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Anna Shadrina, "The Babushka Phenomenon: Older Women and the Political Sociology of Ageing in Russia" (UCL Press, 2025)
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
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Dr. Anna Chadrina
Spries du dzoich com de nosq if.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
Hello and welcome to another episode on the New Books Network. I'm one of your hosts, Dr. Miranda Melcher, and I'm very pleased today to be speaking with Dr. Anna Chadrina about her book titled the Babushka Older Women and the Political Sociology of Aging in Russia, published by UCL Press in 2025, which looking at what life is like now, really in post Soviet Russia, so now and the last few decades, highlighting the role of older women, which is a really important part of society now and of course has always been an important part of society. But what does that mean when a country like Russia has gone under such a change from the Soviet system to now? What does the media say about older women? What do actual older women think about what society is telling them to do or not do? It's actually turns out really interesting to kind of get a whole picture on society by looking at this very specific group. So we have a lot to discuss. Ana, thank you so much for joining me on the podcast.
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Dr. Anna Chadrina
No, thank you, Niranda, thank you very much for having me.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
Could you start us off please, by introducing yourself a little bit and tell us why you decided to write this book? What sorts of questions are you asking? How did this all develop?
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Dr. Anna Chadrina
Of course. So I'm a lecturer in sociology at the University of Liverpool, and my work is driven by two central phenomena, global aging and the rise of authoritarianism. And I examine how domestic and global dynamics shape political imaginaries of aging in Eastern Europe. I grew up in Belarus, and I was 16 when the Soviet Union collapsed and I started my career as a journalist. And I was in my 20s when I realized that that event was causing massive changes to everyday lives. So, as a young woman, I, I, I was particularly interested to understand why women of my generation started to postpone getting married and having children. There were, of course, books in English about the transformation of intimacy, but they were about Western women. And I, I, I waited, I waited and waited for somebody to write about my part of the world. But eventually I realized that in order to read those books, I had to write them. So I ended up writing a book about single women and women's matrimonial behavior after Soviet socialism. And then I wrote another book about reproductive choice as a new phenomenon after the Soviet Union collapsed. And so, having written two books in Russian, I realized that I actually grew out of journalism, not to mention that Belarus isn't the best possible place, to say the least, to be a journalist. So I decided to become an academic. And it felt like a logical continuation to explore the experiences of women's aging after Soviet socialism. For my PhD project.
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I had various geographical combinations in my research proposal to focus on, and the one on Russia specifically won a PhD scholarship at Birber College, University of London. Initially, I wanted to understand what it was like to be shaped as a citizen in one and grew older under completely different social, economic and political conditions. But later it became clear that women's aging in Russia is actually a broader case of the post Soviet redistribution of resources. And what I mean by this is that it's common for Russian families to encourage their children to have their own children sooner rather than later. And this may seem counterintuitive because many young couples start families even before they can afford financial independence. And then what happens? The problem of housing, childcare and housework is being transferred to the older generation to take care of because the State withdrew from providing free housing, affordable childcare and guaranteed employment. There has to be a way of normalizing the expectation that it is now the family who will find solutions to all these problems. So what I'm trying to say is that you can't just sell your home to buy an apartment to your adult son and a smaller one for yourself. You need to explain to yourself why you are doing this. And the traditional to Russia reproductive pressure operates as this kind of rationalization that feels familiar. I'm doing this because I want my children to start their own families. This is the most normal thing to do. And why do I want to do it? It's because everybody does this. Because if I don't ensure this today, tomorrow may be too late for me to become an involved grandmother. And being a grandmother is extremely important for older women because this is the most significant social role that society offers to Russian women of pensionable age in Russia. But largely this role is a product of neoliberal welfare reforms, gender ideology and Russia's demographic approach.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
See, this is exactly what I meant. That by looking at what seems like a very specific group in the society, you actually can get a whole picture of kind of what's going on a lot more broadly as well as within the group. So thank you for giving us that introduction of kind of what you are exploring and why. Can you tell us a bit about how you did it? So what kinds of methods you were using the data you collected to answer these questions?
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Dr. Anna Chadrina
Yes, sure. So the book is based on biographical interviews with Russian women of pensionable age, which I conducted in 2016 in Samara, a leading industrial center in the Volga region. And in 2017 I also interviewed all the Russian women who had immigrated to the United Kingdom. And I integrate these interviews with media, film and literary analysis. To unpack the interviews, I used thematic analysis and I also wrote so called pen portraits for each participant to condense their stories into one main story to kind of identify the main logic that that drives their biological narrative. So I did a lot of analysis and to be honest, at first nothing worked. So I struggled a lot because trained as a journalist, I think in terms of stories. So I couldn't figure out what the main story of my research was. And what did actually help was a job interview I was invited to at that time. For that job interview I was expected to prepare a short presentation of my research and I only, I think I only had like three minutes to talk about my then PhD project. So this is how I compressed all my ideas into a couple of lines. And only then did I realize that the whole project was about what I now call the babushka phenomenon.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
I also actually find something very similar to be really helpful in terms of kind of speaking ideas out loud, teaching them, or a job interview can often be really clarifying. So thank you for sharing that kind of behind the scenes detail because of course, research is about the finished product, but it's very much also about the process of getting there. So that's really helpful to understand, to make sense of all of this information you've gathered. I think, though, that one thing we want to clarify, to make sure we're also clear on before we continue, is what we mean by old when we're talking about these women so that we have a better sense of the group. So when you, for example, spoke to these immigrants in the uk, for instance, what did old mean? How are we defining that category?
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Dr. Anna Chadrina
Right. So there's a number of popular narratives about aging available in Russia, but it's a universal thing. Universally, in Russia or in other countries, many people will say that you are old when you are no longer able to be independent. But independence is a metaphor. Nobody is independent. So essentially nobody knows what aging is. And it's not important for me how what aging is. And what important for me is how people use ideas about aging to represent themselves in a particular light. So, yes, it comes down to.
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What story about yourself you want to tell, whether you want to come across as not too old yet and therefore having something to offer to society. Or you can say that you are old in order to liberate yourself from an expectation. So in my book, I explore tacit norms and expectations and how they are enacted and why. And in Russia, women of functionable age are commonly referred to as babushki, the plural of babushka, which means grandmother. The expectation that all women will become grandmothers, extensively involved in childcare, has shaped this imaginary that erodes later stages of women's lives with their function in informal welfare, and because women are largely expected to abandon their careers and personal lives as soon as they have grandchildren. Aside from this family role of grandmother, the babushka word also means a social position, and it also implies a distinct type of subjectivity that is believed to take shape as women grow older. So what I mean is that to be seen as a babushka, a woman doesn't need to have grandchildren nor to be very old. It is a specific performance of gender, age and class that members of Russian society read as a sign that a woman has already adopted the position of A post professional and post sexual member of society. And paradoxically, while grandmothers are expected to help their children with housing, housework, childcare, babushki as a social group are often ridiculed in mainstream culture for allegedly being idle or aggressive towards people of working age. And this unflattering portrayal has a long history. Actually the legendary character of Eastern European folklore, Baba Yaga, embodies patriarchal attempts to downplay all the women's important role in social reproduction by presenting them as witches.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
Yeah, we're definitely going to talk about some media portrayals because as you said, the roots go back pretty far and definitely have an impact. But I want to focus more on this idea of pensionable age because as you've described it comes through really strongly as kind of part of this categorization of what older means. And of course, when you're for example, we're sitting in the uk, we kind of are like, oh, we all know what that means. There's an established system, multiple generations have gone through it. But of course that's not the case when we're looking at Russia where expectations around retirement and pensions were different in the Soviet system than in the post Soviet one. So how do women sort of navigate that when maybe when they entered the workforce? Ideas of what pensionable age was was one thing and now that they've reached it, it's something else.
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Dr. Anna Chadrina
Yes, you're absolutely right, Miranda.
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It was not until very recently that the pensionable age for women in Russia has been lifted from 55 to 60. And it actually a massive change because the pension system was established during the Soviet era with a particular social position for all the people in mind. Their idea.
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Was that after certain age people would be entitled to a well deserved and paid rest. The key here is deserved. The Soviet state tried in many ways to ensure that all the people engage in social participation. After the end of Soviet socialism, many people who were trained for the Soviet planned economy found themselves impoverished. This is not something that life had prepared you for as a Soviet citizen. Quite the opposite. You were expecting this exact well deserved rest. After Soviet socialism. An old age pension isn't enough to get by. So you have to be proactive.
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If you want to survive. And the job market works in such a way that if you have resources to gain skills to compete, good for you. But if you are the product of the old system and you don't have resources to adapt, you are expected to retire upon reaching pensionable age. And then maybe if you have.
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Some strings to pull, you can get a lower skilled lower paid, often undocumented job to combine it with your old age pension to survive economically. So this means that while you are expected to be more proactive as you grow older, your social status actually decreases. This decrease reflects the capitalist allocation of respect. You are seen as a respectable individual for as long as you contribute to the formal economy. But the problem is that pensioners in Russia are primarily seen as recipients of social benefits. So essentially this is about the socialist language of social justice being replaced by meritocratic values.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
That I think was one of the most interesting things for me to read about in the book of kind of navigating this really big change and kind of all of the sorts of norms and expectations around this. And you've mentioned a few times now how kind of caregiving is so emphasized as being part of the role of older women. But of course it's emphasized as part of the role of women full stop, not just when they're older. Is there anything further we should understand about how important caregiving is seen to be?
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Dr. Anna Chadrina
Yes, and probably I'd like to talk a little bit about the status, the transformation of the status of grandmother during the pre socialist socialist and after the collapse of the Soviet.
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State. So in pre revolutionary rural Russia, grandmothers enjoyed a social status higher than that of mothers. Because prior to collectivization.
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Families were run by the Bolshak, who was the key figure of the Russian peasant household which was organized around natural production. And this middle aged man was in charge of decision making money.
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And the key figure within the female hierarchy was his wife, the baalshukha. So she was in charge of the garden, animals and food. And when she was becoming older, which was manifested through her declining health, the belshuka would pass on her status to her daughter in law and assumed the role of staruka, which means old woman. And in this transition, she would relinquish her previous dominance over all women, children and unmarried men of the household. But the collectivization and the social upheavals of the 20th century resulted in a massive change in how power was divided into within the family. So due to enormous losses in the male population, the Balshukha's role included subsequently many of the responsibilities that had previously belonged to the boshak. So as a result, male family roles gradually infantilized and they became less important for family survival.
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Prior to the Second World War, when a young woman got married, she would typically live with her husband family and become subordinate to her mother in law. With urbanization, many young couples moved away from family control. And this process coincided with the introduction of a new ideology that glorified Soviet motherhood as women's natural duty. And what this achieved was that young and old mothers were equated in status. After the Second World War, due to the loss in the male population, Grandmothers stepped in the families to help mothers combine paid employment with childcare. And this is how this matrifocal family was shaped, with mothers becoming breadwinners and grandmothers becoming domestic carers, and with men on the margins of family life. And now mothers have a social status higher than grandmothers. Most Russian women become mothers sooner rather than later, based on the expectation that their own mothers will help them combine motherhood with paid work. And many Russian women actually feel single, not when they don't have male partners, but when they don't have a mother available to become their primary parenting partner. Like in many other countries, Russia's demographic structure has been shifting towards a predominance of older people. And populist narratives in Russia blame population aging and population decline on women's alleged reluctance to have more children. But research shows that this isn't the case. Actually, Russian women want larger families. The problem is that available social policies don't address the traditional estrangement of Russian fathers from family labor. And little attention is being paid to the problematic work life balance and shortages of preschool daycare facilities. In other contexts, scholars have discussed how racialized and class differences exacerbate when middle class mothers pursue their careers and motherhood while delegating their family responsibility to migrants and less privileged women in Eastern Europe. Age is another aspect of social inequality that divides women. In Russia, there is a paradox. Grandmothers are essentially matriarchs, but they are denied the social status of important contributors to social reproduction. And in general.
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This is about the old argument about nuclear families being unable to function without external support due to insufficient welfare provision and men's reluctance to engage in reproductive labor.
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Dr. Anna Chadrina
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Dr. Anna Chadrina
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
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We were returning home and one of the flight attendants asked Bronx if he wanted to see the flight deck and meet Kath and Andrew.
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Dr. Anna Chadrina
I got to sit in the driver's seat.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
I grew up in an aviation family.
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And seeing Bronx kind of reminded me of myself when I was that age.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
That's Andrew, a real United pilot.
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These small interactions can shape a kid's future.
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Dr. Anna Chadrina
It felt like I was the captain.
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Allowing my son to see the flight deck will stick with us forever. That's how good leads the way.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
Yeah, we haven't mentioned men really until now. So that's interesting to hear that they're coming in kind of. But that's sort of part of the point here. So if an older woman wants to operate successfully within the sort of new context where we're at now with in the post socialist era that you've been describing, what does she have to do to go? Or what are the norms she has to fit in with to be a quote unquote, good old woman?
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Dr. Anna Chadrina
Right. So to unpack this, I drew on Susan Peacock, who notes that the association of Aging Femininity with monstrosity.
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As part of patriarchal domination results into portrayal of a hug in Western culture, a pitiful one and a formidable one.
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With the latter sort of offering emancipatory potential for all the women. And as an equivalent of the hug, the babushka figure also has these two main representations. The good babushka is depicted as a socially approved image of an invisible old woman whose life is confined to domesticity. She is expected to be invisible. She's expected to commit symbolic suicide, if you like. If she makes herself in any way visible, she's ostracized. So if you want to come across as a good old woman, you would want to occupy as little social space as possible to signal that your interests are no longer important.
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You would probably want to do it by disengaging from kind of addressing the male heterosexual gaze.
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You want to signal through your self presentation that.
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You give up on your social rights. Essentially, yeah.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
This idea of presentation and how people are seeing you is really quite key here. It's come up a number of times in our conversation, and especially the kind of shadow idea of you have to do this because there's an idea of a bad grandmother lurking that could kind of quite easily be applied to you if you don't comply. So what is that trope of the bad grandmother and how has it developed in post socialist Russia?
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Dr. Anna Chadrina
Right, so the unflattering portrayal is a way of social control, of course.
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But I'd like to talk about some.
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Tropes that I developed based on my examination of Russia's contemporary culture. So what I find is that particularly post reproductive sexuality is portrayed as of non human nature because it violates the expectation that women of pensionable age will prioritize the interest of their children and grandchildren. And this is closely related to the idea of a citizen in a broader sense, beyond the notion of you're belonging to a nation, it's about how you belong to a community. So in capitalist societies, full citizenship is validated by income. In this sense, the ability to retain skilled post pension age jobs sometimes enables women to claim the right to exercise post reproductive sexuality. But these are exceptions from the rules.
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Now, women who demand recognition for their unpaid labor are represented as monsters.
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Eating their offspring, like in the film adaptation of the famous novel by Pavel Sanaev, Bury Me behind the Baseboard. This trope largely comes from the old witch from the Brothers Grimm fairy tales. And what happens in those fairy tales is that parents are unable to take care of their child and the child end up being lost in the woods, where she encounters an older woman who takes care of the child. And this monstrosity, as I find, originates in the witch hunt era, when women who had some power or requested social assistance were executed based on the claim that there were witches. So that was an attempt of an early class struggle that.
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Their monstrosity was punished as a way to maintain the status quo. Russian women who refused to take care.
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Of their grandchildren and provide housing to their adult children are often represented as cold monsters. And I call this type of monster Grandmother Frost. This kind of monster can be found, for example, in Andre's Zweigenser film. Loveless women who comply with the expectation of providing housing and childcare, in turn, are often represented as monsters who I call Grandmother's Faust because this monster is said to love her offspring too much. And she is going through a Faustian transformation because she needs to obtain money to give it to her children and grandchildren so they can successfully navigate the problematic landscape of post socialism. And as a result, she sells her soul to the devil. And this type of monster can be, for instance, found in Andrei Zvagintsev's film Yelena. Women like Helena are held responsible for allegedly rising generations of socially and politically apathetic citizens. And what these portrayals do is that there's nothing new about these portrayals. It's just the old mother blaming. But apart from that, they also articulate anxieties that many people in Russia experience about the effects of the existing economic and political regime and.
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Yeah, social inequality and Russia's military aggression.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
Again, going back to kind of by looking at this one seemingly narrow thing, we actually get an insight onto kind of wider Russian society at this point. But of course, even within navigating the fears of being labeled a bad grandmother and kind of trying to fit in to some extent of what one is supposed to do, some of the things you outlined as sort of norms of what these women are meant to be doing are really so strict that kind of. They probably don't work that well in reality. Like, even if you are a good grandmother, focusing on your grandchildren, that may not take, like, all of your time, you know, all 24 hours a day, all seven days a week. So besides caregiving, what else are older women doing with their time and how are they talking about these activities and choices?
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Dr. Anna Chadrina
Right. Yeah, I actually really want to talk about this phenomenon that is called benches or lavochki in Russian. So in Russia, all the urban women as a social group are commonly portrayed as socializing on benches, These outdoor gatherings of babushki in the shared courtyards of Soviet style apartment buildings have been a traditional form of.
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Maintaining community ties of social control and.
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Childcare. So late Soviet residential areas were designed to foster a communities period. And to this end, neighborhoods were divided into equally sized shared courtyards formed by four five story apartment blocks situated one in front of another in the shape of a square. So typically a children's playground is set in the middle of the square, visible from the windows of the apartment blocks, which is very convenient for childcare. The entrances to the blocks are adorned with small gardens and each entrance is provided with benches for residents. And during the Soviet era there was a strong tradition of outdoor table games.
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And these traditional outdoor gatherings were and still are very much gender, age and class specific. So members of the Soviet educated class usually distance themselves from these spontaneous gatherings. It was predominantly all the working class men who played table games, while older working class were chatting in groups on the benches, watching, keeping an eye on their grandchildren, playing in the playgrounds. After the dissolution of the Soviet Union, with the privatization of social housing and the emergence of a new property based class system, the tradition of courtyard gatherings, largely the tradition of games, largely disappeared. But.
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Older working class women still gather on benches, especially in provincial cities. In general, women's activities beyond providing family care are very class related.
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For example, more privileged women can do sports.
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Less privileged women.
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Often attend various classes for older people provided by local councils free of charge. But other than that, like everywhere else, all the Russian women do all sorts of things because it's important for them to have a space just for themselves. So.
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They do crafts, some go to church, some tend to their kitchen gardens or solve crosswords.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
If we're talking about activities for the women that are not focused just on caregiving, we mentioned earlier that there's all sorts of tropes around sexual or romantic activities for older women to get off in. But in real life, when you actually talk to these women, is that something that they're engaged in?
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Dr. Anna Chadrina
Yes. And this question is closely tied to Russia's demographic structure.
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Taking into account men's premature mortality and high divorce rates, many older women in Russia don't have male partners.
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And interestingly, contrary to the.
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Stereotype of the lonely old woman who is miserable because she is no longer seen by young men as a sexual object, most of my single interviewees told me that they weren't interested in new relationships with men. Based on my findings, while having a stable job didn't necessarily correlate with the desire to have a partner, most women who expressed an interest in Neuromantic and sexual relationships with men were still employed. And this suggests that the ability to maintain employment beyond pensionable age seems to legitimize women's post reproductive, romantic and sexual aspirations. In other words, women's greater financial independence provides them with a sense of autonomy, which enables them to resist the expectation that as soon as they have grandchildren, they will abandon their careers and personal lives. But many participants in my study didn't wish to resist the norm that associates sexuality with youth.
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For one group of an interviewee, presenting themselves as deliberately post sexual was a means to avoid ostracism. In a culture that stigmatizes older women's sexual desire, some will. Women also.
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Claimed that the age provided them with a socially acceptable way to liberate themselves from women's unpaid labor, which usually increases with the presence of a male partner.
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In general, women formed by late socialism typically don't question the traditional family role of mother, wife and grandmother. But.
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When they discussed the reasons why they didn't want to be in relationships with men, again, they were highly critical of the existing gender order.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
Was there anything else they were highly critical about? For example, did they express political opinions.
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Dr. Anna Chadrina
Well, one way or another? Most participants indeed reflected on the system of social inequality. Many expressed their dissatisfaction with.
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The multiple marginalization that they face as women, as older citizens, and as unprivileged individuals. Some of them discussed the experiences of engaging in everyday politics, small acts of resisting institutional injustice. For example, one woman told me about organizing collective actions to demand accountability of the local administration, administration which had ignored problems in residential buildings. In general, research on political process and processes and participation in Eastern Europe shows that low key, apolitical, resistant activities are the only means available to citizens in this region to recognize and articulate their grievances. So most my interviewees didn't interpret their actions as political, and neither they expressed a hope for social change. And as a person who has lived most of her life in authoritarian Belarus, I understand it all too well that this skepticism is a product of autocracies.
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This is what the dominant ideology in an autocratic system does. Autocratic regimes deliberately depoliticize citizens activities, initiatives. They impose the belief that there is no viable alternative to them. And what is most important is that they severely punish resistance. So openly articulating criticism of the system carries existential threat. And that's why I didn't ask my interviewees directly to discuss their political views. But I would ask, sometimes clarifying questions if an interviewee wanted to express her political views. Many women I talked to avoided expressing their political opinions. Others.
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Asked me half jokingly, after making a critical comment about the government, if they are now going to be arrested. And this is because in non democratic countries where expressing political views in general is dangerous, women who are often primarily responsible for.
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The well being of their families face greater vulnerability.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
I think that speaks to the strengths of the methods you used here. Right. Because by actually speaking to these women, you were able to pick up on those sorts of nuances and what they said and didn't say and kind of what can be taken from the inferrals, I suppose there. So thank you for sharing that part of your work with us as well. I'm curious, as we're sort of coming to the end of our discussion, to go back to what you were saying right at the beginning of how this project obviously came out of kind of specific interests and questions you wanted to ask, but in some ways is also related to the previous two books you've written. You know, there's something of a theme here going on. So I'm curious if you have any upcoming work you want to give us a sneak preview of. Is it also looking at some of these related questions or are you doing something completely different next?
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Dr. Anna Chadrina
Oh, thank you for asking, Miranda. So I continue investigating how welfare systems and geopolitical dynamics.
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Shape relationships between the states, individuals and social groups. And I'm particularly interested in how political actors promote ideas about.
- [45:05]
Older adults and aging and later life in order to leverage their political agendas. And currently I'm working on an article about all the Ukrainian men aged over the official draft age and the wartime practice of social participation.
- [45:27]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Okay. Continuing to have lots of interesting investigations there. Best of luck.
- [45:31]
Dr. Anna Chadrina
Oh, thank you. Thank you very much.
- [45:34]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
While you are, of course doing that, listeners can read the book we've been discussing titled the Babushka Older Women and the Political Sociology of Aging in Russia, published by UCL Press in 2025. Anna, thank you so much for joining me on the podcast. Thank you, Miranda.