In Russia, ‘children of the war’ are left to survive on $6 a day
Pensions lag as ruble’s value plummets
• For Russia’s eldest generation, the “children of the war” as they are called, poverty is a matter of perspective.
When Galina Chuchukova, 81, was 10 years old, in 1944, she crawled onto a minefield searching for berries, only to be called back by an imagined voice whispering her name. “My guardian angel,” she thought then. Seven of her relatives starved to death in the siege of Leningrad, now St. Petersburg, and the rest were scattered across Siberia in the mass evacuation.
With all that behind her, she said, she can handle today’s financial hardships.
“I lived through the war, the evacuation, the hunger of 1946,” her friend, Lyubov Fabrichnaya, 84, said over a cup of tea. “So I look around myself and think, everything is normal. My pension is enough.”
These are, nevertheless, stark times for pensioners in Oryol, a town of 300,000 about 370 kilometres south of Moscow, and for the more than 40 million others across Russia.
The ruble has fallen to less than half its value of just three years ago, driving prices up while state pension payments have lagged. The average pension is about $270 a month. Take off 4,000 rubles, or $85, for utilities. Divided by 30, the remainder is about $6 a day, enough for food and not much else.
Chuchukova likes to keep active, taking work to get out of the house. On a recent Thursday morning, she and 17 other women in their 60s, 70s, and 80s filed into a fourth-floor schoolroom for a morning gymnastics routine: salsa, box steps and breathing exercises. It’s part of a routine that’s kept her going through decades of tumult.
Even the younger pensioners — women can retire at age 55 — have lived through tremendous upheavals: perestroika, the fall of the Soviet Union and the 1998 devaluation of the ruble, which wiped out savings accounts. Russians are no strangers to setbacks.
Now they are struggling through a 23-month crisis. Inflation has hit 15 per cent. Pensions were paid late in several regions this winter. The Russian government is offering pensioners a one-time payment of 5,000 rubles ($102), rather than indexing pensions a second time this year. In a tremendous moment of bad judgment, Russian Prime Minister Dmitri Medvedev told an elderly woman in recently annexed Crimea this spring there was no money to raise pensions, but to “hang in there” and “have a nice day.”
President Vladimir Putin, who owes his popularity more than anything else to prosperity in his 16 years as Russia’s leading politician, has pledged to raise pensions by the inflation rate in February.
Cutting benefits could hurt him before the 2018 presidential elections.
Under duress, Russia’s pensioners have further tightened their belts. Everyone makes sacrifices.
“Maybe I can allow myself chicken, but definitely not beef,” said Tamara Kozyreva, who at 62 hardly looks like a retiree. A native of Magadan in Russia’s Far East, she blames the bitter climate and recent bouts with depression for her poor health, and now “the diseases are piling up.”
She has turned to homoeopathy, because a visit to the doctor can cost $100, and it’s better than antibiotics. She borrowed money from a brother for surgery.
“Don’t get sick,” she said. “If your treatment includes drugs, no pension is going to cover that.”
After a decade of rising living standards, Russians, including pensioners, have faced two years of backsliding, said Marina Krasilnikova, head researcher for incomes and consumption at the Moscow-based pollster Levada Center.
Pensions are enough “not to starve,” Krasilnikova said. “As long as you just spend money on utilities and food, and forget about participating in public life or going to cafés.”
That wasn’t enough for Lyudmilla Zadernyuk, 61, dressed in a zebra-stripe sweater and bright-green scarf, her hair dyed a jaunty red.
“Sure, by comparison to the war, today is heaven, but we see how pensioners are living in other countries,” said Zadernyuk, with a hint of exasperation. “Pensioners in other countries go to restaurants! I can only dream of that.”
Seeking human contact, they came here, a DIY school for the elderly, where students attend classes in gardening, computer literacy, chess and aerobics, just to name a few. Zadernyuk teaches dance.
It is the brainchild of Tatyana Kononygina, 53, who in the early 1990s teamed up with a German non-governmental organization to create a school for the elderly, the “University of the Golden Age.”
“It’s not right, to my mind, when our government creates a national youth policy and no national elderly policy,” she said.
Most of her several hundred students have average or below-average pensions.
“Pretty much everyone in the summer is at the dacha planting,” she said. “We’ve also trained some younger pensioners on computers, it helps them find work to supplement their income.”
“But most of all, the people coming here are seeking companionship,” she added. “Old age has a woman’s face. No country has the same ratio of women to men in old age, and when the kids have moved away and their husband has passed on, they come here.”
Fabrichnaya, a former Communist Party functionary, recently channelled her energy into pestering political parties and Gazprom, the Russian energy giant, for funds.
“No one gave anything,” she fumed, especially at the Communists. “I believed in this party. I believed I was building something in the future.”
“Putin says everything is good, and OK, I really respect our president,” she said. “But why is he the only one? Where are the people around him who should be supporting him like they should? That’s what concerns me!”