Feed Them and Beat Them: Homeless in Moscow

© Photo : © Kursky Station. The Homeless Children“Media exposure can be dangerous for the homeless, some of whom are beaten by well-off citizens venting their own fears.”
“Media exposure can be dangerous for the homeless, some of whom are beaten by well-off citizens venting their own fears.” - Sputnik International
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“I don’t understand opera, but I like jazz,” Mikhail says as he trudges toward the bus. “Baroque jazz, and cosmic jazz, you know? They’ve got synthesizers and everything.”

“I don’t understand opera, but I like jazz,” Mikhail says as he trudges toward the bus. “Baroque jazz, and cosmic jazz, you know? They’ve got synthesizers and everything.”

You wouldn’t peg Mikhail for a jazz aficionado if you met him at Moscow’s Paveletsky train station, lining up for free food in his worn black jacket that all men sport here along with the other homeless.

He really came to ask charity volunteers for 600 rubles ($20) for a ticket home. He is visibly relieved to receive the modest sum and chats incessantly in the ticket line. The mood only changes once, when Mikhail asks with an inward look: “You ever begged in the streets? It’s hard. It’s not for everyone.”

Mikhail, a man in his fifties with a higher education, traveled to Moscow from a town in central Russia to get a job, but the deal fell through and all his papers were stolen, leaving him stranded and making his story a case study for the city’s homeless.

Employment problems provide a steady trickle of new recruits for Moscow’s homeless army, though disintegrating family life, illegal migration and abusive authorities or fraudsters who prey on vulnerable apartment owners also contribute, charity activists said.

Food, clothes and first aid became available in recent years to those living in the streets of Moscow, thanks to combined grassroots and official efforts.

But long-term rehabilitation for victims of social exclusion, a delicate psychological process, often remains out of reach for the inexperienced social services and under-resourced charities, said Eleonore Senlis, vice president of the SAMU Social Moskva charity foundation.

Moreover, the society at large is not ready to accept the homeless because most Russians subconsciously fear to end up in their place and project their fears on the people in the streets, said Anna Fedotova, an Orthodox Christian charity activist.

Job, Family & Other Disasters

The average Moscow homeless person is a man of about 40, a native of the provinces with no college education, a criminal record and drinking problems, Andrei Pentyukhov, who supervises aid for the homeless at the City Hall, said at a conference in March.

Street dwellers number an estimate 10,000 to 12,000, a small fraction of the city’s populace of 11.5 million, according to city officials. An improvised poll held by RIA Novosti among several Muscovites showed they believed the figure much higher, with one respondent cautiously speaking about a million beggars. By contrast, New York City had some 41,000 homeless out of a population of 8.1 million as of October 2011, according to Coalition for the Homeless group.

Many future homeless come to Moscow to get a job but fail to hold on to it, often due to fraudulent employers, said Fedotova, who works for a charity called “Kursky Station. The Homeless Children.”

Some have no means of getting home, but many just do not want to go back because nothing is waiting for them other than ridicule and unemployment, charity activists said.

Trouble happens in the capital, too. “They raided our textile factory in Moscow, you know? We did the best tapestries, but no, the land was too good. Now it’s all offices there,” says Maral, a Kazakh woman pushing 60.

After the alleged takeover, Maral spent some years in Nizhny Novgorod, where she has an apartment, but rented it out and went to Moscow in search of employment after her mother fell ill in Kazakhstan. Now she is lining up for free food along with Mikhail the jazz enthusiast.

Many homeless have residences on paper, but were in fact kicked out by their cohabitants or tricked into selling it cheap by fraudulent real estate agents who ply such clients with booze, said Maria Ovchinnikova of SAMU Social Moskva.

“There’s an influx of migrants too. We’ve got a real International out there,” said Fedotova. “We’ve had people from all over CIS, a German, and even a Cuban.”

Social Exclusion

Living in the street can scar people as deeply as the horrors of war or drug addiction, Fedotova said.

“We had this retired KGB colonel from Mordovia once,” she said, referencing an impoverished region in Volga Federal District. “He needed a ticket home. He fought in Africa and Afghanistan, and he had grey hair and all, but he just stood there and cried, saying he wants to go to his mother.”

There are four stages of social exclusion, according to French doctor and homeless rights activist Xavier Emmanuelli. You begin with rebellion against the society that discards you; then come the depression and self-loathing, then the self-deceiving belief that living in the streets is a free choice. At the final stage, you just give up.

“It’s an epidemic that has been on a rampage since the 1970s,” Emmanuelli, co-founder of Doctors Without Borders and SAMU Social, originally a French charity, said at the conference on the homeless in Moscow in March. “It’s present in big cities everywhere.”

Soup on the Sleeve

Pouring soup is harder than it seems. It’s windy, the plastic bowls are frail, and the dozens of people waiting for a helping make you nervous, a lot of soup spilling on your sleeves under their watchful eyes.

But the crowd is as polite as in any Moscow hipster café, and perhaps more, and once you get the hang of it, you become an automaton dispensing warm soup, potatoes, vinaigrette and tea.

The job leaves a fuzzy feeling, but the thanks are embarrassing: the people who come to Paveletsky for the free food speak of it in somber, quivering voices usually reserved for weddings, funerals and other life-changing occasions. Perhaps it was one of those, though.

The Kursk Station charity said it serves some 1,000 helping of food a week during their regular tours of Moscow train stations.

“The officials doubted at first that it is needed, but then they saw we were right,” said Fedotova. Her charity is the most prominent among several Christian groups catering to basic needs of the Moscow homeless.

A Place to Rest

The city does not sit idle either: There are currently eight state-run homeless shelters in Moscow, capable of housing almost 1,500 people.

Luxuries available at the shelter include food, medical and legal help, and, most importantly, sleep – the most precious thing for people who do not have a place to rest and can almost never afford more than a couple hours of shuteye before some policeman or official kicks them out from their park bench.

“That first night, I slept at the bus stop on Kursky train station,” the homeless Maral recalled. “People kept on driving by and demanding blowjobs from me. Turned out it was a spot for the prostitutes. One horndog grabbed me by the coattails. I told him, I’m old enough to be your granny!”

Since 2009, the city has also run the Social Patrol, a fledging service currently comprising 15 motorized teams of medics and psychologists who reach out to the homeless in the streets instead of waiting for them to come to the shelters.

“They recognize our vans and flock to them, and you know how hard it is to win the homeless’ trust,” Social Patrol head Andrei Mudritsky said in a proud tone at the conference in March.

Muscovites can stay in the shelter for a year, getting long-term help with their psychological and employment problems, Sergei Logunov, the head of the City Hall social security department, said in emailed comments.

People from the provinces can only stay around for a month, though they can seek help with tickets home and often-missing paperwork. But no one is helping them look for a job.

Rules & Motivations

However, rehabilitation of homeless is an intricate and drawn-out process that often takes years and is in no way limited to food, sleep and other attributes of the bottom level of Maslow’s pyramid of needs.

“Everybody has a different story,” said Senlis of SAMU Social. “Everybody needs different help.”

But the help available in Moscow is not nearly diverse enough, said Ovchinnikova of SAMU Social. For example, there are no advisers for people with drinking problems, and no day centers where people can just spend some time in others’ company without worries – a crucial factor for the early stages of rehabilitation.

Many employees of the homeless shelters are retired army recruits, who are bad psychological advisers, to put it mildly, Senlis said. In a telling analogy, life in the shelters is subject to a myriad of regulations, army-style, which puts off many homeless who have bad experiences of dealing with rules and authorities.

“The system is aimed at the perfect homeless who doesn’t drink, follows rules and has motivated himself,” said Fedotova of Kursk Station charity. “No one is asking them what they really can or want to do.”

Count Out a Begging Bowl

The world outside is of little help. A 2008 survey by Levada Center think tank – the latest poll available – showed that 59 percent of the populace thought helping the homeless is the government’s job, 13 percent believed it all was the outcasts’ own fault, and 9 percent wanted the police to “clean the cities” from beggars. Only 13 percent said helping the down-on-their-luck was a moral obligation.

KursK Station charity activists are reluctant to let the homeless in their care be photographed, saying public exposure in the past has ended up in the homeless being beaten. It happens often without the photos, too.

“If you’re homeless, you’re guilty by default,” Fedotova said.

“People vent their own fear and frustration with the higher-ups on those whom they can reach,” she said.

“[Ordinary] people don’t want to see what they themselves could have become,” agreed Senlis.

SAMU Social is working to change that: the group holds seminars with the Social Patrol service staff and plans to teach courses on social exclusion at leading Moscow colleges, reaching out to the country’s future entrepreneurs and decision makers.

“The people need to understand social exclusion for what it is,” Senlis said. “It’s nothing to be ashamed of, every country has it.”

But society is slow to change, and spreading awareness of homeless’ plight does nothing to change the economic problems that bring them to the lower depths, said Fedotova.

“We’ve seen a lot of wide-eyed girls come to us just to help the homeless. In a year, they’re all turning human rights activists. It’s inevitable,” she said.

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