had learned of Vera’s death. “Then, in the evening, we are standing around in the store, chatting. We look out the window and Vera walks by, apparently alive! Everyone was floored.”
There is work in the village, but mainly for men. For women, as Lida puts it, there’s no place to go. On the weekends she picks up some extra money working as a milkmaid at a farm, leaving Adelina in the care of the older children.
“I get up at 3:30 and run off to work. I return home at one in the afternoon. We have 200 cows to milk. I’ve been milking since I was seven. Mama worked as a milkmaid, and when we were children we would go to the farm with her; that’s where we learned to work and fend for ourselves. After I finished school, I started working in the fields: hauling feed grain and potatoes. I’m not afraid of work, there’s just none to be found. In the summer, we gather berries and mushrooms. Last year, when I was pregnant, I went with my husband to the spawning. Hauled fish out of the drink.”
Lida appears to be cheerful and unbroken, but when I ask her if there is anything she would have done differently in her life, had it been possible, she suddenly begins to cry.
“I would love to return to my youth, to live a bit for myself. I rushed into marriage at 19, without dating around. And then the years just rushed by… We met on the lakeshore. Back then, I was beautiful. My husband did everything he could to make sure no one else looked my way. He was a warrior. First he beat up on any suitors, then he started in on me. Beat me badly. Somehow, I couldn’t take it, so I drove him off. My daughter cried, saying, ‘We can’t make it without papa.’ He returned. Then one night he went out drinking with friends, and I went to the bar with a cousin. I returned home after an hour, and he knocked me down and pounced on me… Knocked out my teeth, split my lip, cracked my head open. I was unconscious when the ambulance took me away, and when I came to, I decided that would never happen again. I filed for divorce and had him put on probation. Now the local patrolman comes by every month, to document that everything is okay, that he hasn’t touched me. But we can’t live separately; the children and I would not make it alone.”
Lida is attractive, in good shape, and young. She gets unnerved if someone pays her a compliment. And she doesn’t believe she has any other options in life.
“There are no men here, no one to even look at. And ever since he knocked out my teeth, I’ve gone toothless. I need to get some put in, but that takes money, plus three days lodging in Petrozavodsk. I don’t know how to save up that much. Probably once the kids grow up, I can get it done then. I’m used to not having men pay attention to me anymore. Taking care of our home takes all my attention now.”
Lida invites me to visit the farm. She says she wants to introduce me to her favorite cow, Delyanka. “I love cows,” she says. “I just adore them. When I get to work, I call out, ‘Delya, your mama is here!’ and she immediately starts to moo! She is so brown, so beautiful. She is my dearest.”
I don’t get a chance to meet Delya, as when I call the next day Lida does not pick up the phone.
Kristina and Ivan live on the outskirts of Vedlozero. They are the “hard workers” that Suvorova spoke of.
Their house is a mess. Kristina, embarrassed, says they had a party the night before.
“Do we drink? Yes we drink,” Ivan says. “But we also work.”
They have lived in Vedlozero for four years, and before that they lived in Pukhta, in Kristina’s home. But it burned down. “Our drunken neighbor burned down our home,” Kristina says. “It was three a.m., in the winter. We threw on what clothes we could and ran out. The only thing we managed to save was the cat.”
Ivan had inherited a house in Vedlozero from his father. It was, he says, “a complete disaster” – no ceiling, no windows. The only furniture remaining was a couch and a table. And now you have to settle down somewhere new, renovate a house, and you have no job, no savings, no friends.
“It was very difficult at first,” Ivan says. “Going around the village, asking everyone for work. You see some guys with saws sitting around: ‘Guys, I’m looking for work!’
‘Yeah, whattya do?’
‘I can saw and chop wood.’
That sort of thing.”
For a while, Ivan worked at the sovkhoz, then, in his words, they “stopped seeing money.” So he thought “to hell with it all” and set out on his own. He and Kristina learned to make a living on anything and everything.
Right now, as far as income, Kristina and Ivan have entered a bit of a dead zone. More specifically, they are digging graves.
“The worst months are usually January, February, and the first half of March,” Ivan says. “Almost no funerals. But this year coronavirus helped out: we were digging graves. We can’t even count how many graves we dug during corona. Recently we dug five at once. At 4,000 per grave, that’s 20,000 in your pocket. It pays well.
“We also help out pensioners: chop and stack wood for one, tear down a hut for another, patch a stove for still another. We earn a bit for everything. We have a 90-year-old babushka living nearby. She calls, saying she needs help, her stove is smoking. I did everything, but didn’t feel right taking her money… It’s fine with the dacha folks, they’ve got money, but she’s only got a pension of 15,000. So I said, ‘Whatever you can afford, babushka, that’s what I’ll take, no hard feelings.’”
“I get used to things,” Kristina says. “Somehow, in three days, I split 12 cords of aspen wood. Chopped of my finger, so they took me to the city, sewed me up, and that’s that… There’s nowhere here for a woman to work. Just cows to milk, but I’m scared of them. We also have two plots, with our own potatoes, beets, carrots. We gather berries in summer, catch fish. Five liters of blueberries gets you 500-700 rubles. Cloudberries can early you almost 3000.”
I ask them why, then, are they in the debtor’s book? Ivan says that there are just times when there is no money at all. They turn to their neighbors, borrow a bit, and then pay them back with labor.
“My uncle sometimes sends me money. Mother works at the cemetery and also can help out. The only ones who always do well are our cats. Those two fools over there (he affectionally trills at them), they are definitely not wasting away.”
Valentina lives next door to the store. She is a bit drunk and not in the mood, but agrees nonetheless to chat. Stumbling over her high threshold, she says that in her youth she looked like [the pop singer] Alla Pugacheva.
“I got married in 1977. We lived in the city, and then my husband hauled me off to this f—ing village,” Valentina says haughtily. “I don’t like it here, why did he drag me here? I grew up in a children’s home. My mama was deaf and dumb, and there were five of us. She was forced to give us up to the home. At some point she went to do laundry and fell into the water. Logs were floating by and she was struck by one of them. And my father, he was murdered by his stepfather. That’s the sort of difficult hand Fate dealt me. The children’s home sent me to Pitkyaranta. I finished school there, and then was sent to Sortavala. There I finished trade school to become a plasterer-painter. Then they sent me to Petrozavodsk. And there I got married.
“Five years ago, my Misha had a heart attack in the night. I woke up in the morning and poured him some coffee. I called out, ‘Palych, come and get your coffee!’ But he doesn’t answer. He is lying silently on the divan, with one leg hanging down on the floor. I go over to him and don’t understand what is going on, afraid to touch him. His sister comes over and I say, ‘Misha is not getting up, I’m afraid to get near him.’ And she says, ‘It’s because he’s dead!’ And they call the police and the ambulance. I didn’t want to touch him, so that they would know it wasn’t me who killed him.”
To this day, Valentina lives alone. Sometimes her unemployed girlfriend comes over and they eat and drink together. But she has no interest in men, saying she likes being alone.
“Many of them come to me and say, ‘Babulya, let’s live together!’ Thanks but no thanks, men screwed me up good! I’ve got a cat to lay beside me, and a dog, and that’s plenty. I called him [the dog] Boss, so that everyone would be afraid of him.”
Valentina sips a bit of cheap wine directly from the bottle, covers her face with her hands and howls. Then she says, “I had a daughter, may she rest in peace. She got married, had a son. And left for Lakhdenpokha. Then some guys came around and hung her from a tree. Since my daughter’s death, I began drinking horribly.”
Valentina gets wound up when I ask her about her debt to the store.
“My roof is leaking. This house is 100 years old. It costs so much! I had to buy roofing material and wood. And I still have to eat. The wood cost 8000! But I will pay it back. I always pay it back.”
One evening in the store Galina Suvorova says, “That list you examined – current debts – they are the more recent ones. I also have a notebook… It contains 300,000 in debts. I closed it three years ago and wrote them off. I don’t chase them anymore. I can no longer say, when a person comes in, ‘Would you like to pay down some debt?’ For my own good, I decided that we all will pay off our debts some day.”
There are many names in the shabby, thick grey notebook. Including those of some who have died.
“This fellow, he owes 37,100 rubles. Worked as a watchman, harvesting lumber. They didn’t pay his salary on time. He ran up his debts on booze and groceries. When his pay came in, he would pay down his debt. Then one time he came in, went on a binge, started drinking, and drank himself to death. The debt is still there.
OVERHEARD IN THE STORE “It’s a two-kilometer uphill walk to get to the bus stop. There is no light there, the road is not plowed. I once got out of the marshrutka [taxi bus] carrying a cake. I see a grey wolf looking at me, it’s tail drooping. I say, ‘Don’t you eat me, take my cake instead.’ And I walk slowly, shaking in my boots. And he walks along with me. He accompanied me to the crossroads, then turned and left. It turns out he often accompanies people. He’s friendly.”
“Here’s Klavka, she owes six thousand. She’s not a drunk, she simple didn’t want to pay up.
“Raya. Took some groceries. The last time she left here, that was it. Larisa has owed me since 2016.
“Here’s a welder in the sovkhoz. He’s from Savinov [the neighboring village]. Came in, took some groceries, paid up his debt. The next time he took some and just up and left for good.
“Here’s Vitya, he would come for groceries and pay up gradually from his pension. Then his house burned down. That’s it. When a person had been paying then suddenly stops, it’s pretty likely that something bad happened.
“This woman always paid her debts. Then hooked up with some young fellow. Stopped going to work and was fired from the sovkhoz. I said, ‘Svetka, when are you going to pay off your debt?’
“‘From now on, Galya. I’ll go to work and pay it off!’
“Got herself a job in the local village council, fell off the wagon, and was fired. Then she got herself back together again. I even offered her a job. But she couldn’t believe that anyone would hire her. Worked for two weeks in the store, then calls and says, ‘I’m not coming in, my blood pressure is up.’ Blood pressure once, twice. Everything is clear.”
Despite the fact that Galina often has to deal with deceit, she continues to extend loans to the locals. She feels she has no choice. And it makes her very happy when things end well.
“This fellow came here from Ukraine to work. Drank really heavily. Then he got married, and they both drank. They had a child, which seemed to bring them to their senses. He decided to get Russian citizenship. And that required that he have at least 27,000 rubles in his bank account. So he came to me and asked for a loan. I gave it. He did everything as promised: took the money and returned it. Then I loaned him more money for his studies. He also repaid that immediately after he earned it. And he works to this day, and all is well.”
The activist Nadezhda Zaitseva (the woman who planted a pine tree opposite the store) stopped in with some news: in the evening there will be a “dance” get-together at the House of Culture.
“Aerobics, finally!” Suvorova says, clearly happy. “Lena will lead it,” she explains. “She’s the one we put forward; the local administration didn’t want to hire her.”
“I am going to dance,” Zaitseva exclaims. “I really need to get out and about. What is it they say? ‘Sit around too long you turn into a couch potato?’”
Zaitseva is an honored member of the as yet unnamed activist cell. Her focus is ecology. Not far from the administration building there are some bags affixed to the façade of a boarded up building. And hanging above them are placards with handwritten inscriptions: “Plastic,” “Glass,” “Metal.” Alongside that are two trash containers, a broom and a shovel. This is all her doing.
Around here, they say Zaitseva is a saint. She goes about the village picking up trash. And they also say she and her sister are a bit “bonkers.”
“They cleaned up the memorial site on the rise in front of Karelian House,” Suvorova says. “And people started calling them crazy and wondering ‘Don’t they have anything better to do?’”
Zaitseva isn’t really concerned about such talk.
At 63, Nadezhda lives in a former outpatient clinic. She and her husband were lucky enough to purchase the huge, high-ceilinged building. “We split it with our son,” she says. “I stayed in the ‘pharmacy,’ and the other half of the home went to the children.
“I would like our village to set an example,” she says. “I often speak with children, explaining that this is our homeland, that we need to protect it, not litter. I work on contract as a janitor in the agricultural administration building. At one point the administration asked me to clean up trash in the village. And so I, after the snow melted, walked around with a bag, cleaning it up. I and a friend who helped me took the money we earned to buy presents for our pensioners. We have lots of lonely elderly folks here, and I go around to visit them and help them. There is a babushka here whose son disappeared without a trace. I sometimes just sit and talk with her, so that she won’t be alone.
“Somehow an eco-taxi came to visit as part of the Karelia Without Trash Project. Previously, I took some sacks to the administration building and attached them to the side of an abandoned building. And I wrote what should be placed where. To this day, people are using the bags for their trash. And when the sacks get full, I take them to the public dump. Then the taxi comes around and I turn in the recyclables. Gradually I am teaching our neighbors what it means to separate your trash, and why it is important. In the winter, I clear a path to the sacks, so you just have to come, for Christ’s sake, and put your stuff in there! At the Karelian Language House we now have boxes for separated recycling.
“This is not a burden to me, I like it. I need to constantly be doing something, whether in the community, or helping someone, or sewing. If I haven’t gotten anything done, then the day was wasted.”
For now, Nadezhda is no longer getting paid to collect trash, yet she still can’t walk past a piece of trash – a piece of paper or a bottle, say. Dogs will dig up trash, or the wind will stir it up, and she is there to sweep it up.
“I went to Finland and saw how beautiful and clean it is there, and I really want us to have that here too. But you have to start with yourself, and so I have. I planted pine trees along the lake… But first I planted them in my yard. And then, when my husband died, people said that pine trees in the yard are a bad omen, they remove men from their home. So I dug them up and planted them along the lake. And now I walk over and enjoy them.”
Zaitseva also speaks about the public council. “The village should be supervised, it should be a suitable place to live, be beautiful. In order that everything be nice, you have to work with people. You have to ask, gather, talk, and explain. As soon as we create our organization, we will do all of this.”
Nadezhda’s family has never been on Suvorova’s list of debtors. She has never taken anything on credit because, she says, she lives by the proverb, “Stretch your legs only as far as you have blanket to cover them."
“I know what my monthly limit is, and I don’t go beyond it. I got my pension and I immediately deliberated: where should it go? So much for food, for electricity so much, here, there. And if I want something but it is beyond my budget, I simply don’t buy it. Therefore I always have money.”
In the evening, there are spontaneous gatherings of activist Vedlozero women at Khali Gali. They say there is nowhere else to get together.
Natalya Polevaya arrives, a pensioner and mother of five. Her husband was a fireman and died in the line of duty. Then her son died tragically. But Polevaya did not throw up her hands, and now does much to improve life in the village. Marina Rybnikova, with whom we visited the sewage plant, shows up. After her there is the director of the school, Yekaterina Yevseyeva.
The conversation is barely underway when it is interrupted by a drunken man, yelling something in the store.
“Vanya, go home,” Rybnikova says sternly, “before all these women get upset at you!”
Vanya continues being rowdy, but Suvorova quickly leads him outside.
The activists discuss the House of Culture building, which no longer exists in the village. It was taken down for its lumber in the 1990s, and its activities were moved to a former kindergarten building, built in 1948. Construction of a new building has been at the promise stage for years now.
“How many years have we had a House of Culture without a movie hall or place for concerts?” Suvorova asks. “It has no stage. The village women have no place to wear their nice dresses and shoes!”
The women feel that, just like with the House of Culture, everything is collapsing.
“The village is like a swamp,” Rybnikova sighs. “It is sucking us down. But we don’t want to live in a swamp! We want a full, bustling life.”
As I was working on this story, the Vedlozero activists officially created their group and came up with a name: CCCP (USSR), which stands [in Russian] for “Save our Village With Our Own Hands.” The chairperson of the group is Natalya Antonova, who works at the Karelian Language House. The secretary is school director Yekaterina Yevseyeva.
The group has already had a few meetings in the Karelian Language House; the most recent one drew 22 people. Along with residents, meetings have been attended by the head of the village and several Duma deputies. In the future there will be subbotniks (volunteer work days), an installation of benches, a flashmob “On the Heap” featuring war era songs, a serious discussion with the owners of adjoining land about the accumulation of trash, a battle against pollution in the lake, and plenty more. The “USSR” is looking like an unstoppable force.
“We came together,” says Galina Suvovora, “because it is easy to snap a single twig, but you cannot break a broom.”
In the past month, none of Suvorova’s debtors has paid up.
Протягивай ноги по длине одеяла.
“Почти нет халтуры.” The word халтура generally refers to off-the-books or shoddy work. But locally the term is used for mooching off other family’s funeral banquets.
The Russian phrase is actually to “scream like a beluga whale.”
A dude, guy.
A state-owned farm.
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