The Babushka Phenomenon

Being described as a burden of population ageing while being expected to close the next generation’s care gap are not contradictory positions. Anna Shadrina’s The Babushka Phenomenon treats them as two sides of a social arrangement. Older women sustain families and continuity across generations, yet their work is often understood as private affection rather than a public contribution. Babushka is therefore more than an affectionate cultural image: it is a socially allocated position.

Published in English in 2025, the book combines cultural representations with life histories. Its research includes 37 biographical interviews with Russian women aged 60 and over in 2016–2017: 23 in Samara and 14 in British cities. This comparison prevents Russian older womanhood from becoming one life lived inside national borders. It is qualitative sociology, not a representative survey estimating how all grandmothers behave.

Who is allowed simply to grow older?

The introduction places ageing within post-Soviet welfare changes and reproductive politics. As employment, housing and childcare become less secure for younger generations, grandmothers’ practical and financial support becomes especially consequential. Counting only retirees who require support misses how they sustain paid employment and family life in return. A category of dependent population can rest on a transfer of care that has disappeared from the account.

Social age is not just the number on an identity document. A woman positioned as someone who should withdraw into family life, reduce her own needs and remain available to others occupies a gendered relation. Physiology does not automatically produce that role. Class resources, family position and national expectations help shape it. Recognizing older people’s different needs should not become permission to close their choices in advance.

Elizaveta’s story takes the argument beyond the grandmother defined only by biological grandchildren. She repairs neighbors’ possessions and asserts value through practical skill. Having no grandchildren of her own, she also forms a grandmother-like relationship with the children of her son’s former girlfriend. This is not a legal adoption. Greetings, gifts and ways of addressing one another create intimate belonging beyond a purely genealogical map.

Meaningful work can still restrict autonomy

Her comparison with her neighbor Paulina brings class into social age. Paulina is a retired university professor; Elizaveta, a retired factory worker, emphasizes competence in solving practical problems. This responds to differences in knowledge, status and privilege. The point is not to rank their lives. Care and capable self-presentation can be ways of claiming dignity as well as complying with expectations.

Shadrina also records Elizaveta’s account of being unwell and unwilling to disturb a neighbor late at night. It can express independence, consideration and self-control while raising a difficult question: must she avoid asking for care to remain a valuable person? Reading only strength removes fear; reading only passive victimhood misses how she organizes relations, understands herself and finds satisfaction.

The book uses ontological security to consider continuity and meaning in life. Care can make someone feel needed while supplying stability for younger people. Meaning and constraint can coexist. Celebrating grandmothers as indispensable does not automatically secure a right to refuse, rest or pursue another project. How valuable labor might avoid becoming a permanently callable life is a political question the book leaves open.

This analysis does not require declaring every family relationship exploitative. Elizaveta’s pleasure in her grandmother-like connection need not be exposed as false consciousness. Mutual recognition matters. Yet the meaning of a relationship cannot replace an examination of resources and alternatives. Receiving care when she needs it and deciding how much care to provide should remain separately expressible claims.

The Russian and British material also shows why migration, class, health and family arrangements matter to ageing. A historically produced role is not the natural disposition of Russian women. Interview-era pension and welfare contexts are not current policy guidance. Qualitative accounts reveal how relations operate; they do not demonstrate that every older woman lives the same life.

Read the open-access book with Caring Democracy to ask why family care belongs to citizenship and public institutions. Essential Labor connects generational obligations to the wider organization of care work. These readings push gratitude further: recognizing who continually sustains others must leave room for the life she herself wants and needs.