The Other Side Of the City's Party

For tens of thousands of Moscow's homeless people, now is a time not for celebration but for fear.


Bryon MacWilliams reports.It was a Friday night, either March 14 or March 21. Kirsan Bagmayev is not certain of the date. What is known is that temperatures were at a marrow chilling minus 12 degrees Celsius as several homeless men, among them Bagmayev, slept in the entrance of an apartment building in Moscow. He said they were spotted, then set upon by OMON riot police. Clubs were whipped violently, he said, smashing flesh against bone. And before night had passed into day, one of the men in the entranceway, Statey Kim, 35, was dead.


"We were sleeping. ... They hit me twice, and they killed my friend," said Bagmayev, 60, under the strain of tuberculosis at a park adjacent to the city's Kazansky railroad station.


No one corroborates Bagmayev's account. The police deny the incident ever occurred. Yet people who work with the homeless say Kim's death is one of at least four at the hands of law enforcement in and around Moscow over the past year and a half. Only one of the incidents was investigated by police, who deny that even one homeless person has ever been killed by an officer.


Yet, aid workers say the alleged killings are the most extreme examples of tension and violence in relations between police and the homeless, a tension they feel is growing on the eve of the 850th anniversary celebrations. Many call it the most dangerous time to be homeless in Moscow since the Olympics in 1980 -- when bomzhi, a Soviet-era acronym for anyone living "of no fixed abode" without a formal city residence permit, were banished to distances of at least 101 kilometers.


Police officials say they are indeed taking extra measures to "cleanse" the streets of the estimated 100,000 bomzhi prior to 850th anniversary festivities this weekend, although it is not official policy. And, law enforcement has made no secret of its compliance -- often punctuating its zeal, say the homeless, with the blunt end of a truncheon.


Police, cast by default in the role of social worker while enforcing the city's rules for residency, pluck the homeless from soup lines and health clinics. They scour the train stations at night, placing homeless into so-called social rehabilitation centers where they may be detained for up to 10 days. Some herd them onto trains traveling one way to cities such as Tula, Kaluga and Yaroslavl, or simply drop them off in forests some 100 kilometers away. And the homeless say there is often a warning: do not come back, especially before the anniversary.


Human rights advocates contend that the deportation of bomzhi violates the Russian constitution, as well as international treaties that guarantee all Russians basic freedom of movement.


But Vladimir Zubkov, a Moscow police spokesman, wholly disagrees. "The activists interpret those rights too literally," he said. "This way it turns out that, where the rights of one person start, the rights of hundreds of others end. Normal Muscovites have the right not to be around smelly, lousy carriers of diseases."


Zubkov said that measures to "cleanse" the city of vagrants and beggars have, indeed, been reinforced for the holiday. But he denies that measures to deport homeless are a city policy: "We simply tell them to leave Moscow because they don't bring any good to the society, and are being parasites."


Natalya Sebezova, spokeswoman for the city's Social Protection Committee, also says that deportation measures are not a city policy. "There is no 'cleansing' the city of the homeless. How can anyone use this words about living people?" she said.


Human rights advocates say they are powerless to intervene, holding their breaths with a view toward long-term change in a government short on tolerance and ideas -- and among a citizenry that harbors little understanding, or empathy, toward homelessness.


"This is a basic human rights problem. And the city thinks it's better to have this system of policing by terror," said Nicolas Cantau, general coordinator of Vrachi bez granits, or Doctors Without Borders, a Belgium-based agency that has provided medical and social assistance to the homeless in Moscow since 1992.


"The only action that they are taking is putting them away as far as possible from the city," said Cantau, whose organization is known outside of Russia as Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF). "... They ignore the problem."


Diedrich Loehman, of the human rights group, Helsinki Watch, said that the homeless are one among several groups being ostracized -- and, in the process, victimized -- because they are considered undesirable by the Moscow government. He said the city is flatly denying applications for refugee status, while loading prostitutes who work the streets into cars, driving them far away and telling them not to return. Those without propiski, or residence permits, are being held in detention centers for up to 10 days before they are sent back, often under armed guard, to the places from which they came.


"There's a big cleanup effort going on, and over the last few months the situation has definitely gotten worse," said Loehman. "They want a nice, clean city for the celebrations in September and, of course, homeless people who walk around the city drunk and in dirty clothes don't add to the prettiness of Moscow."


Alexander Petrov, also of Helsinki Watch, characterizes the actions in blunt terms: "The general idea is to make their lives here unbearable. This is the only way to get rid of homeless. ... And what's the point of putting them in prison? For some of them, prison is like a paradise. ... As a result, the number of cases of beatings of the homeless appears to be growing."


Petrov's assessment is purely anecdotal, as no one in Moscow has amassed reports and statistics to that end. "I've heard rumors about the police beating the homeless, but I'm not aware of any real accidents. If they do beat them, they don't go out to the Red Square to do it," said Sebezova, of the city's social protection committee. "As to our Committee, we do nothing but good."


Zubkov is incredulous as to Petrov's assessment. "Who would dare to beat them? Look at them -- they are meek, harmless people. Even the most [stern] policeman wouldn't raise a hand to a person like that."


He admits, however, that homeless sometimes die after they are detained. "The reason is typically heart failure. These people are in very bad physical shape," he said. "They are like dying candles."


Ivan Lalov, a veteran of World War II, has managed to elude the police sweeps that he says resulted in the transport of acquaintances to "camps" for the homeless near Yaroslavl. Once, he said, a train was stopped prematurely. "The police took them to the forest 100 kilometers outside of Moscow. They beat them with sticks. That's why some of them are coming back here beaten up," said Lalov, depicting a beating with a free hand.


Zubkov, however, says no such camps exist in neighboring cities.


A short, stout man with a long white beard -- his white hair is combed back, then gathered into a ponytail -- Lalov is nicknamed "Santa Claus" by volunteers with the Russian-American Orthodox Brotherhood of St. Seraphim, which provides white rice, brown bread and sickeningly sweet coffee to the homeless, elderly and sick three times a week.


Lalov, whose hard-swollen hands and capillary-laced face display the effects of alcohol abuse, said he began to beg for money after his pension stopped coming. He said he was condemned to homelessness after a police officer took his documents and even his war medals. Upon demanding their return, said Lalov: "They said to me, 'Don't even come here anymore or we will beat you, or even kill you.'"


A police spokesman at the Dorogomilovskaya station, where the incidents allegedly occurred, declined to comment.The odds are narrowing on Lalov's chances at evading police. Last month, an undetermined number of police officers converged upon those standing in line for food. "They started beating people while they were eating. They beat them, picked them up and took them away, a lot of them," said Daniel Ogan, the president of St. Seraphim.


"It was pretty violent," said Ogan, who said volunteers saw officers wielding clubs. "No answers were given but, well, the answers were documents. ... Where they were taking them? Who knows?"


Although the Salvation Army's feeding program in Moscow has also been targeted for unannounced police sweeps, so far the number of homeless who appear five afternoons a week for black rye bread and soup -- at asphalt parks adjacent to the Kursky and Paveletsky railroad stations -- has remained constant, said Sandra Reid, who runs the four-year-old program.


"[Police] have been coming up on the soup line more regularly, and they've been asking for documents of individuals and taking [the people] away. It used to happen from time to time before, but not as often as it's been happening recently," said Reid.


"Personally," she said, "I have not seen them harm a homeless person at the [train] station. I haven't seen them beat anybody up. I've seen them take them away, and what happens beyond that point I don't know."


Kiril Kozhemyakin, a physician at a permanent clinic on Krasnogvardeski Bulvar -- a site donated by the city to MSF in 1993 in a bid to control a diphtheria outbreak -- said he has seen police officers hiding around the corner of the building, waiting to ensnare homeless seeking assistance.


"Right now, bomzhi don't want to go to the [city's two] disinfection centers because the police will be waiting for them at the entrances," said Philippe Dart, medical coordinator at MSF.


What Cantau characterizes as "policing of terror" that treads on human rights, the city government simply characterizes as effective.


"We are feeling the effects now, because the amount of homeless has been steadily decreasing from April," said Alexei Nikiforov, a physician and sociologist working at MSF's permanent clinic.


In April and June of 1996, the clinic gave medical and social consultations to 605 and 500 homeless people, respectively. On the heels of police efforts to deport homeless from the city limits, the numbers fell to 415 in April and 396 in June -- a combined decrease of 30 percent in 1997.


"I think after [the anniversary celebrations in] September," Nikiforov said, "the number of consultations will increase again."


The word fought its way down the cement railroad platform, passed in fits and starts from one person to another to another before coming to rest at Raisa Ivanovna Yenakal. She raised her heavy frame from the ground with purpose and walked off, alone, into the dusk.


Her teenage son was in trouble again. He had been taken in by police for having a knife. The word also reached her husband, Sergei, who said he arrived at the police station in Oryol with his two young daughters to find his wife arguing with an officer. The husband said he told her to shut up. She didn't. He told her again. She persisted. He said the officer took out his truncheon and struck Raisa Ivanovna brutally and repeatedly in the stomach. The husband said he intervened, but was also struck down. The family retreated to a crawl space under the train platform. One of the daughters called an ambulance, the driver of which she said refused to take the mother to a hospital because she was homeless. Raisa Ivanovna, 42, bled to death internally at about 6 p.m. March 23.


Police deny Yenakal's allegations. Yevgeny Pyenyayev, deputy director of the social safety department of the Oryol MVD, said that Yenakal gave a statement that his wife was drunk on March 22, not March 23, and that she had fallen down a staircase and into a basement, fatally striking her head.


"A policeman killed my wife," insists Yenakal, a willowy man who clutches his wife's white pocketbook against his chest as if it were a child's stuffed animal. "These kids, they saw everything. And when they asked the nurse, on their knees, to take [their mother] because she was still breathing, she said 'sdokhla' -- or dead, like an animal. She said she was dead even though she wasn't."


Yenakal also asserts that his daughters -- Svetlana, 10, and Tatyana, 8 -- were each given 50,000 rubles by a second officer who restrained them during the fatal beating. Yenakal said he was warned that he might be killed if he filed a complaint. He said his wife was buried April 9 at an undisclosed location.


Pyenyayev said that Yenakal was present during the removal of his wife's body.


The family had been known to the St. Seraphim brotherhood. They arrived homeless in Moscow in 1996 after their house was intentionally burned to the ground by the 13-year-old son -- the same child, documents show, who was awarded but never given 1 million rubles in 1995 after a court found that he had been sexually assaulted by a soldier in Bryansk.


The family had been living in the burned out shell in Oryol, Glazunovsky district, until purportedly ordered to leave by police. "Everybody knows me on the Kursky railroad station," said Yenakal, who said he was forcibly removed from the Moscow train station between 3 a.m. to 6 p.m. earlier this year because Mayor Luzhkov was scheduled to tour the premises.


He is an easy target; he has no documents, and is heavily tattooed from the 18 years he spent in prison for three robberies. At this point, he said he simply wants to find out where his wife was buried and place a cross upon her grave.


"I'm afraid to lose someone else," he said. "We all will probably die as dogs."





Those who condemn the police also harbor empathy for their role as both enforcer and ad hoc policy maker for a social problem that did not officially exist in the former Soviet Union. "The only agencies that are really working with the homeless are the police, and us," Cantau said. "All the agencies that are supposed to work with homeless -- such as the Ministries of Health and [committee for] Social Protection -- don't know anything about them."


Nikiforov of MSF, moreover, has perhaps more information about the homeless in nearly a dozen worn, multi-colored spiral notebooks than the entire city government. A physician who works as part social worker, part sociologist, he questions hundreds of homeless each month -- gathering yet more statistics -- while attempting to clothe, register and reinstate the documents among the 2,500 bomzhi treated monthly by MSF.


The core element, or backbone of the framework of this social dysfunction is the system of propiska, or residence permits. During the Soviet period, it was used by police to control the movements of people. Without a propiska, employment opportunities and almost all social services, including health care, are unavailable.


On Jan. 25, 1993, President Boris Yeltsin signed a federal law guaranteeing freedom of movement and eliminating the propiska. It was scheduled to go into effect in October 1993, but the failed coup attempt that month stalled its inception. Most big cities, including Moscow, have ignored the law.


Luzhkov went even further on Aug. 27 1996 by issuing decree No. 637, a 17-page outline, rooted in the propiska rules, which authorized the detention of people without valid registration documents as a prelude to deporting them or delivering them to the social welfare department for rehabilitation. Zubkov says that, since the elimination in 1991 of section 209 of the criminal code on vagrancy and begging, there is an unwritten code of behavior that all people must follow. Police officers are expected to be able to visually distinguish the truly homeless.


According to city officials, only former Muscovites may be legally homeless in Moscow. Those who prove they are city residents may live in four s