Granny’s Domain
Grandmothers Are Both the Blessing and the Curse of Russian Families
While Russian grandmothers are renowned for their devotion, self-sacrifice and affection for their grandkids, their love can also be destructive to family life.
The West has no equivalent for the special pride of place that grannies occupy in Russian family life. Grandmas the world over pat and pamper their grandkids and shower them with hugs and kisses, but two traits appear to distinguish the Russian granny from her Western counterpart—her addictive devotion to her grandkids and her acceptance of grandparenthood as an inevitable sacrifice.
Traditionally, every normal Russian home is expected to have the benign influence of grandparents—especially the grandmas, better known as “babushkas.” The fact that Russia is both a European and Asian country only enhances the importance of Russian grandmas, giving them a unique role that combines elements of oriental respect for the elderly with Western allegiance to the nuclear family.
In many respects, the Russian “babushka” is an institution. Her ultimate and unchallengeable authority is firmly rooted in tradition and Russian folklore. There is always something of a mystique of love and reciprocal self-respect around the grandmas. The present-day busy, youth-oriented, consumerist culture, which neglects, disregards and devalues older people in the West, has largely spared the Russian grandmas. Younger generations of Russians, for one, do not treat their grannies as effete—as Westerners sometimes do—and would hardly contemplate keeping their grannies in nursing homes or hospices after retirement.
“Grandmas are associated with Russia as much as bears, vodka and Siberia,” Ekaterina Larina, a columnist, wrote in the Russian Journal. “But unlike some other Russian stereotypes, Russians cherish their ‘babushkas’ as much as foreigners do the idea. The image of a ‘babushka’ is a part of national folklore that exceeds specific realities. A typical ‘babushka’ has endless love for her grandchildren and an insatiable desire to spoil them.”
Grandparents in numbers
With people aging, moving, establishing households, and anticipating retirement, Russia’s demographic landscape is dramatically changing, and with it the role of Russian “babushkas.” In recent years, the total number of Russian pensioners has reached 38 million in a country with a population of 142 million people, according to the Russian Federal Statistics Service. Despite a significantly lower life expectancy in Russia—which currently stands at 60 for males and 72 for females—Russia’s population is aging and experiencing a trend in changing family structure similar to that in the United States and in European countries.
Russia’s demographic statistics are hardly a dream-maker for grandparents who look at life with fairy-tale optimism. The population of Russians 65 and older is now 19 million, 12 million of whom are 70 and older. The birth rate is also trending south, dropping from 15.9 births per 1,000 people in 1980 and 13.4 births per 1,000 people in 1990, to less than ten births per 1,000 in the 1990s and 2000s, and mirrors the demographic trends typical of many European countries.
All this of course means “that with fewer children per family unit, the Russian family composition has changed from a relatively small number of generations with many people in each to a larger number of generations populated by fewer people, resembling a beanpole structure,” Artemi Romanov, an associate professor of Russian at the University of Colorado at Boulder concluded in a recent study.
Adding to the grandmas’ bouquet of misfortune is the overnight arrival of market capitalism in the 1990s. Russian grandparents have generally been reluctant, slow, or unable to adapt to the new lifestyle, with many finding themselves at the bottom of the social ladder as a result of drastic social transformation.
Mutual dependence
But despite such socio-economic difficulties, the role of grandparents in Russia has not diminished. “The flow of care and concern in Russian families is almost always bidirectional, at least over the long-term,” Romanov writes. “Often in Russian multigenerational households, children are brought up by their grandparents and even great-grandparents, especially in single-parent households, and many keep close communicative contacts well into adulthood.”
For many Russian grandmas and grandpas, connecting with their grandchildren is the only way they can cope with the generational challenges facing them. That was at least partly the conclusion of psychologist Lyudmila Presniakova, who, in 2005, conducted a survey on the “Social, material, and emotional climate for the elderly in Russia.” Presniakova’s research shows that, over the years, older Russians face the problem of a dwindling circle of communication. Sixty-one percent of retired Russians indicated that their communication circle had shrunk, while 37 percent of Russians 70 years and older indicated that they experience a lack of communication, whereas only 26 percent of respondents in the age group of 50 to 55 expressed a similar opinion.Presniakova’s research also sheds light on why grandmas, or “babushkas,” have preeminence over their spouses in Russia. The two world wars had a decimating effect on the number of men and Russia’s poor post-Soviet life expectancy records have not helped matters. Among women 70 years of age and older only 17 percent lived with their husbands, whereas more than 50 percent of Russian men 70 years and older lived with their wives. “Elderly women,” Presniakova writes, “complained about the lack of communication more often than men did in part because of the loss of spouses in their age group, hence a strong attraction to their grandkids.”
Natalia Kovaleva, the author of the “The elderly and their social wellbeing,” said that the desire to connect with their grandchildren traditionally occupies the highest place in the Russian grandparents’ system of values. “The Russian elderly valued communication with family members and communication outside the family higher than things such as independence in life, respect from others, an interesting hobby, post-retirement employment, and community service,” writes Kovaleva. “Only health and material well-being have been ranked higher than communication in the lists of values by people 60 years of age and older.”
Aging in Russia always goes hand in hand with some reduction in social activities, such as patronizing theaters and cinemas, hosting guests or traveling. At the same time, it gives older Russians more free time to interact actively with their grandchildren. “Grandparent-grandchild communication is an obvious area that could compensate for the communication deficit experienced by older people, especially if they reside in extended and multigenerational family units,” Romanov says.
According to Presniakova, about 21 percent of Russian grandparents live with their grandchildren under one roof. But the more the number of children in the family, the more likely the grandparents will want to live with their grandchildren, Presniakova said, adding that about 26 percent of Russian families with three or more children reside with at least one grandparent.
Benevolent grandparenthood
Apart from mundane historical necessity that keeps grandmas beside their grandkids, there are other social functions that make the Russian “babushka” indispensable. Family experts have long concluded that some traditional tasks grannies perform—cooking, sewing, and taking grandkids to special events at theaters, museums, zoos and parks—are salubrious to the state of mental health in the family. In Russia, as elsewhere, the presence of grandmas means that parents will no longer have to fret about spending too little time with their children after they are born. Nor do they need to be anxious about finding affordable childcare when the bliss or boredom of maternity leave is over and it is time to return to work. Even in post-Soviet Russia, many families with grandmas living with them never need to put their children into pre-school or kindergarten, as a kindergarten teacher can hardly match the care and attention that “babushka” provides.
While parental love often manifests itself in fits and starts, grandchildren in Russia can count on absolute love and devotion from their grandparents. Russian grandkids often find separation from their granny a very traumatic experience compared to separation from their parents, experts say. While the generation gap is often a problem between children and their parents, there appears to be an unbreakable umbilical cord between grandchildren and grandparents. That is the message of a Russian proverb: your first child is your last doll, and your first grandchild is your first baby.
Though rarely acknowledged, the larger-than-life role played by the grandparents can and does save marriages. According to statistics, one of every four marriages in Russia ends up in a split, and recent research puts some of the blame on the appearance of children in the family. While marriage increases happiness, researchers say, the presence of kids often wipes out the joy and fun of family life.
Drawing on some 20 years of research, American best-selling author and Harvard psychology researcher Daniel Gilbert found that spending time with children makes mothers about as happy as vacuuming. As Jennifer Senior underscored in a recent New York Magazine piece, “children may provide unrivaled moments of joy but they also provide unrivaled moments of frustration, tedium, anxiety, heartbreak.” Even if family responsibilities were shared with a partner, the churn of school and gymnastics and piano and sports and homework would still require an awful lot of administration, Senior writes. In Russia, if push comes to shove in family life, the “babushka” is ready to stake health and wealth to save the situation.
In a world where television sets and computer games are fast replacing story-telling and theater-going, only the “babushkas” can be counted on to give their grandkids strong roots and anchors. Russian grandmas are known for their avid story-telling skills, which have given many a generation value benchmarks and heroes worth emulating. Because of the country’s rich cultural tradition, grandparents are widely perceived here as the source of wisdom and justice, as well as role models for the young.
Beware Babushka!
In many respects, the Russian “babushka” is an institution
But grandmothering in Russia is not all love and no blemish. Russian psychologist and author Alla Spivakovskaya identifies two approaches to grandmothering in Russia: the grandmas who behave as victims and grandmas who unconsciously victimize their adult children. In the first category are grandmas who see grandparenthood as their mission in life and would go to any length to cultivate devotion and obedience of their grandkids. “Having made family and childcare the only justification for their own existence, they sacrifice all the pleasures of personal life and often relive conflicting emotions, including dissatisfaction and disaffection with loved ones, resentment over the lack of gratitude on their part, sadness and anger,” Spivakovskaya said.
While granny-the-victim is bad enough, Spivakovskaya believes, “babushka”—the-competitor can test the limits of tolerance in the family. The beat-them-to-it grandmas always try to excel over their daughters or daughters-in-laws in the art of parenting. They raise the standard of patience and punctiliousness for their own adult children by successfully combining diverse parental responsibilities like devoting their weekends and holidays entirely to their grandchildren. “Beneath the veneer of activities lurks a secret desire to be ‘a better mom’ for the grandchildren,” Spivakovskaya said. Such desire is sometimes so strong that it leads to an endless search for the mistakes and inadequacies in the parents and a tendency to claim total glory for whatever is well while finding fault with the oversights of the parents. “A child’s antennae are wired to catch such conflicting signals in the family,” Spivakovskaya said. “He either blames himself for being the cause of such conflicts or uses them pragmatically for his own ends.”
While it is no surprise that Russian grannies are sometimes willing to ruffle feathers to stay in their grandchildren’s limelight, experts have cited instances when “babushkas” conspire with their grandchildren in activities that are against the parents’ wishes—from cuddling, gifts, and great meals to showing favoritism toward one grandchild over another. But since love is stronger than logic, many parents are powerless to stand up to the “babushkas,” experts say.
Writer and publicist Sergei Shargunov calls the phenomenon “a vicious circle that afflicts every generation in Russia.” “When your parents become grandparents, they will wrestle with you over your own child,” Shargunov said. “They see themselves in him more than they do in you because he carries their blood and essence into the future.” Grandparents will brush aside any objections in order to give a grandkid something they could not or were unable to give their own children, Shargunov said: “In Russia, we have a saying: our children are our prosecutors but our grandchildren are our attorneys.”
One institution, however, would remain eternally grateful for the subversive strategy of Russian grandparents: the Russian Orthodox Church. British historian Professor Gordon Rupp once said that the Christian Church survived decades of persecution and communist propaganda in Russia because the communists underestimated the power of the grandparents. They thought the church had no future because it was full of old people, Rupp said. But thanks largely to the obstinacy and resilience of “babushkas” who never forgot to serve their grandkids “kulichi” (Russian Easter bread) and painted eggs every Easter, the Orthodox Christian tradition not only survived communism, it did so with its integrity largely intact.
