"We'd Be Nothing Without You"

by Kseniya Shorokhova
photos by Alina Skitovich

The school in the Siberian village of Ponomaryovka has just one student: Sabina. But, thanks to her, seven locals have jobs – something especially valuable in this village of 90 residents. Thanks to Sabina, Ponomaryovka has a chance at survival.

In Ponomaryovka, a tiny village in Kolyvan District, a couple of hours north of Novosibirsk, 10-year-old Sabina is the only child hurrying to get ready for school. It’s not far away: walk out the gate, pass the house next door, cross a bit of vacant land, and then turn to the left, to a two-story brick building. The village council occupies one half of the building, the school the other.

The school’s principal is 54-year-old Yevgenia Anatolyevna Ulanova. She lives in Khokhlovka, a village of 10 residents eight kilometers away. Her trip is longer than Sabina’s – she has to get to Ponomaryovka first. She takes the public bus, which her husband drives. Sometimes, when the weather is dry, she navigates the bumpy road herself in a Jeep-like UAZ.

Sabina and Yevgenia Anatolyevna start their school day at eight a.m. in a tiny blue office with two desks. Sabina normally has four or five classes a day, and Yevgenia Anatolyevna teaches almost all of them – she’s the principal and teacher rolled into one.

She sometimes walks Sabina home after school. Then she returns and does paperwork until the evening, when the bus passes through Ponomaryovka once more.

“Sabinochka is a good girl, smart, figures things out quickly. We appreciate her very much,” Yevgenia Anatolyevna says fondly.

Sabina is in third grade. This is the first school year she’s spent alone – there are no other students left in the village. But Yevgenia Anatolyevna believes that the school hallways will once again – and soon – be filled with students. All they need is time, she thinks. And there is hope: there are younger children in Sabina’s family and in the family of one other teacher, who’s currently on maternity leave.

“We’ll keep fighting”

Ponomaryovka is one of about 45 villages in Kolyvan District. The majority are small, some with just a few residents – or even only one. The district has 14 functioning schools offering general education, three of which are located in the district center of Kolyvan, which has a population of 12,500. Yelena Guseva, head of the Ponomaryovka village council, says that small village schools are being shut down, with children from those villages sent on public buses to schools in larger towns nearby. The Ponomaryovka school will likely be closed in the near future as well, but bureaucrats aren’t currently able to do so, due to the current student’s young age. Guseva believes that the question of closing Ponomaryovka’s school will be raised once Sabina completes primary school. This will happen in two years’ time. The only thing that could rescue the school, Guseva adds, would be new families with children moving to Ponomaryovka.

The cold November sun floods the hallways of Ponomaryovka’s school. To make things more comfortable for Sabina, the curtains in the classroom where her math class is currently being taught have been closed and fastened with a pin.

“Everything here is homey,” Yevgenia Anatolyevna explains. “But we never forget that we’re a government institution. Here, we’re just like everywhere else. We follow the national curriculum, we have extracurricular activities, clubs, meetings with parents, inspectors even come by...”

Ponomaryovka’s school is not the only one in the area suffering from population decline. Laptevka’s was shut down about a decade ago and Kazanka’s has been closed for about five. The school in Ponomaryovka is hanging on for dear life.

“If they wanted to close us, they’d have prepared the paperwork already. And that’s not something you do in a week, up and close a school,” the principal says. “It takes 10 months to get those documents ready. They even gave us money this summer for some minor renovations, so yes, we’ll live on – and keep fighting.”

Those renovations, by the way, were allocated R10,000 (about $100). It was enough to do some cosmetic upgrades: a bit of repainting and whitewashing here and there. All DIY.

The school building is 50 years old. It was previously home to a boarding school. Children from the neighboring villages of Vdovino, Zhirnovka and Khokhlovka lived in its small rooms six days a week and went home on the weekends. But the villages began rapidly emptying out 20 or 30 years ago as employment opportunities dried up. People quickly left for cities and bigger towns. Students from the local school were transferred to the former boarding school from a big wooden building not far away that now stands on overgrown land and has gaping dark cavities instead of windows. Children used to run into this gloomy building in search of adventure – back when the village had children.

In the current school building, there are small classrooms on the second floor (“They’re all we need,” Yevgenia Anatolyevna says) and some all-purpose rooms where the boarding-school students used to live. The space once used by the boarding school was enough to set up a teachers’ room, a library, a conservatory with portraits of top students (“Ours all became pilots for some reason”), a small gym with one exercise machine, and several multipurpose rooms. The largest was designated the cafeteria. The students – that is, Sabina – have their meals in a cafeteria where one wall is decorated with a poster reading “Devoted to the Great Victory...” (a rarity these days) and portraits of young 1940s resistance fighters.

Yevgenia Anatolyevna says “the children” out of habit, even though the school has only one student. “Last year we had ninth-graders graduating. They went to community colleges and are doing well, and also practicing boxing. And Tyoma, who was in second grade, his mother took him to the city. If you only knew what it was like here between classes. There were only four students, but they sounded like 20 – the school shook from the noise. They would run, and jump – the school was alive. And children should be running on their breaks, not sitting around, don’t you think?”

The Ponomaryovka school started losing students 10 years ago, when the village’s only (and privately-owned) farming business closed. Several teachers left as well. Ponomaryovka is now a community of senior citizens – a phenomenon that is playing out throughout Russia’s rural regions.

There is hope that, at the very least, Sabina’s younger sister will start attending the school three years from now. She is eagerly anticipated.

“That’s if no one else moves here,” Yevgenia Anatolyevna clarifies, “but we really hope we’ll have new people in the village too. We have a strong feeling that motivates us: the thought, ‘But what if children show up?’ It’s easy to close a school – it’s much harder to get it going again.”

New residents do come to Ponomaryovka now and then. Two male retirees have moved here in the past year, but unfortunately, they have no school-aged children.

Seven people

The bell rings. It sounds especially loud in the school’s narrow and empty hallways. The bell isn’t automatic: it has to be activated by hand, the old-fashioned way. Sabina goes to the cafeteria where the cook, Yelena Mikhailovna, has prepared chicken with potatoes and sliced tomatoes – red, juicy, from a home garden – just for her.

Her next class is science, which is taught by Yelena Sergeyevna, Yevgenia Anatolyevna’s right-hand woman and adviser, as well as the teacher in charge of extracurricular activities.

Yelena Sergeyevna is 34 and has been working in the school for four years. She juggles teaching with her primary job as a librarian. Her quarter-time position pays about R8,000 (about $80) per month, including the “rural coefficient” (a salary supplement for jobs in remote or climactically challenging parts of Russia). She teaches logic and algorithmics (a version of computer science for younger children) and physical education, as well as running the clubs: chess and puppet theater. Her education is in chemistry and biology; last year she taught ninth-grade biology, and now she teaches science to Sabina. Yelena Sergeyevna’s teaching duties cover just four hours a week, but even that is a big help to Yevgenia Anatolyevna, what with her 19-hour teaching load.

It’s hard to believe, but thanks to Sabina, its one and only student, the school employs seven people: besides Yevgenia Anatolyevna and Yelena Sergeyevna, there’s also a cook, a janitor and three watchmen. (All the staff live in Ponomaryovka or Khokhlovka.) You would think they could do without a cook, but the school is legally required to offer students meals. There are freelance staff, too: a guidance counselor and an electrician (they come from Novosibirsk a few times a month), as well as one more teacher, who is currently on maternity leave.

“Do you know how hard it was to find staff?” the principal asks. “It’s important to me that people be reliable. So I can sleep at night, as they say. I know the watchmen aren’t going to wander off, start drinking or get into trouble. So yes, I picked all my staff – they’re all excellent and I trust them.”

Everything has long been operating like clockwork at the Ponomaryovka school: if Yelena Sergeyevna, the teacher, goes on vacation or takes sick days, Yevgenia Anatolyevna substitutes for her. And when she herself takes time off in the summer, her right-hand woman takes on her workload.

“You think we’ve got nothing to do in the summer? Hardly! The cook, our janitor – we all work in the summer. There’s always something somewhere to clean, fix or sort out. You see what our school is like? It’s a lot to take care of.”

When they run out of children

Sabina’s last class for today is coming to an end. While she does her lesson, Yevgenia Anatolyevna takes us to her office and spreads an impressive stack of professional development certificates and diplomas across her desk. Yevgenia Anatolyevna trained as a math teacher but needed to upgrade her education in order to teach additional subjects. She even learned English and now teaches it to Sabina – there would be no other way to find an English teacher in this tiny village.

“We didn’t have foreign languages in the school at all, so I went for additional training. And then some of the teachers – when we still had other teachers – went away to take courses or fell ill, so I taught physics. Then I had to study to teach Russian language and culture, literature, and health and wellness. Well, what choice did I have? I had to get extra training, so I did.” She shrugs her shoulders.

Yevgenia Anatolyevna was born in Ponomaryovka, then, when she got married, she moved to be with her husband in neighboring Khokhlovka. There were still children in Khokhlovka then, so she got a teaching position there at a primary school. She served out 10 years. But in the early 2000s, Khokhlovka started “running out” of children, as she puts it. Yevgenia Anatolyevna’s class completed third grade and went to Ponomaryovka to continue their studies, and their former teacher soon followed them. She started in the Ponomaryovka school with English, then took on math, followed by other subjects, when some teachers moved away and others retired.

“No, of course I don’t want to leave, not under any circumstances!” She waves off the question. “The school is my second home. Everything here goes smoothly, everything works. Maybe it’s because I’m a mathematician myself and I have that kind of mindset. I mean, I even keep a spare set of clothing here: a coat, boots...”

But Yevgenia Anatolyevna also can’t deny the fact that, sooner or later, they’ll “run out of children” and the Ponomaryovka school will close its doors. She has come up with a plan for herself if that happens: she, along with her husband and son (a watchman at the school), will move to Kolyvan, the district center. The family definitely doesn’t want to move to Novosibirsk, though – they don’t like the noise and bustle of the city.

“They probably need teachers in Kolyvan, too. I have 35 years of teaching experience and I’ve still got energy. So I can still teach children. That’s what’s most important for me. Especially when they finish their studies with us and enter college, pass all their exams. Let me tell you, there’s nothing better in the world!” Yevgenia Anatolyevna smiles.

At one p.m., Sabina finishes her school day. She takes her time putting on her puffer jacket and changing her shoes then goes outside. She squints into the frosty sunlight and jumps along the frozen puddles. She says in a quiet voice that going to school by herself is “a little boring.” When Tyoma, whose mother took him to Novosibirsk, was around, it was a lot more fun.

Sabina attended first grade in Azerbaijan, so instruction was in Azerbaijani. Then her family moved to Ponomaryovka. She had to repeat first grade in Siberia, since she wasn’t yet fluent in Russian. To this day, she admits, she sometimes confuses words, but she does well in school, earning A’s and B’s. When she grows up, she wants to be a doctor or a teacher, like Yevgenia Anatolyevna – she hasn’t decided yet.

“Sabinochka, where are you?” Yevgenia Anatolyevna walks out onto the school’s stairs. “I lost you for a second, thought you’d run off already. I was worried – where would we be without our student? We’d be nothing without you, Sabinochka.”

This article was originally published in Russian in Takie Dela.

To read more about Ponomaryovka’s history as a place of forced resettlement, see “The Road to Nowhere,” Russian Life, Fall 2024.