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February 18-24, 2006
A winter's tale
What the snows of Moscow reveal about modern Russia
Moscow
Summary prepared by Hayk Sargsyan of CDI
On the wall of Andrei Pentukhov's office is a large map of Moscow. Black marks are scattered across it, clustering especially around the railway stations to the north-east of the city center. Each black spot represents a person found dead of hypothermia in the streets. Mr. Pentukhov, who works for the municipal social-services department, explains that hypothermic corpses turn up even in August, after drunks tumble into puddles. Most of the black spots, however, appear on the map during the winter. Muscovites have a name for the bodies that emerge when the snow thaws; they call them “snowdrops”.
The problems and peculiarities of Moscow's homeless reflect Russia's dramatic recent history. First, their sheer numbers, which, like many of Russia's problems, are as outsized as the country itself. Those numbers have declined since the early 1990s, but even conservative estimates say there are still 10,000 souls sleeping on the city's streets or in temporary digs; some put the figure many times higher. Just as striking is the paucity of public provision for them. Peter the Great decreed that vagrants should be beaten and exiled to Siberia; in Soviet times, homelessness was, in effect, illegal. Today, the city provides around 1,500 hostel beds, says Mr. Pentukhov, who insists that no one is turned away in winter. Others are sceptical. The special causes of Moscow's homelessness are telling, too. As in other countries, many rough-sleepers are ex-convicts. But others are victims of the economic turmoil of the 1990s—first the chaos and hyperinflation that followed the Soviet Union's disintegration, then the default and devaluation of 1998. Some traded their apartments for vodka, or were swindled out of them and have slept rough since.
In winter, Moscow's homeless sleep in the stairwells of residential buildings, ringing on all the buzzers until someone inadvertently lets them in, then pretending to be asleep when residents pass by. The homeless adults share these with another group that is symptomatic of Russia's post-Soviet condition: Moscow's street children, products of the widespread family breakdown that the collapse of the Soviet empire and the end of communism brought with them. In 2002, Vladimir Putin, Russia's president, declared that the problem of child homelessness in Russia had reached “threatening proportions”. The nation's runaways then numbered in the millions. New shelters were opened, and the police were given powers to pick up homeless youngsters. Yet last year the interior minister declared that Russia was living through a new wave of child homelessness, comparable to those induced by the civil war and the Second World War.
There are perils besides the drugs and the rival gangs, especially during the winter. Like some handicapped people, homeless children are forced by criminals to beg or steal, says Alexei Nikiforov of MSF. But the biggest problem is the police and their brutality. And the hardest time is the middle of the night, when the station administrators are away and the policemen get drunk.
As is the case with homeless people in other countries, only more so, lack of a fixed address and of proper identity documents makes escaping the streets of Moscow difficult. Last year, according to the federal migration service, 750,000 work permits were issued for foreigners to work in Russia. But 10m-14m people, the service reckons, are in the country illegally. The vast majority come from Russia's ex-Soviet neighbours, where living standards fell further and faster when the Soviet economy disintegrated than in Russia itself. In the West, Russia is seen as a middle-income country with important raw materials and a few extravagant oligarchs; in Central Asia and the Caucasus, it is considered the land of opportunity.
Like many economic migrants around the world, those who make for Moscow tend to be aspirational and moderately well-educated, but see their social status dip when they arrive as they take up jobs that native Muscovites balk at. Refusal to pay salaries is a common scam on the construction sites that soak up much of the immigrant influx during the spring and summer. Muhammad Islamov came to Moscow from Uzbekistan, looking, he says, for political asylum. For six years he has been living in barracks. Last winter, he worked clearing away the snow for a group of dachas outside the city: “heavy work”, Mr Islamov says. Then last summer, he and five other men worked for three months building a dacha. They were given enough food, he says, to stop them dying of hunger, but were paid “not a kopek”. When the work was done, he says, all six of them were arrested and beaten by riot police, who, he believes were in league with the contractor. Mr Islamov has a minutely itemised account of his unremunerated work, scale drawings of the dacha, and a hospital report about the damage to his ribs from the alleged beating, plus copies of his fruitless correspondence with local prosecutors about the swindle.
But he is better off than some. The trouble, says Gauhar Dzhuraeva of the Tajikistan Foundation, a group which helps immigrants in difficulty, is that if a worker is not properly registered, “after three days you can do what you want with him.” Without the proper documents, immigrants are liable to deportation if stopped by the police. And they are likely to be stopped: a monitoring project by a human-rights organisation, borrowing its methodology from racial-profiling research in America, found that Central Asian and Caucasian immigrants are 21 times more likely to be questioned by the police in metro stations than are Slavs. As a result, many are confined to modern-day urban gulags. Passports are often confiscated by employers; sexual slavery and the sale of human beings are not uncommon. Some in Russia, including in the federal migration service, want to do something about this system, or the lack of one—for Russia's benefit, if not for the migrants themselves. Russia has the demography of a country at war: its population is shrinking at the rate of around 750,000 people a year. Only managed immigration can fill its medium-term need for able-bodied adults. The migration service has been experimenting with the “legalisation” of migrants in pilot regions across Russia. It is lobbying for a comprehensive government scheme to bring people in, and for a simplified registration system.
Glamour amid despair Unfortunately, as Elena Tyuryukanova, an expert on migration at the Russian Academy of Sciences, delicately puts it, the interests of the state, and of particular individuals who represent it, are not aligned. In other words, the current shambles may simply be too profitable to scrap.
A deported migrant cannot return to Russia for five years. This makes the threat of deportation an extremely lucrative one for the police to wield. Even if a foreigner's registration documents are real, says Mr Islamov the Uzbek, policemen are liable to seize them and demand a bribe: “These are our rights,” he says ironically. Fitting migrants up on drugs charges—or threatening to—is another earner. Many migrant workers, it is said, have taken to sewing up small amounts of money in their coats, to have something left over after they are frisked. Ms Dzhuraeva says that 70% of the problems she deals with involve the police.
There are other predators. Ms Tyuryukanova says that the complexion of the immigrant community is changing, as the proportion that comes from Central Asia rises and the quotient from Slavic Ukraine falls. Thus the “cultural distance” between the mass of newcomers and the host community is widening. At the time of the riots in France last year, Russian commentators voiced anxieties about the growing, unintegrated foreign communities living in the capital. But in truth the risk of insurrection by Moscow's unorganised, beleaguered Uzbeks and Tajiks seems slim.
Conversely, their chances of suffering violence are rising. The Tajik Foundation has a horrific video of Russian yobs beating a Tajik man to death in a Moscow school-yard early in the winter. Skinhead violence is booming in Russia, a vicious corollary of the increasingly strident nationalism of mainstream politics. A number of foreign students have been murdered in St Petersburg; a man from Mali was killed there two weeks ago.
Other migrants meet less dramatic ends on the snowy streets of Moscow. Nearly half its homeless have come to the city from outside Russia—especially, says Mr Pentukhov, the social-services manager, from Tajikistan and Ukraine. They come looking for work, then run out of money and can't get home. Some finish up among the “snowdrops” of the thaw. And work itself can be perilous, especially in the winter, when workers clamber across roofs clearing the snow and scraping off icicles, often without safety harnesses.
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