The Abandoned

Tanya Shchukina may be the only child in Russia who goes to school wearing the star-shaped badge of the Little Octobrists. [A Soviet era youth organization for children 7-9 years old.] Last year, her mother ceremoniously inducted her into the long defunct organization when Tanya entered first grade.

Tanya lives on the outskirts of the ancient Russian city of Sergiev Posad, in a barracks with her adoptive mother, grandmother, five cats, and two dogs. One year ago, the family’s house burned down, apparently due to the fact that Tanya’s mother is a renowned defender of animals.

“They burned us out, it seems, because of the dogs, as far as I understand,” Tanya’s mother says. “We had a new neighbor. He started throwing stones, bricks, saying: ‘I will destroy you, I will outlive you.’ But, as we know, a man is innocent till proven guilty.”

Here are the facts. In March of last year, when Tanya’s mother, Olga, was in the hospital, someone set fire to the family’s house, car, and all their possessions. The fire was set at night, and seven-year-old Tanya and her 84-year-old grandmother – who is severely handicapped – were asleep in the house. The grandmother and child were woken and saved by the loud barking of their dogs.

At the time, the Shchukins had 14 animals, but not all were saved from the flames. A boy living next door helped to drag out the grandma, who can only get around with the help of a walker. He also saved the family relic: a nineteenth-century icon of Nikolai the Miracle Worker. Otherwise, all of their things, including their car, were destroyed. The neighbors only called the fire department an hour later.

A criminal case was opened, but it has been over a year and there are still no results.

“You know, I can’t sort it all out, how it could have happened?” says the grandmother, Lyubov (which means “love”). “I have lived honestly my entire life with an open heart, always ready to help people in need. My daughter says I have become a meaner person since the fire, that before I was nicer. What is it people want? I don’t understand...” She lowers her head, perplexed.

All her life Lyubov worked at Sergiev Posad’s legendary Zvezda Electromechanical Factory. During the Second World War, the factory’s output – the famous Shpagin machine guns, antitank and hand grenades, and pyrotechnics – went directly from the production line to the front.

And it was there, at the factory, that the family’s history of aiding animals began.

“A puppy named Vityok attached himself to me,” Lyubov recalls. “Perhaps I fed him, or maybe I petted him. And he moved from the factory to live outside our window. Olga, my daughter, traveled to Moscow to work, and he followed her onto the suburban train. She sent him out of one of the car’s doors, back out onto the platform; he came back in through another door.”

Olga picks up the story. “He lay down at my feet. He was a smart dog. I feel like he’s a person, not a dog. He would go to the factory in the morning with mama, and everyone there expected him: someone would give him some canned food, someone else gave him something from a bag. He would patrol the whole line, and everyone would feed him. He would lie down at the checkpoint and take a nap. Many people loved him. And when they killed him, about a hundred signatures were collected on a petition to the prosecutor, asking that the guilty party be punished, but it was all for nothing.

“A knackery was working the city, killing dogs, and Vityok got picked up. But he had a collar, with an engraved plate on it that the factory boss had made. It had his phone number on it, my phone number, the dog’s name. The day that our Vityok was killed, that is when it all began.”

That was 1998. Olga Shchukina began to pick up sick, abandoned animals, to nurse them back to health and find them new owners. She put ads in the local papers, and her phone number swiftly flew throughout the entire city. People would call at any time of the day or night when an animal was in trouble. Even the emergency services turned to her.

But Shchukina did not just help dogs and cats. “In 1998, the Shapito Circus abandoned a camel in Sergiev Posad,” she says. “All of these circuses are concentration camps. I am at war with them! We succeeded in placing the camel with a very nice fellow who built a small zoo in Bogorodskoye for abandoned animals.”

There were also horses. “In the winter of 2000,” Olga continues, “someone called me to say that two sick horses were wandering around the village of Khotkovo. It was cold, and their coats had grown out. Some sort of Cossack lived there who had a farm; he had gone on the bottle and let the horses out. One of them had a bad wound on its hip. We managed to save them as well.”

In order to work with the local government, Shchukina registered as a city animal protection organization. It consists of Olga and two others. Together they succeeded in sorting out the problem that had led to Vityok’s death: the knackery no longer roams the city killing dogs.

Over the past 19 years Olga has saved over 3,000 animals. She has carefully logged information about each animal in a notebook: who appeared where and when, who the animal was adopted by, etc. She would use the information to visit the adoptees at their new homes. But unfortunately her invaluable notebook was also consumed in the fire.

It had not been easy for the Shchukins to build the home that was taken by arson. Olga raised it brick by brick over 12 years. “We built it one meter at a time,” she says. “The workers stole the cement. Instead of cement grout they used just sand. I acquired some bricks, but those were also stolen. There were no building materials; everything was obtained through blat [influence, connections] back then. You’d be on the waiting list for a year, for two. It was the 1990s.”

And it all burned up in an instant. Their books were like kindling: in a matter of minutes, the fire consumed the family’s entire library, including many rare editions, fueling the broader destruction.

The Shchukins were moved far from their home, to a barracks. Grandma Lyubov rarely gets outside; she is miserable without her garden. And Tanya started having trouble with her peers at school.

Back at their old home, Olga had placed Tanya in a gymnasium, and the young girl quickly rose to the top of her class. But, as a result of the fire, Tanya had to move to a different school, where she was unable to find her groove. She started bringing home poor grades and falling in with a bad crowd. So Olga moved heaven and earth to get Tanya back into the gymnasium. The downside is that Tanya must now spend several hours each day getting to and from school.

“Back in our village, it is quiet,” Olga says. “And here, all around the apartment it is noisy. This is where her problems began, whether it was the bad grades in school or the local cop bringing her home. In the gymnasium she placed third in the Olympiad for the entire region! Timur was her idol,” Olga laments.

When Tanya was younger, Olga gave her a book to read: Arkady Gaidar’s Timur and His Team. It is a Soviet-era story about Pioneers who help their friends and others in need, how they reeducate hooligans and bullies. Tanya fell in love with the book and watched the film based on it several times. “Timur had a big red star sewn on his vest,” Olga explains. “I had just an Octobrists’ badge. The kids [in the story] had a hammer and sickle in the middle of their star, but my pin had a photograph of young Lenin there. Timur is an example that we strive to emulate.”

So last year, when Tanya entered first grade, her mother inducted her into the Octobrists. Her classmates were interested in her pin and asked about it. “In my class, just two people knew what sort of star it was,” Tanya explains. “They asked who was pictured there, and I explained who Lenin was, how we celebrate his birthday on April 22.”

Unfortunately, the star pin was lost in the fire. Olga went to a local antique shop, looking for a replacement. The shopkeeper found her a new Octobrists’ badge, as well as one for the Pioneers and another for the Komsomol. “I set the latter two aside,” Olga says. “As soon as Tanya turns 10, I will induct her into the Pioneers, I have that right, as I was on the Komsomol committee at my institute.”

After the fire, the family decided to rebuild their home on its original plot. The cages for the animals survived the blaze, and now Olga travels several hours each day to feed and tend the animals living there. When she cannot, Tanya goes in her stead to take care of the dogs.

In a bit over a year, thanks to the kindness of others, the family has succeeded in putting up walls and a roof.* In order to move back into the house, however, they still must install heating and windows. The Shchukins don’t have means of their own to rebuild the home. Olga is retired and does not work, nor, of course, does her elderly mother. All of her small pension is spent on medicine for her mother, on keeping Tanya fed, and on helping the animals. Somehow, the Shchukins get by, albeit in more than constrained circumstances.

Much of that is attributable to Olga’s brave spirit. “We will endure it all,” she says. “I built a home once, and I’ll do it again. We’ve been through this before: sitting on bricks, boiling soup from bouillon cubes... We built it ourselves...” RL

For more information on the Shchukin family and how you might be able to help, visit obrazfund.ru [in Russian]. Or contact the coordinator of direct assistance, Dmitriy Nikolashvili ([email protected]).