This article seeks to contribute to our understandings of old age in historical context through its focus on the experiences of and perceptions about older people in late Imperial Russian villages. Elderly people feature as an integral part of Russian rural family life in literary and in scholarly accounts, and are predominantly framed as able, skilled, omniscient community members. Constructions of old age that see the elderly retaining physical prowess and community leadership overlook the lived realities of ageing. As elderly people lost physical and mental capacity, they slipped out of view in the Russian village, desexed, unseen and unremarked. The experience of the frail elderly allows us to explore the values accorded individuals within rural communities, and the extent to which families, communities and legal structures could and did intervene in the private sphere
