The Past Is Never Dead: The Status of the Homeless in Russia Is Still Defined by the Living Legacy
By Stephen Wilson, one of our reporters abroad
“The past is never dead. It's not even past. All of us labor in webs spun long before we were born, webs of heredity and environment, of desire and consequences of history and eternity.” This quotation comes from William Faulkner's novel, “Requiem for a Nun.” Although Faulkner stated that many of the characters in his novels live too much in the past, are absorbed in brooding over the past and attempting to hold on to it {as in characters such as Rose Coldfield and Quentin Compson in “Absalom, Absalom!” who can't come to terms with the impact of traumatic events during the American Civil War}, many people of the Soviet union still have not come to terms with the past or acknowledged that we have to also live and attain joy from the present moment.
In this respect, old inherited beliefs and perceptions of the homeless formed during the Soviet Union still linger on. In fact, the problem with homelessness was denied. It did not even exist! This is despite the fact that there were millions of homeless children haunting the cities of Russia in the 1920's as a result of civil war, famine, and later collectivisation as well as mass evictions from the homes of 'enemies of the people.' And as many as 20 million people were made homeless by the devastation of the Great Patriotic War.
The historian Orlando Figes wrote that “As late as the 1950's, there were still millions of people living in the ruins of buildings, in basements, sheds or dug outs in the ground” {page 457, Orando Figes, “The Whisperers”}. Then with the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, thousands of people once more swarmed into the capital from the regions searching for work.
The new Soviet state attempted to define the homeless out of existence by playing with words. They thought it sufficed to conjure them out of existence by simply claiming there were no homeless but 'vagrants' and 'parasites.’ It was simply a matter of some people 'pretending' to be homeless. The new Soviet state declared that anyone who was deemed undesirable from a political point of view was often deprived of work or a place to stay if they were not executed. This list of 'undesirable 'people could be so subjective and ambiguous that anyone might fall into it. For instance, any group that was deemed a relic of the capitalist system such as former kulaks, petty traders, gypsies, prostitutes, criminals, vagrants, beggars and nobility were likely to be purged as an obstacle to building a communist society. Figes stated that “Between 1932 and 1936 tens of thousands of these 'socially harmful elements' were rounded up and expelled from the town, most of them sent to the Gulag” {page 192 of “The Whisperers”}. The head of the secret police Iagoda cleansed Moscow of 12,000 professional beggars who were sent to Kazakhstan to perform hard labor.
The conventional definitions of homelessness at present remain too narrow. Officials often just define a person as homeless if he or she is on the streets. The notion that people living in hostels or couch surfing might be homeless is alien to them.
Homelessness was, in effect, criminalized. As late as 1961, the penalty for vagrancy was 2 years in prison or 6 to 13 months of correctional labor. Anyone caught living on the streets could be imprisoned . Those penalties remained in force for the next 30 years! The state refused to acknowledge that homelessness existed and if they did confront it they blamed the victim rather than the real causes of homelessness. The real causes of homelessness were socioeconomic factors such as wars, revolution, famines, natural disasters, economic crises , unemployment, poverty, child abuse, exploitation, and family conflict. The root causes lay with an unfair and abusive social system which refused to acknowledge and take resolute action to build people accessible and proper accommodation.
It is odd that one of the aims of the revolution was to make anyone considered bourgeois {an intellectual, artist, or someone who might look foreign, and noblemen} driven out and evicted from their home and blacklisted. They were denied not only residential rights, but work.
A radical American Journalist who observed this injustice quickly became disillusioned with this after he observed this in Russia during his 6 year stay. Eugene Lyons was shocked at how 'former people' were being 'pried out into the open and stepped on without pity.' Lyons discovered many did not survive. The journalist Walter Duraty called former people in 1931, 'phantoms of the past in the Soviet present.'
The twisted logic was that you deserved homelessness if you were a former member of the nobility or factory owner but did not deserve it if your were from the working class or peasantry. At this very time the Soviet state had put up a slogan above the entrance of Gorky Park which claimed, “Life has become merrier and happier.” The creation of the new Moscow metro helped sustain the illusions that the bad times were over. But rather than the repression becoming less or a thing of the past, in the late 1930's, it escalated to unreal and undreamt of heights. Even the legendary director of “Gorky Park,” Betty Glan, was fired and sent into exile for 10 years.
During the 1920's and 1930's, Moscow had a huge shortage of housing. One of the most brutal ways in which the state partially resolved the accommodation problem was with the firing squad. During the repression, the homes of thousands of people who were executed were taken over by new officials who needed a home. They also provided people with homes by evicting landlords or noblemen. In March 1925, the Soviet state issued a decree where all former landlords were evicted and practically all ended up on the streets without means of support. The historian Douglas Smith stated, “With the arrival of collectivization, they were all pushed off the land, along with every other landlord all across Russia prior to 1930. Most of those people made their way to the cities and joined the ranks of the outcasts in desperate search for lodgings, work, and food.” Douglas Smith stated how the state attempted to solve the housing question in the early 1930's through launching 'Operation Former people.' He wrote, “One way to alleviate the problem was to empty the city of undesirables. Between 1933 and 1935, 75,388 Leningraders were exiled, or simply shot, freeing up 9,950 apartments and rooms” {pages 338 to 339 , “Former People: The Last Days of the Aristocracy, Douglas Smith, 2012, London: Pan Books}.
Given the constant threat of being made homeless or blacklisted should anyone discover you belonged to an unwanted category such as a kulak {rich peasant} or Nobleman, people had to keep their past secret. They even went as far as to buy new passports and enter unsuitable marriages simply to survive. Instead of living in the past, they either kept silent about it or even reinvented their past. It was possible to buy or bribe officials to give you a new passport and identity. Orando Figes stated that it was relatively easy to change or reinvent your past. As Figes stated, “They became clever at concealing or disguising impure social origins, and at dressing up their own biographies to make them seem more 'proletarian' {page 136, “The Whisperers”}. People could marry not for love but simply to survive and attain a room in Moscow. For instance, a woman called Anna Dubova, who was the daughter of a Kulak, married a policeman. She stated, "My marriage was a kind of camouflage. I had no place to live, but once I was married we had a little room to ourselves. And when I went to bed, I would think to myself ‘Dear lord, I'm in my own bed’” {page 138, Orlando Figes, “The Whisperers”}.
Immense psychological damage followed from living a double life. People often lived in great fear of being exposed. They would play safe by being more reserved and withdraw into themselves. They often felt a sense of low self-esteem, and they felt shame and inferiority.
People also felt guilty about being impostors. Unlike some of the characters in Faulkner's novels, they did not live in the past. But they were traumatized by both the present and the past all the same !
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Recommended reading:
1. Orlando Figes, “The Whisperers: Private Life in Stalin's Russia,” 2001, London: Penguin.
2. Douglas Smith, “Former People,” 2012, London: Pan Books.
3. Donald Rayfield, “Stalin and His Hangmen,” 2004, New York: Random House.
4. Orlando Figes, “A People's Tragedy: The Russian Revolution,” 2014, London: Bodley Head.