Anna Petrovna Badaeva

Anna Petrovna Badaeva is identified as a re-settler whose testimony records how radiation unsettles the ordinary terms of village life. She recalls the old comforts of living near the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Station, then sets those memories beside deaths among the men, damage to women’s reproductive health, and food practices that have become unsafe. Her account does not resolve the gap between what can be seen and what must be feared. Instead, it shows that people continue living inside that uncertainty, adapting habits while mourning losses they cannot fully explain.

Identity and Position

Badaeva speaks from the perspective of someone attached to a village and its inherited routines, but identified in the text as a re-settler. Her account makes that position more than a label: she measures disruption against the landscape and household life she knew before. The nuclear plant had seemed close enough to belong to the neighborhood—thirty kilometers as the bird flies, forty by road—yet its presence had not made the atom imaginable. People knew how to understand a fire as temporary; they did not know what the atom meant. The distance is thus both geographical and perceptual: the plant was near, but the danger was not something the residents knew how to recognize.

Her memories of that earlier life are not presented as an uncomplicated idyll. They are specific material recollections: the stores had meat and cheap salami, and a trip to the plant offered the abundance associated with Moscow. The contrast matters because the later restrictions do not arrive in an empty landscape. They interrupt a life that had felt secure and supplied. Badaeva’s recollection of satisfaction gives way to a present in which familiar food, water, and land have become questions of risk.

Loss in the Community

Badaeva describes death through the pattern it leaves on particular streets. On one street, across the river, she says that all the women are without men; on her own, her grandfather and one other man remain. Her account does not offer a cause for each death, and she explicitly says that no one can explain why God takes the men earlier. What she can describe is the unevenness of the loss: men are absent, and those left behind drink from sadness. The community’s grief is visible not as a single event but as a changed social landscape, where whole streets are marked by missing husbands and companions.

She places this loss beside a statement about women’s bodies and the possibility of bearing children. Badaeva reports that women’s reproductive organs are damaged in one out of three, as people say, and stresses that the harm concerns both the old and the young. Some, she says, did not manage to give birth in time. The reported figure is not offered as a medical investigation; it enters her testimony as part of what people have heard and are trying to understand. Its force lies in the connection she draws between deaths already experienced and futures that may not come to pass. She closes this reflection by saying that, on consideration, it all seems to have passed as if it had never been. The phrase does not undo the evidence she has just given; it conveys how loss can become at once pervasive and difficult to grasp.

Food, Inheritance, and New Restrictions

Badaeva’s account of food begins with a chain of instruction between generations. Her mother taught her to churn butter and prepare cream, cottage cheese, and ordinary cheese; she also passed on a simple milk dough made by mixing flour with water, boiling the torn pieces, and adding milk. Badaeva remembers being told that children would learn what their mother had learned from her mother. The recipe therefore carries more than nourishment: it is a practical inheritance, something learned by watching and meant to be handed on.

That inherited knowledge belongs to a broader repertoire of making use of what was nearby. The family drank sap from birch and maple trees, steamed beans on the stove, and made sugared cranberries. During the war, people gathered stinging nettle and goose-foot; berries and mushrooms could be found in the forest. Badaeva recalls surviving hunger and having enough to eat, even gaining weight, through foods drawn from the surrounding land. Against that memory, the present restrictions make the landscape newly uncertain. Milk and beans cannot be eaten, and mushrooms and berries are forbidden. Meat is to be soaked for three hours, while the water is to be poured off twice when potatoes are boiled. The old confidence that a pot’s contents would remain dependable has been broken by rules that reach into the most ordinary acts of cooking.

Uncertainty and the Work of Continuing

Water brings Badaeva’s practical questions to a limit. People warn that even the water cannot be drunk, but she asks how anyone can do without it: every person contains water, and even rocks contain it. Her thought turns from household necessity to the possibility that water is eternal and that all life comes from it. Yet there is no authoritative answer available to her. She says there is no one to ask; people pray to God but do not ask him. The uncertainty is therefore not simply lack of information. It enters the daily dependence on the very things—water, food, land—that once seemed unquestionable.

Badaeva’s refrain that people have to live follows these questions rather than solving them. It appears after her account of the village’s dead and again after her recollection of lost foods and warnings about water. In each instance, living means carrying on without a complete explanation: the deaths remain unexplained, the restrictions unsettle inherited routines, and the source of reliable answers is absent. Her testimony gives that persistence no easy triumphal meaning. Its significance lies in the ordinary scale of what has changed—a recipe, a potato pot, a glass of water—and in the effort required to continue when even familiar necessities have become uncertain.