photos and text by Zbigniew Bzdak
I traveled to St. Petersburg, Russia, to photograph a newspaper story on homeless children living in the city sewer system. I arrived during the June celebration of "white nights" and settled into a hotel on the outskirts of St. Petersburg in a post-communist high rise development. During the following mornings, I would watch large crowds of commuters rushing to catch the metro trains to work and children walking in groups to school. All of this reminded me of my former life in Eastern Europe and especially of my childhood in Poland.
Although I had assumed the city's homeless children would be found in the older part of St. Petersburg, a local missionary led myself, reporter Robin Biesen and a translator onto the subway toward a newer development on the outskirts of St. Petersburg near the Pionerskaya metro station. The missionary located a manhole in a grassy area not far from the station and clambered into the underground tunnel. I followed close behind and was nearly overwhelmed by the horrible stench and heat of the steamy tunnel. We soon saw the shadows and silhouettes of children lying on the large pipes that carry hot water between the surrounding high rise buildings -- the children were trying to stay warm.
We settled into a small, square bunker housing five children as our translator started to ask them if we could take their pictures. We had to assure them that we were foreign journalists and that we wouldn't supply the police with any of the photographs -- apparently, local authorities had conducted raids on the sewers to try to drive out the inhabitants.
These children had no other place to live and were barely able to exist on their own in such extreme conditions. A meal could sometimes be found at local charities, but some of the children were unable to eat because of their near-continual use of glue as an inhalant. They moved me with their stories as we shared bread with them.
I found my experience with St. Petersburg's homeless children to be very disturbing -- I felt sure that most of the people who walked to the metro station every day must have known of these children living below, yet nobody seemed to care or even acknowledge the problem. After my experience with the young homeless of St. Petersburg, I began seeing more of them all over the city, and I knew that local residents were aware of them as well.
The second leg of the journey took me to a heroin recovery clinic located on the outskirts of the village of Preobrazinka near the Estonian border. Housed in a former Soviet psychiatric hospital, the clinic is almost entirely self-funded and self-sustaining -- it receives only limited donations and no government funding. It is also normally off-limits to outsiders and foreigners.
The residents of the clinic assist in all aspects of day-to-day work and providing support for each other -- many bring along their families while they recover. Most patients come from St. Petersburg to recover from addiction to technical heroin -- cooked heroin made from domestically grown poppies and strengthened with chemical additives.
Some clinic residents recover successfully and return to their former lives; others only stay for a few days, then leave without having recovered. The support structure at the clinic is strong, with residents providing camaraderie and emotional and religious guidance.
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Photos Copyright © 1998-99 Zbigniew Bzdak
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