- MOSCOW -- Natalia, 15, leans
against the window of a kiosk selling pies, brings her coat collar up to
cover her mouth and inhales deeply. Her nose is permanently blocked and
her shrill voice punctuated by girlish giggles and sniffing.
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- The fumes from the glue beneath her coat are all that
keep her going during her third year as a resident of Moscow's filthy Kazanskaya
Metro station.
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- At 11, Natalia fled from Ukraine and her parents' drinking,
begging for the train fare to Moscow. Here she joined Russia's epidemic
of 'social orphans', children whose parents may not be dead but are jailed,
drunk or incapable of providing a home.
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- New government figures show that, while the Second World
War left 600,000 parentless children across the Soviet Union, a social
crisis has now left 700,000 'social orphans' in Russia, and the number
is rising by 20,000 each year. Sociologists said the first wave of orphans
last century was caused by the 1917 revolution and civil war, the second
by the Second World War. Yet the third is different, said Svetlana Pronina,
from the group Right of the Child, and 'has come from social problems and
poverty'.
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- They fall into an abyss between broken parents and an
indifferent state, and are left to eke out a life in Metro underpasses.
'You don't really exist here, you just live,' Natalia sniffed. At 4pm on
Friday, most of her friends were still sleeping, catching a break from
police harassment.
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- On 17 February, Moscow's anarchic police swept into the
three Metro stations around which the city's estimated 33,000 orphans intermittently
swarm and packed many of them off to hospital and the groaning, brutal
welfare system. Days later, they were back, unwelcome in or afraid of state
homes, yet police intimidation persists.
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- 'The police on the Metro, in the station, and on the
street all come from different patrols,' said Natalia. 'So one lot throw
you out into the path of another. They bounce us between each other.'
-
- Natalia, who dreams of being a doctor, keeps one hand
in her jacket's upper pocket, holding the plastic glue bag tightly. 'It
makes you feel drunk,' said her friend Anya.
-
- Orkhan Nasibov, who works for a MÈdecins Sans
FrontiËres aid programme for Moscow's street children, which is due
to open tomorrow, said he had met children as young as 10 with drug problems.
'Some kids are even born on the street,' he said. 'There is no younger
age limit.'
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- Government figures show there were 500,000 social orphans
in 1994. By 2001 there were 685,000. Despite the purported economic miracle
of President Vladimir Putin's first term, the number has kept on rising.
Officials blame poverty.
-
- Nina Shakhina, from the family department in the Ministry
of Labour, said: 'For millions of families, the birth of a new child means
an immediate worsening of their situation, leading to the reduction of
income per capita and putting them on the edge of poverty. We have many
families who have to send their children to orphanages temporarily in order
to survive.' She added that the biggest category of poor in the country
were families with children.
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- One stop away, at Kurskaya station, is Sasha. He insists
he is 17, despite a grin putting him at least four years younger. He fled
his home in the Moscow region three-and-a-half years ago after his brother
killed himself. 'My parents said I was no longer needed,' he said. Today,
as sharp as any 17-year-old, he makes occasional cash from his dexterity
with a deck of cards. 'I won £20 once gambling,' he said. He also
landed himself a job at the Metro by picking up a stray ID card there and
pretending to be its wearer, he said.
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- Svetlana Pronina said: 'The number is rising not only
because of the bad economic situation and social decay, but also because
of state politics. Instead of working with families in risk groups, the
state has a repressive mentality, depriving every year about 20,000 families
of parental rights and sending their children to orphanages.'
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- The crisis in Russia's youth is self-perpetuating. By
2015, analysts fear, the falling number of young people of working age
per pensioner, and the high youth mortality rate, will put Russia on the
edge of a demographic abyss. There are already 200,000 children in orphanages,
and statistics show that 30 per cent of them will end up in criminal gangs
and in jail. A further 14 per cent commit suicide.
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- Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited
2004 http://www.guardian.co.uk/worldlatest/story/0,1280,-3988759,00.html
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