Natalya Antonova is Editor-in-Chief of the newspaper Vieljärven ikkunat, which, translated from Karelian, means Vedlozero Windows. The paper is read by the residents of the village of Vedlozero (population just under 1000) and the villages that surround it. Those residents also write the paper. But neither Natalya nor the authors nor the associate editor (ответсек) receive any pay. The paper survives on “donations” from local residents, and on the enthusiasm of Natalya and the people who distribute it.
Our correspondent traveled to Karelia on the day the summer issue was delivered from the printer and then charted the paper’s full path: from the home of the person doing the layout to readers in tiny villages that require resourcefulness to reach. We spoke with authors and subjects of articles in order to understand why rural Karelians might need a paper today and to understand the sort of challenges that this independent editorial team faces.
The first Editor-in-Chief of Vedlozero Windows was Nadezhda Stafeyeva, a friend of Natalya’s. She began publishing it in 2011. But Nadezhda (Nadya for short) had a weak heart and she passed away in 2021, before a heart transplant could be arranged. But the paper has kept publishing.
“After Nadya’s death, I had a dream,” Natalya recalled. “I was at her home, and she was lying in a white coffin. And then she was also standing there, alive, leaning on her kitchen counter. I look at her in the coffin and also alive, and I say, ‘Nadya, what should we do with you now?’ And she replies, ‘I told you! There is no need for a big fancy meal, let it be an ordinary day. Sit at the table, with however many people can fit. Drink tea and eat cake, and that’s it. Nothing more is needed.’”
Natalya did as Nadya had instructed her in the dream. She organized a modest funeral and purchased two cakes. There were no blini or kutya – the pancakes and granola-like dish typically served at memorial meals.
Back when Nadya was very sick, she tried several times to speak with Natalya about her death. But Natalya always stopped her. “And now I understand,” Natalya said, “that I should have given her the chance to say all that she wanted to say.”
Nadya Stafeyeva was Karelian, born in Vedlozero, an ancient Karelian village. She and Natalya became friends in Petrozavodsk, where both were living after studying at university. Natalya worked in the Karelian language newspaper Oma Mua, and Nadya worked one floor above her, doing layout on the Finnish language paper Karjalan Sanomat.
Later, Nadya was promoted to editor and proofreader. She might have lived the rest of her life like that in the city, but she married a traffic cop from Vedlozero, Igor Stafeyev, and they returned to live in her native village. There was no work for editors in Vedlozero, and so she got a job working in the local administration as a military registration specialist.
Then one day Nadya happened upon the archive of the former regional newspaper that had been published in Vedlozero. Leafing through the paper, she decided she wanted to revive it, to create her own version. It would be a free paper for the public, so that it didn’t depend on anyone, and so they could write whatever they wanted.
She called the paper Vedlozero Windows, because behind every window in the village there are people.
The first articles were written by village residents. But they also roped in people who had left the village to live in the city. For example, layout designer Konstantin Andreyev, who wrote several articles and did the layout from Petrozavodsk. Natalya also wrote an article while she was living in the city and frequently visiting the village. The editors and authors all contributed to the printing of the first issue, and Nadya put in the most money of all.
At first, the newspaper came out monthly. According to Nadya’s mother, Lyubov Nesterova, her daughter immediately set a very high bar. She wanted the paper to be thick, full of interesting material, and to come out regularly. To make that happen, Nadya wrote much of it herself while also recruiting an army of helpers. Even her own mother, who was a teacher of Russian.
“I worked at the school,” Lyubov recalled, “but in my free time I would go around to people’s homes and interview them. It was so interesting! And others got involved and also started writing. But they didn’t write much. So it was mostly Nadya and me writing the first page, and the second page, it was me and Nadya, then on the third Nadya and me, and so on. It was difficult. So, we gradually moved to publishing it every two or three months.”
According to Natalya, Nadya adored the newspaper and everything connected with it. She happily did interviews, sought out article ideas, including in the archives, and edited all the articles herself. In 2015, she traveled to the United States on the Open World Program (a Congressional program that brings emerging leaders from Eurasia to the US), taking copies of the paper with her and showing it off at all her meetings.
Despite the heavy editorial load and her day job, Nadya also devoted lots of time to her home.
“She was a homebody, she liked everything to be tidy,” Natalya recalled. “She was a member of several groups having to do with homemaking, and she had everything in its place, spoon by spoon, jar by jar. Everything was light, there were flowers everywhere. Once I took a shower at her place and all the labels had been removed from the shampoos and shower gels. And I said, ‘Damn it, Nadya, there’s no way to know what to wash yourself with!’ And she said, ‘Oh Natalya, it’s all visual noise.’”
Nadya and Natalya became close friends when Natalya moved to Vedlozero in 2016. She had been offered a job at the Karelian Language House (KLH). They would spend time in one another’s’ homes, go to the banya together, travel to other villages, talk frequently, and help one another out.
Nadya was diagnosed with congestive heart failure in 2014. To the very end, she continued going to work. In 2016, when she barely had any strength, she quit her day job and stopped producing the newspaper.
“She said to me, ‘Natalya, I am so tired! People don’t write,’” Natalya recalled. “‘I am so tired of cajoling them. Everyone wants a newspaper, but no one writes!’”
The last two years of her life, Nadya waited for a heart transplant, and she and Natalya became closer than ever, visiting each other several times a week.
“In 2021, Nadya finally got the notification: come on September 15 for the heart transplant. But she foretold her death. She said to me, ‘Natalya, you understand that I am not going in for a tooth transplant.’”
On her way to the hospital in St. Petersburg, Nadya went through Petrozavodsk, where Natalya happened to be – she still had an apartment in the city. Nadya’s husband Igor drove her there, and the friends stayed up late in the night drinking tea and talking. Then Igor took Nadya to Petersburg, where they were to wait for a donor.
“This all happened in the time of Covid,” Natalya recalled. “Nadya waited five months for a donor. The doctors said that she ‘was unlucky,’ that everything was delayed due to Covid. I went down there to visit her, but they wouldn’t let me see her. We talked by telephone – I stood on the street and she stood by the window. It was the last time I saw her.”
Fifteen days before her death, Nadya was put on a extracorporeal life support. She suffered a hemorrhagic heart attack, fell into a coma, and died.
For Natalya, the death of her close friend was a shock from which it took a long time to recover.
On her Vkontake social media page, she wrote:
You wanted warmth and flowers, but departed in a bitter frost. You told us to eat a piece of sweet cake at your wake and not to shed bitter tears. The first one we coped with, the second, sorry, no…
I could rush to see you at 10pm, my hair wet from the banya, or just collapse on your sofa tired from a day outdoors. For tea. For three hours. I could plunge into your home, a paradise blooming. Open your refrigerator and choose the most beautiful of the many beautiful jars of jam. Cherry… mmmm… and chatter endlessly. And don’t get me started about how you would gaze misty-eyed at the lake, and your quiet voice.
“Look how beautiful it is… turn around. What calm… The muskrat is swimming toward us, see? This is how I sit every morning and watch. Every day is a new picture. And I think: ‘When we leave, who will this all be left to, and what, in general, will happen here?’... Imagine in a hundred years… or even in fifty… And it makes me want to cry.”
“It will all still be here, Nadya! Life will go on. There will be water. Sky. Your grandchildren will be here, great-grandchildren. And the muskrat as well.”
“Wait, let me put the rosettes [cookies] on a plate; don’t eat from the jar.”
“Oh, stop! Why create more dirty dishes?”
“No. We will drink tea properly.”
Three months later, on May 18, Nadya would have turned 40. Natalya decided to publish a special commemorative issue of Vedlozero Windows for Nadya’s birthday.
Money for the printing, as always, was collected from the entire village. Natalya wrote the editor’s letter while sitting in front of Nadya’s photo. And Nadya’s mother, Lyubov, wrote about her daughter on the first page. And she edited all the contents of the issue.
“I didn’t plan to revive the newspaper,” Natalya said. “I thought that I would do a single issue and that would be it. But then people started asking for another. And I was just sick without Nadya, so I decided to bury myself in work.”
And so, starting in May 2021, Vedlozero Windows began to be published quarterly under Natalya Antonova’s leadership, with support from the local group “USSR.”* “After the second issue,” Natalya said, “I again saw Nadya in a dream. She was sitting in some sort of white room and reading the new issue. She looked at me and smiled.”
Natalya Antonova is 46 and a language programs specialist at Vedlozero’s Karelian Language House. KLH is a Karelo-Finnish project financed through private donations and Finnish grants. Its construction in Vedlozero was the brainchild of Karelian translator and activist Olga Gokkoyeva, who is an ethnic Karelian.
Olga has lived in two countries – Finland and Russia. She has a house a few kilometers from Vedlozero, in the village of Kinerma. Gokkoyeva was a chairperson at KLH and made significant personal investments in it.
Gokkoyeva spoke out actively against Russia’s War on Ukraine on social media. Her Vkontakte page was one of the first to be blocked in the republic, and it was recommended that she not travel to Russia. In order not to bring any harm to the KLH, she stepped away from the post of chairperson. Yet she keeps in touch with colleagues to collaborate on projects.
In the two-story KLH building they have discussion groups, theater groups for young children and teens, and there are festivals and holiday events. The main project, however, is a kindergarten that is an alternative to the state-run school, where children speak only in Karelian. And it was for this specific project that Gokkoyeva invited Natalya Antonova to come and work in the village.
At root, Antonova is an ethnic Karelian. At home she speaks only in Karelian with her parents. She even thinks in the language. Nonetheless, she never thought or dreamed that the Karelian language would become her profession. She dreamed of becoming a doctor.
“I assumed Karelian wouldn’t be needed anywhere outside the home,” Antonova said. “Almost all my classmates were Karelian, but we didn’t know that many of them both understood and spoke Karelian. It was all something you only talked about at home. It was never brought up in school, in any subject. We studied Finnish, and perceived Karelian as the language of the family. But it was my teachers at university who opened my eyes.
“It was a difficult time, when I was going to school. I was a super Soviet kid, and never went anywhere. For me, even Petrozavodsk was like another planet, even though Vedlozero is just 100 kilometers away. My self-esteem was so low in school that, for some reason, I thought I wouldn’t get anywhere, because I didn’t have sufficient knowledge. There was crazy competition to study medicine, and I didn’t risk it. So instead I chose a department at the university where I had passing grades: Balto-Finnish Philology and Culture. Plus, people with a strong command of Karelian had a better chance of getting in, especially if they were from a village.
“When they, during the interview, heard my Karelian, they excused me from language exams, because I spoke Karelian better and more assuredly than Russian.
“My teachers back then spoke about the possibilities offered by the Karelian language, about its wealth. We began to study linguistics deeply, as well as Karelian folklore, ethnography, and dialects. We plunged straight in.”
“After university, I worked in Petrozavodsk,” Natalya said. “And for the last ten years there I worked in the Finland-Russia Society. I traveled around Russia visiting Finno-Ugric peoples, carrying out linguistic projects. In parallel, I worked as a journalist for the Karelian newspaper Oma Mua, which translates as ‘our native land.’ I wrote articles in Karelian about Karelians, about people, and about local initiatives. I work there to this day – it’s been 25 years now – only now I’m a part-timer, just 25 percent.”
Natalya rented an apartment in Petrozavodsk for 20 years, but since she didn’t have much money, her apartments were often dirty and uncomfortable.
“Villagers have their own ideas about what it means to achieve success in the city: a job, education, owning a home,” Natalya continued. “Then you’ve made it in life. And so, in 2014 I put money down on an apartment in a building being built, and finally owned my own small apartment in Petrozavodsk. But when that was done, I sat in the four walls of my apartment and thought, ‘Now what?’ And that was it. I lived for a year in this apartment and then pointed my skis toward Vedlozero.”
There, her aging parents (both are 90) needed her. And also Olga had explained to Natalya the idea about a “linguistic nest” and the kind of mountains Natalya could move in the development of the Karelian language at the KLH. And so Natalya moved.
She and Olga developed the concept of the linguistic nest together. They found and trained employees – meaning Karelian babushkas. They persuaded parents to send their kids to their kindergarten. And now she oversees it all. “We play with them every day, speaking in Karelian. It is 100-percent immersion, a ‘linguistic banya.’ The kids already understand the language well and are beginning to speak it.”
Going through the list of everything Natalya is up to (projects, events, translations, books, chairing civic groups, gardening, parents, and a free newspaper), it’s hard to believe any one person could handle it all.
“How do you get all this done?”
“In the morning, I help my parents, so they are set for the whole day. I help them get cleaned up, feed them, perform various medical procedures. My dad has an Foley catheter, so he needs to have it washed with furacilin every morning. I pray to God that they don’t get sick, because then they will be completely dependent on me. If I need to go to Petrozavodsk, I can never stay more than two days. In winter, stoves add to the morning chores… Then I work all day, sometimes running off to my garden beds.
On her fifth of an acre, Natalya has planted cucumbers, tomatoes, zucchini, cabbage carrots, onions, beets, greens. The family doesn’t need that much, but her parents insist. And so Natalya gardens…
She also restored the home where she grew up, both inside and out. Where once there was a hayloft, there are now cozy rooms. She has preserved items from everyday Karelian life, and the house is not just one of the most beautiful in the village – it is something of a museum.
Nearby, on the lakeshore, Natalya is building another home, this one for guests. She dreams of welcoming guests here. To this end, she saves almost everything that she earns, and lives on her parents’ pension. She saves for a year, then hires carpenters to do what they have enough money to finish. Then she works another year to accumulate funds, then spends it. She does not buy anything unnecessary. And that is how everything moves forward a little bit at a time.
I sit on a little couch in the KLH and leaf through the July issue of Vedlozero Windows. It is hot off the presses, and we ourselves transported the copies here from Petrozavodsk, from the layout designer Kostya. He works in IT, in the Karelian Institute of Educational Development.
Kostya moved away from Vedlozero long ago, but continues to do the newspaper’s layout for free. He sends it off to the print shop and picks it up himself, then tries to find someone who happens to be driving in the direction of the village. He recalls how they did the first issue. How people at first were very suspect of a free newspaper (“they must have done it for the elections”), and how people gradually fell in love with it.
“The cost of printing the paper then was 30 rubles, and we sold it for 10. People always contributed to the shortfall with the printer,” Kostya said. “And now the cost is almost 100 rubles, and we sell it for 50. Because few people will pay more than 50 rubles – that’s real money in the village.”[1]
Kostya says that they “sell” the paper, but in reality the paper is not sold: it is handed out for a recommended “donation.” People know that it is wrong to give less than R50, and some give more.
The newspaper currently runs to 16 pages, and it takes Kostya about two days to do the layout.
“For me, this newspaper is a connection with my hometown. My sister lives there, she works in the school. We published the first issue together, and also jointly set up the website where we upload the issues as PDFs. This is how I pay tribute to my hometown. And, in the bargain, it keeps me up to date. I myself give Natalya money to support the paper.”
While he is laying out the paper, Kostya reads everything and, if he finds something “dangerous,” he can correct it.
“In the beginning, we gave everyone a chance to express themselves,” Kostya recalled. “Write whatever you like in the Letters section. But that is where the insults began. People started sorting out their squabbles through the paper. One would say something bad about Finland, and another didn’t like that. And the debate began. Then they would call the editor and it would end in tears. So we just removed the opportunity for that sort of thing.”
After the newspaper arrives in Vedlozero, Natalya begins organizing its distribution via local stores and in other villages.
We stop in at the local clinic to leave a stack of papers. Tomorrow, the local ambulance will be visiting a distant village, and so the doctors will take the papers with them. Delivery “by ambulance” surprises only us outsiders. For Natalya this is nothing out of the ordinary. Anyone who goes someplace is expected to take some newspapers with them.
After the clinic, we stop in at stores, where the newspaper lies out on counters alongside envelopes into which people can insert a donation. Natalya barely manages to put out her Windows in the Rubin food store before people start snapping them up. A Finn who has come to visit a relative in the village wants to give him a copy of the paper. Natalya knows Finnish as well as she does Karelian, and so they chat for a long time.
Another store in Vedlozero that distributes the paper is Khali Gali [which Russian Life wrote about in September 2021]. The store is owned by Galina Suvorova. She is part of the USSR group with Natalya and is always ready to help out those in need. In fact, it was Galina who more than anyone insisted that Natalya be chosen as the chairperson of the group.
“Everything depends on Natasha,” said Galina, apparently referring to both the newspaper and the village in general. “Natasha has a talent for gathering thoughts into a bigger picture – not just her own thoughts, but all of ours… There is a truism: that all major changes, all revolutions, are carried out by a minority. And in recent times it is women who have been leading the way. Nothing would get done without women!”
Galina distributes some of the newspapers with the bread deliveries. A driver places the papers directly on top of the bread tray and takes them to the village where they need to go. There, distributors await, and they immediately hand the papers over to residents, along with their bread. And the money is sent back to Natalya.
Today the car is going to the small village of Yurgilitsa, where the paper will be distributed by a local activist and pensioner, Nina Vasilyeva.
The mobile bread store – a small van with black bread, white bread, and pastries – visits Yurgilitsa twice a week. Vasilyeva said that the locals had been waiting a long time today for the van, yet no one is complaining. “It’s like an event for us,” she laughed. “We get together and chat, discuss the news.
“At one time it was hard. We didn’t have the bread van for an entire year. They couldn’t find a driver. People would walk to Vedlozero to buy bread. Uphill for two hours. I took our village head’s car, drove for groceries, brought them back and distributed them. But now it’s no big deal. They bring meat, and milk, and bread.”
Of the ten people waiting for the van, seven take a paper.
“I read it, then give it to my neighbor,” one woman said.
“I take it home as a souvenir. Some of our babushkas clip stories from them to save,” said another.
“Do you wrap up fish in it?” I asked.
“Never in your life! That would be shameful. I keep them all on a shelf.”
“Well, there’s always our newspaper Our Life, put out by the local government. I haven’t read it for years. It’s not interesting. Just official reports. Nothing to read.”
Nina counts up the papers, mumbling, “Fifteen is too few. I asked Natalya to send me more. There won’t be enough for everyone…”
She explains that 27 people live in the village during the summer months. And that 20 of them get the paper. Nina takes copies of Vedlozero Windows home for all those who didn’t meet the bread van. Why? Because it’s not difficult for her. And it’s her civic duty.
Nina heads up the Village Council and sends requests to the territorial self-government bodies. She explains how one time she contacted the director of a local enterprise and asked for help with a playground. Their workers dredged the swamp for free and leveled the ground.
“Then we, five activists,” she recalled, “made a children’s playground based on local initiative. I am in touch with all the ministers and deputies. Some respond to my first call, some to the tenth, some to the hundredth. But my position is this: the main thing is to take on the task and achieve something. So the newspaper is not even a burden. For me it is enjoyable to deliver it to everyone.”
The associate editor and senior guardian of Vedlozero Windows, Lyubov Nesterova, whose daughter Nadya started it all, spends her summers in the home where she was born, in the tiny village of Pikkoila, in Olenetsky District.
“Lyubov Fyodorovna, we are arriving tomorrow with the journalists,” Natalya announces to her over the phone. “Only, please don’t worry! We don’t want you to cook anything. Just some tea will be fine.”
“Just like with Nadya,” Natalya explained, “her mother has a weak heart. And of course, when Nadya died, everything got worse for her mother. She now finds it difficult to be active, from shortness of breath. Yet when you go to visit, she always asks, ‘What should I make?’”
Pikkoila is part of the village of Verkhnyaya Vidlitsa (“Upper Vidlitsa”). There are just nine homes in all. In winter, no one lives there, but in summer there are two people: Lyubov and her neighbor.
Lyubov wrote for the paper while her daughter was publishing it. And she returned when Natalya resumed publication. She writes less than before, but proofreads everything. And, aside from the paper, Lyubov has one other very regular activity: she heads up the village’s Vkontakte group, Ylä-Videlen hieru. There, she writes about people’s lives, digs through archives, and continues to travel to different villages (sometimes even by bicycle) to gather stories.
“I came to the village, found out what people are planting, who’s had grandchildren, who baked what, put it on the table, and photographed everything,” Lyubov said. “And so I’m sitting there one evening, and there is this noise, and I have no idea where it is coming from. And then suddenly, through the window I see this massive balloon landing in our field. I was stunned! I grabbed my camera and started clicking right from the window. And I’m thinking, ‘Who are they? What are they flying around for? Should I run out to the field or not?’ Later I learned that it was Sergei, a normal guy, who lives in Gavrilovka. And I took the chance of riding out to visit him, but he was not home. I went from room to room, but no one was home. So I sat on the porch and waited. He later explained that he and his wife had long wanted to buy a hot air balloon, but never had enough money. But then they finally had saved up enough. And he said, ‘Would you like to go up with me?’ That made my toes curl. I’m such a coward. I didn’t go up. But I wrote about it, and he later sent me more material about hot-air ballooning in Karelia, so I wrote two posts for the (Vkontakte) group.”
Despite problems with her heart, Lyubov to this day loves to travel around interviewing people and will go just about anywhere for an interesting story.
“I love visiting old people, those who have experienced and seen a lot,” she said, “in order to write down and preserve their memories. I get very upset when they won’t meet with me. They are happy to read about others, but they themselves don’t want to share: ‘Oh no, no, write about someone else! We don’t have anything remarkable,’ they will say. But I say, ‘Everyone is remarkable, we’ll find something.’ And if I ask someone to write for the newspaper, they say ‘You are educated, you write it.’ And I say, ‘We’ll edit you!’ But it’s of no use. Yet Nadya and I took everything from everyone and fixed it up, just so that the stories would get out there.
“For instance, there was Vanya F., who wrote a piece for us, and we had to make a new sentence from each one he wrote. But no big deal, I managed. But, of course, an entirely different story resulted. I don’t know whether he noticed.”
In Savino, a streetless village between two lakes, the newspaper is delivered by Nadya’s widower Igor. He works now as a school bus driver, delivering both children and newspapers. Today we are traveling along as well, and we are met by Zhanna and Irina, two civically engaged women who help to distribute the Windows.
Zhanna Poroyeva is Savino’s only contributor to the newspaper. She heads up the local club, working just over half-time. She is responsible for all repairs, for village meetings, lighting stoves, removing garbage, and God knows what else.
The club is being renovated, so Zhanna is painting the walls and floors, acknowledging that the local government has not given them any money for the renovation, just like it doesn’t give money for anything. Zhanna does it all on her own dime and with contributions from residents she is able to bring on board.
“To meetings, I even bring my own notebook computer from home,” Zhanna said. “It’s old and broken down, but I don’t have enough money for a new one. I found money for paint, but I didn’t have enough money to repair a couple of windows. I had to board them up.”
In the July issue, Zhanna wrote about Valentina Moiseyeva, from the village of Chyornaya Lamba.
“Valentina is so amazing!” she said. “Her life has unfolded such that she and her husband are educating their grandchildren. And she manages to do needlework, bake pies, and keep the house in order. And she fishes constantly!
“I write poorly, I can’t keep facts in my head. But they are amazing [Natalya and Lyubov] and they edit me nicely. Mostly I write about our culture, about various events.”
Irina Yevseyeva doesn’t write for the paper, but she distributes it to local residents. She starts at the school and kindergarten, where she is the director, and her co-workers and parents quickly snap them up. Remaining copies she and Zhanna take from house to house. Today we do it with her. It takes all of an hour.
The oldest reader of Vedlozero Windows is 90-year-old Alexandra Yakovlevna. Irina gives her a paper without asking for a donation, then sends Natalya some of her own money. Alexandra’s vision is excellent, and she reads the paper from cover to cover, and says that it’s the only way she can find out what is going on in the region, and who her neighbors are. She can no longer get out for walks and chat with them.
Seeing how Natalya counts up the “donations” that people give and transfer to her, I ask whether she has thought about applying for a grant for the paper. She could use it to pay herself a salary and honoraria to her contributors.
“What grants? Government? Absolutely, not,” she replied. “What is their agenda, and what is ours? I remember how Nadya would say that, so long as the paper costs nothing, it is free. Of course, our freedom is also limited in some sense. It’s now difficult to take up the most burning topics.”
“Kostya said that you try to avoid them. Why is that?”
“Because from the very beginning, under Nadya, we agreed that this would not be a political paper. We would write about people and about our lives. But, of course, it’s hard to totally avoid politics, because, after all, politics surrounds us. And that includes our modest [local government] budget. I try to turn up the heat at least a little bit. I urge people to write about what worries them. Because there are many who are unhappy with what is going on, yet they don’t speak up. And the result is that on paper it’s all rainbows, but in real life, not so much.”
“And what about the ‘special military operation’? Do you write about it?”
“At one point a woman whom we wrote about a few times said to me, ‘I will not buy Vedlozero Windows anymore. Because two of our young guys went off to war, and you didn’t write in support of them in the paper. It’s as if it never happened!’ And she unsubscribed, as they say online.
“For myself, I think of it like this: there is plenty of information on this out there. The local administration publishes it, as do other publications. There are themes other than this. And, well, these guys have only gone away, and nothing has yet happened, so what can I write about that? But if someone dies or does not come back, we could write something…”
Antonova doesn’t just publish challenging articles in her issues: she personally distributes Vedlozero Windows to government offices.
“I get in the car, chug, chug, chug, and distribute to every ministry office. And here’s one interesting bit: everyone knows that the paper has a recommended donation of 50 rubles. But when I give a copy to a bureaucrat, for instance to the deputy of the local legislature, or to a minister, they take the paper and say, ‘Thank you, Natalya.’ And that’s it, they don’t give me any money. I stand up tall, look them in the eye without turning away, and they pretend that they don’t understand a thing. Yet behind them are normal people, babushkas with miserly pensions, who send me 100 rubles for the paper and say, ‘I don’t need any change.’ To me there is a simple conclusion: the simpler the person is, the more they donate.”
“And where do you get the money to make up for the deficit in printing costs?”
“I sit at my computer, compose a post for Vkontake, and within two hours we raise the shortfall. People give right away. There is one guy… He drank his whole life, so really, he had no hope for success. But then suddenly he stopped and got out of that life. And I wrote my usual post asking for help for the paper, and suddenly 5000 rubles showed up in my account. That’s a big sum for us. And I think, “Where is this from?” And he writes to me right away, that he is the one who made the transfer, but asks that I not thank him publicly. I was so happy! Not because of the size of the sum, but because he allowed himself to do this… In general, raising funds is faster than getting material.”
Raw material is the chief editor’s greatest headache. Antonova is ready to do anything to persuade people to write.
“It’s very difficult to stir up the locals. Everyone refuses: ‘We don’t know how.’ To some people I say, ‘Listen, come by my work. You will sit right next to me and tell me your story. And I’ll type all your words on the computer.’ I’ve done this a few times.
Antonova says that, out of desperation, she writes a lot of articles herself, and will get her story ideas from anywhere.
“In our USSR group, we discuss problems, and I write them down. Problems with fishing, with the absence of a post office (the local postal worker went on maternity leave, and they can’t find anyone to take her place), the absence of a well-run cultural center, of normal roads. We’ve published masses of articles on the theme of our polluted lake. We raise all these questions, and write letters to bureaucrats… My highest level conversation was with the Russian Ministry of Agriculture and Fishing. I haven’t yet dealt directly with Putin…”
Natalya recalled how she came up with the idea for the winter issue of writing about women who fish, who sit all day long in ice huts with a fishing line sticking out the window.
“Before, it was only men who sat over ice fishing holes, but now there are women. They sit like haystacks, beneath layers of quilted cotton. I spent a long time trying to convince Galya to let me take her photo. For several days in a row, I visited her at her hole on the lake, or called her at home. Either she was not in the mood, or she promised to do it when she was better dressed, or she just ghosted me. In the end, I started running around, stopping by other women fishing the inlet. I wasted a lot of time, and all for one photograph! This was March – the lake was melting, wet snow was mixing with the water. My legs were frozen to the bone. And when, finally, one woman agreed to be photographed, my nine-year-old phone was completely dead. It couldn’t hold a charge in the cold, even though I carried it inside a woolen mitten. I almost burst into tears out of frustration, and I got angry with myself: ‘You are so stupid! Children in school have had iPhones for a long time, but you have been holding onto this one for nearly 10 years! The paper needs one!” I promised myself to spend money on a new smartphone and bought it before the next winter.”
In the July issue, Natalia wrote about how a husband and wife built a new home. She literally saw the story “out her window.”
“I was sitting at work, and I saw the midwife Olga running about in her garden. She’s an old woman already, but still very active. She’s either gathering up firewood or off to the store. And her husband, Bilal, a Turk, is also always doing something around the house. They recently built a house basically on the swamp. They are simple people, they have worked all their lives, and then they just did it. And so I scooped myself up and ran off – I needed the material!
“They of course refused: ‘Many people have much nicer homes than us.’ But we still came up with a concept. I began the text with the idea that she spent her life working as a midwife, that almost all the residents of the village had passed through her hands. She even delivered me, though in rather extreme conditions. My mama worked up until the very last minute of her pregnancy. She had lost a bull and was running all over the district trying to find it. Her water broke right there on a field on the state farm… The ambulance picked up my mother at the fire station. And Olga the midwife, rather young at the time, delivered her baby right there in the vehicle. That’s where I got my start! And then she told us about their home and household, and how Bilal came here in the 1990s and was working at the sawmill. ‘Nothing to write about,’ they told me. Well how’s that nothing!?”
Natalya and I sit on a bench by the lake, near the Karelian Language House. For three days we have been distributing newspapers to villages, and she is very tired. The days after a paper comes out are always crazy, yet they also give Natalya strength. When the entire newspaper run is out in the world, there is time to think about the “why.”
“Why do people need our local paper?” she asks. “It’s because people get used to the idea that their lives are unremarkable and typical, that our news is not news, and that nothing happens here. The life of a villager is devalued. ‘You can’t write about bad things, and there are few good things.’ I hear that a lot. And yet I see newspaper-worthy news in everything that surrounds me in the village. There are lots more snails in the gardens, the water level in the lake is falling. Here is a home people built that they have long been wanting, and over there, a light is still burning in the military barracks – it means people are living there and they have nowhere else to go. A team of electricians painted the fence around a mass grave – they got the order from their work. I wonder if they would have painted it without the order? There are plenty of things to write about, it’s just a shame there is no one to write it.
“Sometimes I look out over my field, overgrown with weeds, and I think, ‘Why do you need all this, Natasha?’ What is more, everything is done on the run, there are loads of mistakes. But I know that every copy gets snapped up, that people like it. That keeps me going.”
Natalya will start working on the next issue in the fall. Summer is time for herself, for her garden, and for construction. She dreams of finishing her guest house more quickly, because she does not know how much longer she will have work at the KHL.
“It’s a nonprofit, after all,” she said. “Perhaps 80 percent of our budget comes from Finnish organizations and individuals who are Karelian by nationality. There are several Karelian organizations in Finland, and to this day they help us. But it gets harder with each passing month… Partnership with Finland has become far harder. Only one or two people are coming to visit us every other month or so. And if before they would stay for a few days, now they are afraid to even stay for the night. They feel that the current policy is not friendly… We are afraid that the state will declare us a foreign agent, on account of our foreign financing. But we don’t have any choice: without that income, we would have to shut down.
“So today we live, and it’s ok. But we have no plans.”
This summer Natalya and some of Nadya Stafeyeva’s family and close friends hope to install a tombstone on her grave. Antonova has ordered a design that is laconic, Scandinavian. Her friend would have approved.
[1] At press time, R50 is about 50 cents.
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