russian homeless really screwed

Without an address to show residency it's almost impossible to find work in Moscow or to have a valid ID issued, without these you are homeless; seems like a pretty hopeless cycle.

In Russia Homeless Means Nearly Hopeless

Created: 16.06.2005 15:35 MSK (GMT +3), Updated: 18:06 MSK

MosNews

Foreigners coming to Moscow are often struck by how different homeless street beggars are from what they are used to seeing at home — if they are used to it at all. Seated on ripped cardboard and begging for spare change are women with children, an unusual sight for a Westerner. In reality, these sad-looking women and dirt-smudged toddlers usually belong to the clan of roaming professional beggars. Russians who are truly homeless are mostly male and rarely beg; they are usually people who have lost their place in life after doing time or fallen victim to real estate con artists, and their frequent alcoholism, combined with social rejection, keep them from ever surfacing and having a normal life again.

“Abroad, the issue of the homeless is 90% an issue of unemployment,” says Andrey Pentyukhov of Moscow City’s Department for Social Help to the Homeless. The people his institution is trying to help are in much deeper trouble than being out of work. In Russia, where there are no social security numbers, for all legal purposes, people are identified by their legal registered address. A legal address is required to get a job in the first place — or to get social benefits a person might otherwise be entitled to.

“We must legalize the homeless as society’s citizens,” Pentyukhov says. “Right now if they don’t have a home, if they don’t have registration — they can’t get employed, or get disability status, they can’t do anything. Without a home, you’re nobody.”

Some services — like getting official ID reissued — are supposed to be available without a legal place of residence. According to Pentyukhov, 70% of all homeless don’t have any ID. Even if they do scrounge up the money for photographs and passport fees, their application for a new passport (which is the main form of identification in Russia) is likely to be arbitrarily rejected by the local passport office, where the officials might not want to deal with a homeless person. “They tell them, go away, you’re not registered here. Even though they are obliged to take the application and issue a passport,” Pentyukhov said.

The department works on a voluntary basis, helping everyone who comes and asks for help. They offer shelter, food, clothes, help in recovering lost documents, help with employment, alcoholism treatment programs, and legal help to those who lost their apartments because of fraudulent real estate sales — in other words, everything to help reintegrate the homeless back into society. Their facilities can house up to 1,512 people. With the city’s homeless population estimated at 30,000, one might expect people beating down the office doors.

Not so. There are usually about 400-500 spots available, Pentyukhov says. “They don’t want to live a normal life,” he complains. 85% of his charges are men, and 70% suffer from alcoholism — which is a disease, he underscores, but one that can only be cured with the patient’s cooperation. Because shelter rules forbid drinking and demand that all able-bodied individuals try and hold down a job, alcoholics who don’t succeed in their rehab treatment are once again out in the street.

Currently, Russians have little compassion for the homeless. Last winter, I came across a homeless man lying face down in the street. People hurried by without stopping. When I stopped to touch him, another man stopped after seeing my puzzled face. A couple more people stopped and helped to turn him over. Apparently, he just walked down the street, slipped on the ice and cracked his head open. He was dead — no one had stopped to help him out.

Pentyukhov would like to see Russian society as a whole change this callous attitude toward the homeless, who are usually contemptuously referred to as bomzh, or bums. “If you call someone a bum, it means they’re social waste. But they’re people just like us, with their own problems and diseases that must be treated.”