Meeting Ana Petrovna and Others

We met Ana Petrovna, an elderly woman in a padded jacket and shawl, on a roadside verge with her goat. She was pleased to pass the time telling her story to the visitors to her village, one hundred miles to the west of Moscow city. Ana Petrovna has been retired from her job as a farm worker for many years and has lived alone since the death of her second husband. She receives a pension of 900 roubles a month (about £20 sterling at 2003 exchange rates) of which just under half goes on paying for utilities and other services. Were it not for the vegetable patch (ogorod) next to her house and her goat Masha, who supplies her with milk, soured cream, and cheese, it would be difficult for Ana Petrovna to live on this income. Her allotment is small—four ‘one-hundredths’ or sotki (where one sotka is 100 sq. m). It is given over mainly to potatoes, but there are also several rows of cucumbers, tomatoes, onions, and cabbages, two apple trees, raspberry canes, and redcurrant and blackcurrant bushes. On her 400 sq. m Ana Petrovna can produce enough food for the year. In early autumn much of her effort goes into salting and preserving the output of her plot to get her through the winter months, which she adds to the mushrooms and berries, gathered in the forests around her village, that she dried and bottled earlier in the summer. Ana Petrovna rarely eats meat; when she was younger she used to keep a cow and a calf for slaughtering each year, but this is beyond her now. She buys staples that she cannot produce herself in the small village shop: groats, bread, sugar, vegetable oil, and chocolate for an occasional treat. Ana Petrovna has a daughter living in Moscow who comes to the village during the potato-picking season to help with the harvest. She returns to Moscow laden with potatoes and vegetables even though, as she tells her mother, they are not expensive to buy in the city, even for a teacher on a low salary.