The Girl with the Calf

Far, far beyond the Urals, in a small village lost somewhere among the fields, stands a monument that almost nothing is known about. A young woman in a simple dress is giving a calf a drink. It seems as if they had just been left in the yard for a minute — only this minute has now lasted several decades.

Once, life here was entirely different. The Soviet village was built around kolkhozes and sovkhozes, and farming was not just work — it was part of a much larger story, the state's story. Farms were created, cowsheds were built, machinery appeared, people rose early in the morning and went to work. A girl giving a calf a drink was a perfectly natural symbol of this world: young, hardworking, and confident in the future.

Decades passed. The sovkhozes disappeared, the cowsheds fell silent, the machinery left, and the future turned out to be nothing like the one they had imagined. But the girl remained. She stands just as before, the calf drinks just as before, and at first glance, nothing has changed. Only now, it is not simply a monument to rural labor. It is a little scene from a world that no longer exists.

Kurgan Oblast, Russia.
May, 2014.
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