THE FACEBOOK DRAMA THAT’S BROUGHT RUSSIANS TO TEARS

Big News Network, Australia
March 19 2015

RFE Thursday 19th March, 2015

Elderly Russian women — universally known as “babushki” — don’t
often have the distinction of becoming Internet sensations.

But that all changed this week, when 73-year-old Lida Ivanovna was
spotted staring wistfully at a celebrity tabloid in a vending machine
at a Moscow subway station.

Aleksandr Chernykh, a journalist with the Kommersant newspaper,
noticed Lida — “an absolute classic of her type, dressed in an old
coat and a colorful head scarf” — and asked if she needed money to
buy the magazine.

She declined. It wasn’t the tabloid she was after — just the cover,
which featured a photograph of one of her favorite singers, the
French-Armenian crooner Charles Aznavour, famous for songs such as
Emmenez-moi, or Take Me Along.

“He’s so handsome,” Chernykh, in a lengthy Facebook post, later
recounted her as saying. “I really love his songs.”

As Lida and Chernykh got on the subway escalator, Lida Ivanovna
elaborated, enthusing about not only Aznavour but another French
singer-songwriter, Joe Dassin, whose 1969 hit Les Champs Elysees
remains a beloved favorite of many Russians.

Suddenly, Lida burst into song, moving from Les Champs Elysees to
the dreamy Dassin hit Et Si Tu N’Existais Pas and finishing with Je
Ne Regrette Rien by the legendary French chanteuse Edith Piaf.

“It was even more piercing than Piaf’s version…. She turned out
to have a wonderful voice and amazing French pronunciation,” wrote
Chernykh, who managed to film a brief clip of Lida Ivanovna singing
another Piaf number, Milord.

Asked where she had learned her French, the babushka said in the
1960s, while still in her 20s, she had spent many happy hours at the
library, where visitors could reserve a special cabinet and listen
to records. “You would go, listen to records through earphones, and
you’d remember everything,” Chernykh quotes her as saying. “It was
a very fashionable thing to do. We all went.”

Chernykh gave her his telephone number, hoping he could record her
again or even escort her to an Aznavour concert she had seen advertised
on the magazine cover.

But as they parted, he assumed it was the last he would see of Lida
Ivanovna. He wrote up the fleeting encounter and posted it and the
video on Facebook, where it quickly drew nearly 400,000 viewers
enchanted by Lida Ivanovna’s story.

“This story brought me to tears,” wrote one user. “Now Lida will no
longer be lonely. Simply an incredible elderly lady.” Another reader
wrote, “Thank you for not walking past this babushka.” “Bravo! There
are still kind souls in Russia,” a third wrote.

It wasn’t just Russians captivated by Lida Ivanovna’s story.

Organizers for the 90-year-old Aznavour, who is due to perform in
Moscow on April 22, wrote to Chernykh, saying the singer wanted to
personally meet her backstage.

Since then, Aznavour has posted an online video from his home in
France, in which he pledges to lower ticket prices so that elderly
fans might find it easier to go.

The news delighted Russians following the story. But without a phone
number — she had said she didn’t have a phone — Chernykh had no
guarantee he would ever find her again.

But his Facebook post did the trick. Within 24 hours, journalists
from the Armenian news site Barev Today had their with Lida Ivanovna,
whom they recognized from Chernykh’s video.

Chernykh was contacted by Barev Today and was delighted to have another
chance to speak to Lida Ivanovna, who he continues to identify only
by her name and patronym. They sat in a McDonald’s and talked until
midnight. She was a Moscow native, divorced, and had worked as an
accountant. Her father and brother had died in World War II.

Now she shared a tiny flat with her granddaughter, her granddaughter’s
husband, and their baby. “Probably, in order not to bother her family,
she spends the entire day walking around the center of Moscow,”
Chernykh recounted in a subsequent Facebook account, saying she knows
the names and stories of all the street musicians she encounters.

But told about the offer of tickets from Aznavour, Lida Ivanovna flatly
refused. “I’m not in good health, I have headaches, how would I be
able to sit there so long?” she told Chernykh. “And all the people
around me will be beautifully dressed, and I have nothing to wear.

They’ll ask, ‘What is this toothless old lady doing here?'”

Chernykh says he still hopes to persuade her to change her mind. Even
if he fails, the chance meeting has clearly left him in a philosophical
mood about the fate of Russia’s elderly, who live largely in the
shadows.

“She worked all her life, never left Moscow, just lived and sang —
an ordinary person. But see what kind of unexpected magic can happen
to all of us. A world-famous French singer wants to meet a Moscow
babushka in a head scarf. Such stories are taking place in our city.”