Russians in Despair at Street Urchins’ Plight

MOSCOW — Kristina was 5 when she was found curled on a barroom floor, pockmarked from syphilis and terrified of affection.

Fifteen-year-old Zhenya, who makes his home on a grime-caked heating vent, asked shyly for something to read--”science fiction, preferably”--to fill his school-less, aimless, hopeless days.

Nine-year-old Masha urinated behind a trash heap, a moment of escape from a broken family.

For many Russians, these children are cause to despair at the future of their country. Lurching from uncaring homes to underfunded orphanages to alleys haunted by drug dealers and pimps, these neglected children--estimated to number up to 3 million--are making up an increasing share of Russia’s shrinking population.

Investors and politicians boast that long-suffering Russia is at last prospering. Economic indicators show growing incomes, and Moscow’s streets glisten with boutiques.

But these street children embody the hardships Russia has suffered since shedding communist rule a decade ago: mass poverty, loss of social and family security, growth of crime and alcoholism, decline in health care, wars in Chechnya and former Soviet republics.

Long overlooked by the country’s leadership, the children’s plight recently caught President Vladimir Putin’s eye, and he chided his government for allowing their number to reach “threatening proportions.”

Soviet authorities had a swift and brutal solution to the problem of street urchins. When orphans flooded the streets after the Bolshevik Revolution and after World War II, they were transported to labor camps and factories.

In later years, the police state routinely made troubled children vanish into orphanages or institutions for the disabled. Post-Soviet freedoms and economic turmoil have let the problem explode into the open.

Since 1999, Russian police have been barred from picking up wayward children unless they commit a crime. Yet bureaucratic confusion has meant the social services expected to take responsibility for at-risk families have accomplished little.

Child welfare workers welcome Putin’s concern, but wonder whether he will commit as much energy to mending Russia’s frayed society as he does to waging a war in Chechnya.

“We can wash them, feed them, dress them, and tell them that they are loved,” said Irina Abramova, director of the Children’s Crisis Center in the Moscow suburb of Lyubertsy. “That is not enough to heal the illnesses of today’s society.”

In the hallway of a Moscow children’s shelter, Masha jerked up from a reading assignment when she heard a familiar voice. Breathless, the 9-year-old ran to embrace her mother, Galina. It was their first encounter since social workers had found the girl at the trash heap and brought her to the shelter four weeks earlier.

Masha stroked her mother’s dirt-caked fingernails and tugged on the drawstring of her baggy green jacket. “Why don’t you come to see me?” she pleaded.

Galina Filipenko’s watery eyes rarely met her daughter’s. Her voice was clear but her words held little conviction. She brandished documents appealing for state welfare payments and explaining how her apartment building had been demolished and she had been unable to find adequate housing. They described her estrangement from Masha’s father, who provides no financial support.

“I’ll come back with chocolates for you, my sweet little girl,” she said as she departed.

Many Russian children enjoy more adult attention than their Western counterparts. They often live with grandparents as well as parents. Education is paramount even in many poor families (It’s noteworthy that both Masha and the sci-fi-loving Zhenya can read.) Families that have prospered in post-Soviet Russia, meanwhile, are sending children to upscale shopping malls and European boarding schools.

But that’s scant comfort to Yevgeny Gontmasser, head of the Cabinet’s social development department. According to him, about 150,000 to 200,000 children in Russia are technically homeless. But more alarming, he said, is that an overwhelming 3 million children have homes so dreadful that they sometimes prefer the streets, and parents too poor, drunk, violent, or mentally or physically unable to raise them.

That means nearly 10% of Russia’s 32 million children are neglected--and the proportion is rising.

The average monthly wage of $140 a month barely feeds and clothes one child. As a result, Russians are having few children, and the population has shriveled by 2.2% to 144.9 million in the past decade. Meanwhile, more and more children are born to poor single mothers, according to official figures.

Some simply go missing. Anya, 15, hasn’t shown up at home since mid-January, or at school, or at the police station in her Lyubertsy neighborhood.

Her mother, Yevgenia Nurova, missing several front teeth and with failing eyesight, feels her way around their single room in a communal apartment. The room reeks of grain alcohol. The cracked window lets in freezing drafts of wind. A single bed sags between a rusty refrigerator and a heap of stained underwear.

Nurova once worked as a teacher but her eye troubles ended that. “My eyes are guilty of everything,” she said, including Anya’s unwillingness to come home.

Her husband discovered that drug-dealing dramatically boosted the family’s income--until he was imprisoned when Anya was 12.

“The overall problem will take years to solve. This will last as long as in the country there is such huge stratification of our economy, such a difference between rich and poor,” Gontmasser said.

At Moscow’s Kazansky train station, police officers lament that when they see a preschooler sniffling alone in a darkened corridor, all they can do is watch.

Fostering is new to Russia, and adoption is a social stigma. Just 7,000 of Russia’s orphans were adopted in 2000, according to the Labor and Social Development Ministry. Nearly as many Russian children were adopted by foreigners--more than 4,000 of those by Americans.

“These children are so damaged, who would take them?” Abramova asked.

Overcrowded orphanages and shelters have just a fraction of the state financing of Soviet times.

The churches, crippled by decades of state-sponsored atheism, rarely step in. Charities are scarce, because few Russians are rich enough to support them and punitive tax laws scare off corporate sponsors.

There are exceptions, as 14-year-old Denis Yegorov and 15-year-old Zhenya Kurashov have discovered. On Wednesdays and Thursdays, they get a free lunch at the Church of Saints Kozma and Demyan across from the Moscow mayor’s office. The Center for Humanitarian Aid also offers free meals and second-hand clothes to Moscow’s homeless. Foreign aid groups such as Doctors Without Borders and the Red Cross are active too.

Denis and Zhenya sleep on or under a heating vent between Red Square and the country’s largest hotel, the Rossiya.

In the predawn chill, pulling his knitted cap down to shade a bruise he won’t explain, Denis describes daily life: “We guard parked cars for 30 rubles [a dollar]. We beg cigarettes off passersby. We evade the police.”

Police have been rounding up street kids since Putin ordered action, sending them to hospitals and overcrowded holding cells. “They ignore the law,” Denis claimed, citing police beatings he has suffered and witnessed.

Many of Russia’s street children are in Moscow, but most weren’t born in the teeming capital, city council statistics show. Instead they come from atrophying industrial towns, or are fleeing the violence in Chechnya or Tajikistan. Denis came from the town of Nerekhty northeast of Moscow where few of the men he knows are employed and ultranationalist violence is rife.

Gontmasser wants the law changed to strengthen school oversight and make it easier to take children away from abusive parents. Other government officials want less police interference and simplified adoption procedures.

Abramova wants better pay for social workers, who now earn as little as 600 rubles ($20) a month.

The Lyubertsy crisis center is trying to do more than stopgap measures that feed the children but leave them drifting. Helped by European donors who supplement meager state funding, the center offers a school, clean beds, doctors and psychologists, and a basement youth club.

“We must help our children now because in the years to come they will be our leaders,” said Boris Altshuler, director of the Right of the Child advocacy group. “In this way we are building the future of the country.”