"We've nowhere to go in Russia and there's nothing to hope for here," said the 55-year-old miner's wife. "The only thing left is to work the land."
Since Kyrgyzstan and the former Soviet Central Asian republics declared independence from Moscow in 1991, millions of Russians have left the region they settled over centuries of Tsarist and Soviet rule, complaining as Lyubov does of discrimination and economic decline. Out of about one million Russians who lived in Kyrgyzstan in 1991, 400,000 remain today.
In this southern town, silicon factories built for a hoped-for hi-tech boom have been abandoned, leaving many Russians hand-digging for coal in mines that date from World War II, when Moscow turned to the region as a coal source safely far from Germany's advance. Compared to some neighbours Kyrgyzstan has been pragmatic about its Russian inheritance, having declared the state language to be Kyrgyz but given Russian the status of an "official" language, used for much day-to-day administration.
Now, though, some fear a nationalist upsurge as an alliance of opposition deputies recently rushed through parliament legislation that would clamp down on Russian-language media, require officials to pass Kyrgyz language exams and the parliament to use Kyrgyz.
President Askar Akayev has yet to approve the measures, but suggestions by one of his advisors that he may do so have prompted alarm among the Russian population and beyond.
A majority of parliament deputies and much of the state administration, both Russian and Kyrgyz, have not studied Kyrgyz, a Turkic language that has only a slender written tradition and was sidelined in Soviet times.
They see Russian as bridging differences between Kyrgyz and Russians and as helping their remote country catch up with the outside world.
The new proposals would not only keep Russians out of state institutions, but also force out the ethnic Kyrgyz who currently dominate them, said Oksana Malevanaya, one of the few Russian deputies in parliament.
Should the proposals pass, Malevanaya fears the rise of a new breed of nationalist politicians unused to the ethnic mixing that Soviet rule entailed.
In a recent parliament session they berated ethnic Russian Prime Minister Nikolai Tanayev in Kyrgyz, which he does not understand, and walked out in protest at parliament's use of Russian.
Some observers see signs of a compromise emerging and are reassured by the pro-Russian tendencies Akayev has shown - allowing, for example, Russia to open an airbase near Bishkek, not far from a base Washington opened after the September 11 attacks for strikes against Afghanistan. But the row suggests that Akayev's Russia-friendly policy course may be under threat ahead of 2005, when he has vowed to stand down.