In 2018, there were about 10 million more women than men in Russia. The numbers are even more astounding when you look at the group of people ages 65 and older — there are almost two times as many women as men. Men are dying younger from alcohol-related diseases, insufficient health care, or hard and risky work, while their widows are getting older alone, becoming an archetypical Russian grandmother — babushka.
My story is not unique. I’ve never seen my grandfather, but my grandmother was always near to me, at least near for Siberia; I was able to reach her village in four hours by bus.
Maria Antonovna Olkhovskaya turned 90 in August. She has three daughters, six grandchildren and 11 great-grandchildren. Her life was extraordinary but her circumstances were not unique.
She was born in a small hamlet in the Siberian taiga. Being a war child, she suffered through hunger and hard manual labor. She went to four years of school and when she was young, she worked in a sawmill and in a stokehold; she took care of everything at home. She kept 10 domestic animals at the same time as a huge vegetable garden.
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I started to photograph my grandmother four years ago, when I realized that I wanted to keep a visual memory of her and the beautiful world she had created around herself. At that time, I couldn’t imagine that this story would have a twist so late in her life.
In the winter of 2017, my grandmother got very sick for what seemed like possibly the last time. In the spring, she gradually got better. But for our family, it was clear that she couldn’t live so far from the city anymore and take care of the house, where there isn’t even running water or a proper heating system. In the autumn, as a widow of a World War veteran, she received money from the Russian government to buy an apartment for herself. In December, she moved to a city for the first time in her life. Her new one-room flat, which she jokingly calls “a castle,” is located in Tomsk, a city with roughly half a million inhabitants. Here, she has had new experiences from something as simple as a bath to as flustering as a visit to a shopping mall, with the overall blessing of being able to see her family more than ever.
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