24.9.05: mystery of the metro-babushkas

I guess it’s a hangover from the CCCP’s glory days. Or maybe just an outlet for some of the more creative minds at work within Russia’s vast bureaucratic übermachine. Whatever the reason, Moscow’s streets are awash with the human products of a multitude of job creation schemes. You see them everywhere: teams of workmen who sweep up the autumn leaves in between tower blocks; young militia lads ‘standing guard’ around the metro; security guards at fruit markets. The list goes on.

Easily my favourites, though, are the babushkas* who sit in little booths at the bottom of every large escalator inside the major metro stations.

My flatmate Reinhardt and I have theorised at some length about what it is these ladies actually do, what function they serve. Haven’t managed to puzzle out a definitive job description for them yet. Here's the current crop of theories:

EMERGENCY MANAGEMENT

According to this hypothesis, every booth contains a large on/off switch, which the babushka must operate if, for example, a female commuter gets her stiletto heel stuck in a groove and is sucked underneath one of the escalators. (Enormous high heels are typically the workaday choice of the lady Muscovite.)

LIGHTING MALFUNCTION EARLY WARNING SYSTEM

In this scenario, the babushka keeps a close eye on the scores of vertical fluorescent tubes lining her escalator shaft, and informs maintenance people if a globe blows. (An adjunct to this theory is the idea that the babushka herself will throw her emergency switch to “off” every few days or so, go up the escalator and scrape any errant particles of grime from the fluorescent tubes with a pocket knife.)

SLEEPER AGENTS

I personally like the idea that the babushkas are actually there to make sure no tourist takes any happy snaps of things they shouldn’t be photographing, and will inform the militia of any transgressions to the unwritten (and apparently arbitrary) rules about this.

To explain my choice of the word "arbitrary" here: on quite a few occasions I’ve asked the women in booths mozh’na mnye fatagrafeeravat v stantsye? (“May I take photographs inside the station?”, or at least something not too far removed from that). The first time I did this, the response seemed to be along the lines of “Don’t be silly, of course you can!” Since then I've twice had a "yes", while the rest of the time the answer has been a stern and disapproving “no” (which makes the photo on this page a tiny bit illegal - depending on which babushka you talk to, of course).

Hmmm.

WASTE CONTROL

This theory goes that, once in a while, the babushka will reluctantly leave her booth and sweep metro tickets into a little pile, which southern gentlemen in iridescent orange workmen’s vests will later come along and remove.

The waste control hypothesis is weakened somewhat by the fact that, while walking through Bibliotheka Imeny Lenina station one night, I watched a swarm of middle-aged women (not booth babushkas, but the beneficiaries of some other job creation scheme) busily cleaning. They were leaning over the wood-panelled areas between escalators and dragging huge cloths along the surfaces, wiping off a day’s worth of dust and skin oils. So I’m thinking that either they would handle stray tickets as well, or there’d be someone else doing that. (I’d love to know if all of these jobs have titles and, if so, what they are.)

Still, I wouldn't discount the waste control theory altogether. Russian authorities appear to like the word "control" every bit as much as their German counterparts, so any role which has that word in the job title could seem worthwhile inventing.

If anyone can help me get to the bottom of this mystery, I’d very much appreciate it. Hold off for a couple of weeks, though; Reinhardt and I are having fun speculating!

* Brief linguistic aside: I’ve noticed that a lot of people understand the word babushka to mean “baby”, while others think it refers to those dolls that fit inside one another. Just to be sure we achieve mutual understanding in this rather silly blog entry, let me clear that up: babushka means “grandmother”. (The nesting dolls are matryoshka.)