Dissipated like home: a 93-year-old woman left to live in abandoned village
Nearly 20 years she spent without electricity and roads after local authorities decided that it is easier to leave the village to die.
Upstairs
Nina, which is the 94th year, immediately agrees to be photographed. Say, “what is a grandmother to watch.” But before the arrival of the guests still preening: even as we approached the house, we have time to notice that she’s sitting by the window, combing her hair comb. Meets the old woman, we have carefully tied the handkerchief. So we meet the last resident of the village Monchalovo, standing beneath the line. The village was slowly dying for the last 20 years, since the thieves cut reaching to her wire. First of here people are gone, then disappeared and the road, but she said she didn’t want to leave. To stay with her dare daughter of the old woman, Valentina. Now their house is the only dwelling for several miles of forest and fields.
Now these areas appear mainly only hunters: the wheels are passable cars finish the remnants of the road. In the village they won’t stop — passing on, in the field, which are woven from the branches of the tower.
The house of Nina Ivanovna not to find any pictures of the hostess or her daughter, posted for everyone to see. The narcissism here is not inclined too much attention to attract do not want. The only busy wall dedicated to the memory of the departed. In the picture with a black tape — the eldest son of Nina Ivanovna that he recently died from cancer, and prior to that lived for many years in Bologoe. Next — portrait of the young son who died (presumably from leukemia) back in the 1970s, during the military service, which was held in Novokuznetsk. He was 19 years old. According to Valentina, that a young man was seriously ill, they said on the phone the woman who lay with him in office. Another child died in infancy, soon after the war — no one, but Nina Ivanovna, it has no memory. Bottom — spouse Nina Ivanovna, he was born in Monclova and have lived here my entire life, and died in the early 2000s.
Despite his age, the old lady is still quite a lot of walking — on the house move without outside help, and in the summer on the street to Valentina helps with the housework
Almost all of her life she worked at a local farm to do General work. Says, first tried to go by the calf on a cattle farm, but somehow did not work out, and beyond was where we needed help, then cattle, then, for example, in the Hayfield.
Of all the animals in women now there are only domestic cat Musya Yes, these chickens. Their rest is guarded by a fat cock, who was the first Regal came out to meet strangers. Other guards here, though the house, located almost in the woods, and sometimes go out wild animals. A few years ago, for example, Valentina broken the garden into the habit of going family of wild boars.
Most of the yards (there were more than 30) have not gone. It is only the house in which her husband was born Nina Ivanovna; the blackened ruins of the hut with the collapsed roof, it was once bought by summer residents from Moscow, the Moscow Professor’s family, who because of illness was contraindicated vacation in warm countries, and the house emptied only recently. Here every summer came the family living in Rzhev. Perhaps someday the owners will back Windows are carefully sealed, and the porch still have to hang someone had left a jacket.
The only may that connects the village with the outside world, are located far beyond its outskirts, in the fields, a mass grave. It remains 1.6 thousand soldiers, some of them are still in 1942-1943 buried herself Nina. Those who froze in the woods then Rzhevsky, she, a prisoner of the German camps who survived the famine and death of loved ones, regrets still.
At the mass grave is the civil cemetery where the villagers decades buried their loved ones. Here, in this cemetery are the parents of Nina Ivanovna, her husband and sons. Now many of the graves are overgrown with weeds, surrounded the churchyard on all sides, but some are quite modern tombstones — sometimes people manage to bring here the bodies of the dead to bury their close relatives. Say, before I disbanded were located nearby, military sometimes gave their “Ural”.
All its neighbors Nina still remembers by name and can tell you about each. A few years ago she was given the flat in Rzhev, but to move she refused. The district administration saying that this is happening with almost all the elderly: issued apartments remain empty. Officials attribute this to the fear of change, the old habit of their land.