Kyrgyzstan is remembered through the account of Lena M., a Russian-speaking woman who leaves the country with her five children after a period of insecurity and growing hostility toward Russians. Her testimony makes the departure more than a change of residence: it is the loss of the place where she was born and raised, and of the Soviet homeland through which she had understood her family’s mixed origins. The account follows that rupture from daily life in Kyrgyzstan to a twelve-day train journey and an uncertain new home in Chernobyl.

Home, Work, and Belonging

Lena’s connection to Kyrgyzstan is rooted in an ordinary life built over years. She was born and raised there, helped build a factory, and later worked in it. The country is not presented as a temporary stop in her story but as the setting of her childhood, labor, marriage, and the births of her children. Her account of leaving therefore carries the weight of being driven from a place she helped build and sustain.

Her family’s identity complicates any simple description of who belongs there. Lena’s mother was Ukrainian, her father Russian, and her husband Tatar; she had been born and raised in Kyrgyzstan. Her children’s passports identified them as Russian, but she rejected that label as an adequate account of who they were. She described the family as Soviet, bound together by mixed ancestry and by a country that had since ceased to exist. In her telling, Kyrgyzstan is both a specific home and part of a vanished political world that had given her family a shared name.

Increasing Insecurity

Lena recalls an atmosphere in which Russian residents were told to go back where they came from and were treated as outsiders despite their lives in the country. At bread queues, she says, people would tell Russians to leave and push them out of line. She knew only a few words of Kyrgyz, learned so she could bargain and buy things at the market; this limited command of the language marks a practical barrier in daily life, as well as her precarious position within the society around her.

Her account also places that everyday exclusion against episodes of wider violence. She refers to massacres in Osh involving Kyrgyz and Uzbeks, saying that the situation had somehow settled down. Yet the apparent easing did not make her feel secure. She describes leaving as flight from a war, while distinguishing the danger she experienced from open warfare: people were not yet shooting in Kyrgyzstan, she says, but violence, fear, and the threat of being targeted had already reshaped ordinary life. She also recalls that Mikhail Gorbachev was in power during the massacres, anchoring the memory in the Soviet period just as the political identity she claimed was disappearing.

The Journey Out

The family left with what they could take, and their cat, Metelitsa, followed them to the train station. Lena brought the animal along rather than leave it behind. The journey by train lasted twelve days. By the final two days, the family had only canned cabbage salad and boiled water left, a sharp measure of how their resources dwindled as they moved away from Kyrgyzstan.

The danger continued en route. Lena says that one night looters attacked them and nearly killed them; her family guarded the door with a crowbar, an axe, and a hammer. She describes a world in which people could be killed for a television or refrigerator. The domestic objects they had to defend, and the basic food that ran out, give the flight a material reality: it was not a secure passage from one home to another but a prolonged effort to protect the children and survive.

A New Home and a Broken Homeland

Lena arrived with five children, from an oldest child in eighth grade to a youngest in kindergarten. She remembers that all were born of love, and recounts their births in sequence: three boys, then two girls. The family’s future is inseparable from the decision to take them out of Kyrgyzstan. When others asked whether bringing children to Chernobyl was like taking them to a place with cholera or plague, she said she was saving them, not killing them. The fear associated with Chernobyl, she added, was not part of her own memory.

She calls Chernobyl the family’s home and motherland now, while acknowledging the loss behind that choice. Her former country no longer existed, she says, but the family did. The account ends not with a recovery of the home left behind, but with a new, provisional sense of belonging: the birds are the same as elsewhere, and a Lenin statue remains. Kyrgyzstan thus stays present in the narrative as the home that shaped Lena’s life and that she could no longer inhabit, even as her family tries to make a home somewhere else.