The Russian Bourgeoisie Pushes Our Boys and Girls to Drugs. Letter from Chelyabinsk

· Analytics, Denunciations, Russia, Siberia, Urals

From the editors of Left.ru. This letter by a concerned woman from Chelyabinsk paints a true picture of perhaps the most terrifying side of Russian capitalism – its brutal violence against children, its daily destruction of childhood and youth in their souls. Why can a handful of scoundrels – 150,000 millionaires who form the core of the capitalist dictatorship – commit violence on such a scale against a people of 150 million every day? The author of the Chelyabinsk letter gives this answer.

It is the cruel everyday reality, unpunished evil, injustice and unrewarded virtues that must be set right. This cannot be achieved through isolated actions and half-measures, but only through a fundamental restructuring of the worldview (more precisely, the restoration of the destroyed constructive, collectivist worldview). It is time to choose what is more important – the preservation of the people or the preservation of the way of life once imposed upon us.

Millions of people in our country would sign under these words. This is spoken and written about in varying ways in the so-called “opposition” press. Yet all these oceans of words remain well-intentioned but empty wishes, incapable of stopping even one single hand reaching for a syringe toward a vein. Because none of these “opposition” voices knows to whom they are addressing their appeals, incantations, curses and proposals. To the “people”? But the people are an amorphous mass unless organized by their people’s organization. To the “communists”? But communists do not fly in from Mars; they emerge from the thick of the people when it begins to realize that without self-organization, their children have not only no future but no childhood either. So to whom does the author of the letter address the call to preserve the people? To those who stand outside the people? Then it is the voice of one crying out to the Deripaskas, Putins and Medvedevs. For there is no one else besides the capitalist violators of the people and the people themselves. Only the people themselves can preserve the people, and no one else. To do this, they must create their own Communist Party and their own Soviets. This is difficult. But, as they say, what wouldn’t one do for the children…

* * *

Letter from Chelyabinsk

Television shows prosperous pictures, makes rosy forecasts about Russia’s future, discusses the growth of well-being – how nice! Only when you step outside, the terrible reality comes crashing down. The situation with drug addiction, at least in the regions, is only worsening; young people are dying out. Proletarian districts suffer especially. The Leninsky, Kalininsky, and Traktorozavodskoy districts of Chelyabinsk are very troubled. A couple of years ago, drugs were sold openly (now the dealers have become slightly more discreet).

Here are typical observations. For example, syringes and their packaging constantly lie scattered near building entrances, in courtyards of houses and schools. On the way to work, to the store, in various places, young “strung-out” addicts stand in a characteristic pose – swaying on half-bent legs with closed eyes. A procession comes toward you – a dazed couple and two small children (either “runners” or relatives of the addicts). A teenager lies on the lawn in sub-zero temperatures. Drug dealers regularly keep watch in the courtyards.

Squalor and degradation all around – this is the unparaded, unfaçade face of Chelyabinsk. Honestly, every trip to the store or a walk comes with a shock for me. Better to stay at home and watch psychotherapeutic news broadcasts that insist on our well-being.

It seems this is the problem in most cities and hamlets of Russia. Is it not time to adopt a law on compulsory treatment? Then the vicious circle of drug supply and demand might perhaps be broken. Well, what can be done if our small entrepreneurs do not disdain drug dealing – after all, it’s “the most profitable business”? If we cannot curb drug trafficking, let’s go after the addicts – let’s lock them up in strict-regime clinics. The laws concerning illegal trade in psychotropic substances must also be toughened – all sellers of opiates, including pills, should be imprisoned. We must act; otherwise, the ranks of addicts will continue to be steadily replenished by an ever-younger generation.

***

I look with a premonition of disaster at 12–13-year-old teenagers, the lively gang of “boys and girls from our courtyard” who often play together outside. Already now many of them (even the quiet girls) smoke and drink, but I foresee something else with horror… Practically half the teenagers in the area of the Thermal Engineering Institute in Chelyabinsk use drugs. “State employees” live here – blue-collar workers, nurses, doctors, teachers. Their children have no advantages in life. Parents earn little; there is no special joy or well-being in their families either. When children grow up, they try to work. Employers squeeze all the juice out of them, forcing them to work 12–16 hours a day for paltry pennies. The very logic of their existence leads them to drug use. From the perspective of youthful psychology, it is better to ruin one’s life by renouncing it than to do humiliating and meaningless work and see a life full of injustice.

Drug use here is growing in geometric progression. Addicts deal in order to earn money for drugs. According to statistics, one addict usually draws up to 30 people into this addiction and the distribution of drugs. Drug dealers who do not use themselves sell drugs for profit (according to one small entrepreneur, drug dealing is the most profitable small business). Meanwhile, the West abets the massive export of opium from occupied Afghanistan. The “Dulles Plan” is being effectively put into practice.

God alone knows how unbearably hard it is to watch the complete degradation of children’s souls – and not only “problem” children, but also quite ordinary and even “model” ones. Compulsory treatment of addicts is the only correct answer. Unfortunately, Putin has been at least eight years late with it. In that time, so many people have been ruined, so many young people have died, contracted HIV, etc., and been lost to life. And all the verbiage about democracy and the freedom to use psychotropic substances is vile hypocrisy.

Goya has a painting “I Saw This” — it depicts a naked dead torso with a head, severed arms, and half a leg, impaled on a tree branch. If I were Goya in Chelyabinsk in 2008, I would paint “Murdered Youth.” A young, tall girl of rather well-groomed appearance, with long curled chestnut hair, in a motley unbuttoned sheepskin coat, under which there is only a blouse and leggings with a hole at the crotch, clearly high and with a blissful smile, stands in the middle of the road, swaying slightly — her hands stretched out as if in supplication. “Miss, are you high?” — “Yes…” She stepped off the road, stumbling, crossed the intersection, and with the same half-bent hands kind of hailed a ride. Somehow she climbed into the car, slowly, slowly tried to shut the door — the sheepskin coat got stuck. The driver lifted the hem, slammed the door. She drove off. How far? Will she be able to give an address? Will she be thrown out at the next alley? Of course, she has no money… What will her parents do? After all, she was raped, violated, robbed, and even hooked on heroin. A shameful death with a blissful smile. A person, a girl, a young woman, a mother’s joy, care, pride… A doll, a rag, a piece of half-dead human flesh, crushed youth…

***

Drug addiction crawls out of every crack, every nook. It is on the dark faces of the youth, in yards and gateways strewn with syringes, in entryways, squares, green areas of Chelyabinsk, in pharmacies besieged by young people — both broken wretches with vacant stares, and seemingly well-off “decked-out” rich girls and boys, impatiently fussing to hurry the line so as to quickly buy their coveted “insulin syringes,” three-cc, five-cc syringes, “naphthyzin vials,” and so on and so forth — all the components for diluting and injecting drugs. Meanwhile, the administration (as, indeed, the government itself) pretends not to notice the outrageous, and people fearfully avert their eyes, afraid to admit to themselves the harsh (if not catastrophic) reality, although it is their children and grandchildren who daily walk on the edge of life and death, exclude themselves from social life, close off all prospects — for work, family, healthy children, health, a long, normal life, and for life itself…

Pharmacists react differently. Some begin to justify themselves — saying, what are we guilty of, such are the laws, we sell without violating them, yes, we observe drug addicts, but not everyone is doing drugs (and fear in their eyes — what is my teenage son doing while I’m at work?). Others start to open up: it seems the whole world has gone mad, as if no one notices what is happening, teenagers come for syringes as an everyday thing — and they look well-off, but drug dealers hanging around the Thermotechnical Institute use homeless substance abusers as lookouts. This is not a sick fantasy, it’s reality. And if we awaken from thoughtless lethargy, the reality will turn out to be even more terrible than I describe. But to see it means to have a chance for survival and the continuation of the species, while closing one’s eyes means condemning one’s offspring to extinction. Isn’t it time to open our eyes? Isn’t it time to take up a real struggle? It’s understandable that it is difficult when the country’s leadership is virtually inactive, having opened all the Central Asian floodgates for the flow of heroin from Afghanistan and Tajikistan. Whose “invisible hand” stands behind the organization of this mass import of drugs into Russia is also clear (the answer lies on the surface — it is those who are now occupying Afghanistan and conniving at the cultivation of opium poppy).

Yes, the paralysis of activity at the grassroots and local levels regarding the eradication of drug addiction is connected precisely with the incomprehensible stance of the top leadership on this issue. The director of the Institute of Demography, I. Beloborodov (one of many), expressed the idea that it is necessary to raise the birth rate — that’s easier than fighting mortality. This is what our state diligently tries to put into practice. Have mercy, where is the logic here? No sooner does a child cross the threshold of 12 years than a terrible, deadly danger lies in wait — God forbid he inadvertently ends up in a company of kids who have become involved with drugs. And the probability of this is very high — according to data from the Russian Ministry of Health, 16% of Russian schoolchildren have used drugs at least once, another 8% of school students are at risk, 3.1% of schoolchildren are drug-dependent; as for students, 30% have used drugs, 20% are at risk, and 4.8% are drug-dependent. These figures, which are clearly understated, concern only schoolchildren and students — and how many young and youthful drug addicts are among those who neither work nor study? Indeed, to obtain money for “dope,” those “hooked” on drugs engage in involving younger kids, and deliberately so. Why give birth, raise, invest in, educate children if many of them will not even reach adulthood because of this terrible calamity? And if they do, they will go through life as mental and physical invalids — with HIV, AIDS, hepatitis C and other diseases accompanying drug addiction, to the grief and tears of parents and relatives.

Although the virtually open borders with Central Asian countries, the inaction of the administration, narcological services, etc., are important factors in the flourishing of drug addiction, the most important factor remains the socio-psychological one. It is obvious that the harsh realities of the modern world cut at the root any faith in humaneness and justice. The values of competitiveness and fierce competition come to the fore, with personal enrichment and prosperity by any means as the ultimate goal. From this stem the socio-psychological roots of drug addiction. Drug addiction is, in part, a form of protest suicide. To a large extent, it is also the result of the self-destructive action of the system itself, which desperately tries to reshape the constructive consciousness of collectivism, mutual and social responsibility—still present at an archetypal level in the people—into a capitalist mold, while at the same time trying to preserve this people. It doesn’t work. This is a case where consciousness determines being. In this regard, it is characteristic that both poor and rich children are frequent buyers of the drug addict’s kit in pharmacies. Meanwhile, it is foolish to act in a “targeted” manner—for example, by paying children’s coaches and heads of sports clubs more in the hope that young people will suddenly take up physical exercise en masse. The cruel everyday reality, unpunished evil, injustice, and unrewarded virtues—it is precisely this that must be corrected. This cannot be achieved by isolated actions and half-measures, but only through a fundamental restructuring of the worldview (more precisely, the restoration of the destroyed constructive, collectivist worldview). It is time to choose what is more important—preserving the people or preserving a way of life once imposed upon us.

***

For a number of years, not far from the Thermal Engineering Institute, a group of homeless children, about 7–10 in all, has been living somewhere in the basements. Some of them are actual orphans, some are social orphans. I have been acquainted with one of the girls, Irina Panfilova, and her brother for over three years. At that time she was fifteen years old, and she said they were from a village, her mother had died long ago, and she and her brother had been living on the street for several years. At that time the girl was quite lucid. Over time, however, the entire group of children fell into substance abuse. I talk to them quite often. One of the girls, Natasha, tried to get treatment, but without completing it, she returned “to the family.”

The guys are fairly lucid; when I have the chance, I buy them food at a nearby kiosk; once they asked me for money for a bathhouse.

***

The attitude of the juvenile affairs inspector toward this problem is shocking. I spoke to her about Irina Panfilova—I thought perhaps I could take her under guardianship. The inspector lady treated me as if I were crazy. She began to revile these children for all she was worth—that they sniff and shoot up, that they have AIDS and hepatitis C, that they are impolite and ungrateful—they run away from the shelter, and they treat her, a high-ranking lady, without due respect.

The result of such blatant neglect of her direct responsibilities on the part of this lady is obvious—the children continue to live on the street in appalling unsanitary conditions, even though, I am sure, many of them are entitled to some sort of housing. By now the children are mostly 18 or older, so madame “inspector” for juvenile affairs can wash her hands of them—they are already adults. So what, are we to wait until the children die out? As far as I can judge, they are of course suffering from a whole bouquet of diseases, but they do not shoot up hard drugs and can still be rehabilitated.

Only this must be done comprehensively—so that the entire group undergoes treatment together, under a strict regime but in civilized conditions. Then gradually, perhaps, they will come to their senses. Otherwise, these children will continue to wander the streets of nighttime Chelyabinsk as a reproach to all of us.

On the topic of Chelyabinsk drug addiction, see also the article by a professional journalist, “Heroin for Gomorrah,” at https://www.strana.ru/doc.html?id=78798&cid=1

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