The garden gate to Alla Dmitrievna’s house is always open to visitors. The quaint residence is more than just a home – the improvised museum contains some real pieces of history. “Those who want to can come in and take a walk around to enjoy the beauty. Some of them ask if they can take some photos. And I say, ‘you must!'”
The pond – complete with flowering lilies and red koi – is certainly worth a picture. A large collection of old frying pans, meat grinders, samovars, and kerosene lamps adds a rustic, vintage feel to the property. For Alla, they have sentimental value. “These are valuable. The most valuable are my pots because my mother had 10 children, so these are very valuable. This used to be a Russian brick stove.”
A pre-war era baby bath filled with blossoming forget-me-not stands in the sunshine. While indoors, the walls are adorned with washing boards, abacuses, and a special pin for ironing laundry. And half-hidden behind the neat hedges stands a trough – just like in the fairy tale of the Golden Fish. “I brought this trough from my mother,” explains Alla. “It probably belonged to my great-grandmother. Look at this beauty! And this thing is for washing laundry.”
This house – built in pre-war times – has been Alla Dmitrievna’s home for thirty years – and her collection of old household items has been growing the whole time. Two weather-worn busts of Lenin guard the well and cellar, while a third welcomes guests by the gate. This Pinocchio statue is also Lenin, in his early years. Alla found him in a pile of leaves while working at the city’s greenhouse. She painted the figure herself and even molded a cap, nose, and boots using cement. And her granddaughter Alisa says Alla can really work miracles. “This is a bald man; he stands in different cities, he’s handsome. In my grandmother’s hands, even a bald man can turn into a fairy tale character.”
Besides her antique collection, Alla Dmitrievna is also known in Sovetsk as a landscape designer. “She has kind hands and green fingers; that’s why everything she plants grows and grows well,” says Radzh Khamitov, superintendent of the local children’s home. “She planted some thuja trees in these triangles, as well as these flowers, all the creeping and curly ones – and those flower beds too.”
But Alla needed a new challenge. She set about cleaning up an empty plot of land opposite her house – even digging a ditch to channel off water so she could plant beautiful shrubs, lilacs, and fir trees. “I plant things, but people dig them up and steal them. I cry and plant them again. My neighbors say, ‘Alla, why do you need this? Just give up.’ I say, ‘I need to do it for everyone.'”
Alla Dmitrievna continues to take care of the green space, trimming the bushes and trees into fine shapes. While her husband and son have put up a bridge, benches, and a swing set – so that every local can come to relax and enjoy the results of Alla’s work for the community.