Crossing the Line. Vagrancy, Homelessness and Social Displacement in Russia

Book by Svetlana Stephenson, published by Ashgate, 2006

Review by David Maidment,  

Dr. Svetlana Stephenson has been writing on aspects of homelessness in Russia from 1996 onwards reviewing the situations of both adults and street children.  In this book she brings together a comprehensive review of adult homelessness in both the Communist and post Communist societies, putting this in the context of Russian historical attitudes to vagrants and the homeless, referring to restrictions imposed in the sixteenth century and punitive laws imposed by Peter the Great.

The author takes the stories of individual people and traces how they were displaced from ‘settled' society and balances this with an analysis of the social and political practices that create the conditions for social displacement.   She follows the path of the vulnerable losing their social bonds - ex prisoners, children leaving institutional care, migrants, workers with irregular employment history, alcoholics, the elderly, the divorced.  She places the Russian system of territorial registration and the need for appropriate documentation (Propiska) at the heart of the challenges facing people whose hold on family and societal bonds is tenuous.  In the post Communist era, the state registration system remains as pernicious as ever, to some extent exacerbated by the loss of public space and access to housing through the privatisation of property.

Her analysis is based on records from Moscow and to a lesser extent, St Petersburg, as little data is available from elsewhere.    She meets and interviews men and women living in the train and metro stations, markets, cafes and churches of Moscow, she records their survival activities and their interaction with both the regular and criminal societies.  Above all, she records the descending spiral of people trapped by their circumstances, losing the bonds that stem their drift into hopelessness.

Homeless people in the early years of Communism were initially treated as deserving of a better life in the class struggle, but this quickly degenerated into being stigmatised as ‘parasites' and becoming ‘socially excluded'.  Since 1989 the increase in the number of vagrants is very obvious, caused by a number of structural processes which Svetlana Stephenson analyses in some detail.  As well as the problems of registration, the lack of adequate social welfare services in Russia means that there is no system to catch those who need help beyond their own efforts.

Dr Stephenson's conclusion is that such people are denied their rights in the Russian State.  The limited intervention of charities is welfare rather than rights based. Many ‘bomzhi', as they are known, try to hold out, but fail as public attitudes deny their worth and as they lose hope and self-care, the process of stigmatisation and societal rejection accelerates.  She concludes that there is an urgent need for policy change in the laws relating to territorial registration, but current state authority concerns with security and terrorism have put liberalisation of these statutes on the ‘back burner'.

Dr Stephenson gives as the aim of her book "to aid understanding of the hidden world of social suffering, opening up homelessness for public debate without biased moral judgements."  Her book is thoroughly researched - there are sixteen pages of bibliography for those needing to delve further ! - but it is written in a jargon-free and very accessible style and is of interest to the concerned lay reader as well as the academic.   It balances the illuminating and sympathetic stories of individuals with the political and social causes of the phenomenon of homelessness in present day Russia.   I hope her book will motivate activists, government officials and politicians to address the rights of a large underclass of people excluded from Russian society and bring about positive change that can give hope for vulnerable people to overcome their obstacles.