A People on the Brink

Over the past century, the ancient people known as the Votes has been exiled twice, has seen its language banned, and has faced the threat of having its villages razed. Today, although teetering on the verge of extinction, it holds fast to one of the last rights it enjoys – the right to bear and to say its own name.

- Anastasiya Platonova

Zinaida Savelyeva is of pure Vote descent on both sides. She is the last fluent speaker of her native language, and knows its songs and poems by heart.

Living alone since her husband’s death, Zinaida often spends her evenings in the dark. The electricity has been turned off and the candle on the windowsill lights up only a portion of the table. Without her, the village of Krakolye in Leningrad Oblast would be a ghost town in winter. There are few true locals left, the seasonal residents have fled the frigid weather, and Krakolye is a wilderness of shuttered houses. The village is slowly dying, and that process was only accelerated when the school was moved to nearby Ust-Luga.

And when Zinaida goes to bed, she might lie awake for hours. Heavy building equipment is operating close by, and the noise is bad. Something – a gas pipeline, a road, a port – is always under construction around here. The thumping and thudding make it hard to fall asleep.

The 1950s: Peski (Liivcyla)

The sixteen-year-old Zinaida and her mother came home to the village of Peski in 1954. They had walked the whole way from the Estonian city of Narva, driving a cow before them. But they were not the only ones; other family members had left Narva earlier.

The trip took several days. The two women spent one night bedded down on sheaves of hay by the roadside and then, when they were almost home, they had stopped in to see relatives in a neighboring village.

A lot had changed in ten years. The village’s wartime military base was gone. Peski’s tall wooden church where Zinaida was baptized had been dismantled and moved to the settlement that had sprung up around the fish processing plant. Once there, it had been retrofitted to house a club and a library.