Russia’s
Rising Volunteerism Seen As Threat
(By Will Englund and Kathy Lally, Washington Post, 02 February
2013)
A country
doctor, a tiny, dilapidated village hospital, an
indifferent health bureaucracy — and now, coming to the rescue, volunteers
from distant Moscow, bringing furniture, equipment, money and, maybe most
important, good cheer. In the
background, though, is the parliament — weighing a law to bring any volunteer
activity under the purview of the state, on the theory that people who organize
themselves to do good work are a threat to the state’s power. The past year or so has seen an upwelling of
a trend unprecedented in Russia — people getting together on their own to help
others in need. Personal initiative, always suspect here, is suddenly taking
off. Drivers deliver medicine to shut-ins. Women cook meals for hospitals.
Volunteers use rubles and hammers to renovate shelters for battered women,
teenage orphans and abandoned pets.
And here in
Itomlya, a decaying farm village a five-hour drive west of Moscow, a group of
young men led by Dmitry Aleshkovsky, a former news photographer, is trying to
help save a 15-bed hospital. “If I can
help, it will show people they can help, too — that it’s time to stop sitting
around and doing nothing,” he said. “I put my little brick in the wall.” The rapid emergence of volunteer efforts,
fueled in large part by social media, coincides with the eruption
of public political protest — and that’s not by happenstance. There is an
overlap between the political opposition and those who have become fed up with
a corrupt government that delivers little and who have decided to take matters
into their own hands. Legislation to
regulate volunteers has been introduced in the State Duma, or lower house of
parliament, by President Vladimir Putin’s United Russia party. Backers say it
will ensure that volunteer activity conforms to the government’s priorities and
doesn’t conflict with Kremlin policy.
Officials
aren’t the only ones hostile to volunteerism. Russia’s Soviet past, when the
government controlled all aspects of life, has left it with a population that
is accustomed to the idea that the government should provide for its citizens
and that is suspicious of volunteer organizations. A 2012 poll found that more
than half the population disapproves of them, said Boris Dubin, a sociologist
with the Levada Center in Moscow. The
legislation reflects “an absolute lack of understanding of the whole nature of
the social phenomenon,” said Yevgeny Grekov, who helps run a drivers group
called Volunteers on Wheels. It’s a Facebook community where people with needs
and drivers who want to help can find one another. “They want volunteers to be walking in
columns and support the authorities,” Grekov said. “But programs such as ours
have no lists. If you want to help, well, help.”
The drivers
help all kinds of people. Say a group has gathered toys and equipment for an
orphanage but has no transportation. Volunteers deliver the items. Periodically, someone will drive a doctor to
Kaluga, three hours south of Moscow, to see a patient who requires a
specialist’s attention. A babushka has to come to Moscow for surgery: They’ll
pick her up at the airport or train station. Actors need scenery transported
for a charity performance. “This is our
theory of small deeds,” Grekov said. “I’m really in love with this project.
It’s pure human energy.” A volunteer
group called Tugeza, which is an approximation in Russian of the English word
“together,” has grown in two years to include 3,000 members on Facebook. Oksana
Prikhodko first got involved in volunteer work with cystic fibrosis patients,
because her daughter has the disease. She found she liked helping people so
much that she has moved on to other causes.
She has worked on a support group for a teenage shelter in Pskov, nearly
500 miles from Moscow. And, most Friday evenings, she gets together with a
dozen or so other women and cooks hearty meals for a children’s hospital — which
Volunteers on Wheels deliver. “We’re
people who love cooking,” she said. “We want to do this. So we do — together.” There’s a tension, though, that won’t go
away. “Why should we do the state’s job for it?” Prikhodko asked. “On the other
hand, why should our children suffer? It’s a constant debate, and we’re always
on the edge.”
‘A light
in the darkness’
Aleshkovsky,
the former news photographer, heard about the hospital in Itomlya from friends
of friends. The Health Ministry plans to downgrade it to a recovery center,
where no treatment could be offered. The hospital serves a district of 112
villages, or about 3,000 residents. The next-nearest hospital is 30 miles away,
in the city of Rzhev. A bus goes there — on Saturdays and Sundays. Sergei Vishnyakov, 55, has been the sole
doctor in Itomlya since 1981, when he was assigned there fresh out of medical
school. Although the hospital has an annual budget of about $25,000, which
includes his salary, Vishnyakov has come to love his work. He knows all the families
in Itomlya and supplements his pay with home-grown potatoes, pickles and about
20 chickens. The hospital
was set up in Soviet times to serve the huge collective farm that included
Itomlya and the surrounding district. Workers grew flax here, but the farm has
closed, the fields now full of saplings. Most of the men who haven’t taken up
illegal logging have drifted to Moscow in search of work.
Mechanical
accidents used to be a major contributor to Vishnyakov’s workload. Now it’s alcoholism
and the infirmities of age. “This
hospital is like a light in the darkness for us,” said Alexandra Tikhomirova,
72, who had been admitted with dizziness three days earlier and was staying on
in a cramped ward because a recent snowfall had made it
too hard for her to return home. “I
can’t leave my patients,” Vishnyakov said. “I know all of them. They’re like my
family.” Aleshkovsky, 27, arrived leading a group of volunteers who brought a
vanload of donated furniture from Moscow.
“Thank God we now have such young people in Russia,” the doctor said. “I
think they will be able to stir the society and make the authorities listen to
them.”
A deep
lack of trust
The
authorities have been clear about their hostility toward volunteer work. In
2010, after deep cuts in the forest service, volunteers tried to help put out
peat fires that sent choking smoke throughout much of European Russia. Police
stopped them, some volunteers reported on social media, demanding bribes to let
them through. A group called Liza Alert
was organized to conduct volunteer searches for missing people when it became
clear that the police weren’t interested in doing so. After more than a year of
trying, the group’s leaders have won grudging indifference from the police, and
sometimes cooperation, said Irina Vorobieva, one of the organizers, a change
from the outright interference they faced at first. This month, in the town of Domodedovo, just
outside Moscow, police raided a group house for homeless people that had been
set up by worshipers at St. Damian’s church in Moscow. “We’re not going to have
you in our community,” project leader Emil Sosinsky said he was told by one of
the officers.
Residents,
who must work as construction laborers or floor-washers, contribute money
toward the house’s upkeep. Sosinsky said he thinks authorities police are
trying to build a case to charge him with running an illegal business. Homeless
people, he said, make a tempting target for a crackdown. Volunteer organizers said most of the
resistance they encounter from officials is more subtle than that, in the form
of bureaucratic delays or simple lack of cooperation. But it’s impossible to
quantify. For one thing, many volunteer groups, like Grekov’s, make a point of
not formally organizing so they can avoid legal complications. That makes it
less likely that they would report obstructionism — even if there were some
person or agency to report it to.
Aleshkovsky,
who has been helping half a dozen other worthy causes through a Web site he set
up, said it’s likely the Duma will pass the law on volunteers. So he has been
lobbying to water down some of its harshest features. That leaves him open to
criticism from the political opposition, which is against the bill. “I cannot be choosing sides,” he said. “I
will sit down with the devil to keep this hospital. Look, we’re in the abyss.
But to get out, we’ll have to build a staircase. Protesting against Putin is
not enough. People should do something, not just against Putin, but for
themselves.”
Grekov, of
the drivers group, said Russia suffers from a lack of trust among its people.
It can’t have a real civil society without such trust, he said, and it can’t
have true democracy without civil society.
He described his program as a model of civic behavior that he hopes will
be instructive. “It is sad for us,
because we know we could be a thousand times better than we are,” he said. “But
we are better than we were yesterday. The speed is slow.”
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