Current Events

Homeless Being Exiled to Forest

City police, acting on orders from Governor Vladimir Yakovlev, have been rounding up homeless people from train stations, taking them out of the city limits and abandoning them in remote, forested areas.

In October, Nochlezhka got its hands on a copy of a meeting of the city government held Oct. 8 which quotes Yakovlev as saying "For a long time we thought homelessness did not exist in our country - but now it does. It is not a coincidence that I gave the order to the GUVD [city police] to clean the city's main thoroughfares, trains stations, and airports of vagrants and beggars."

In the copy of the typed minutes of that meeting, which was shown to The St. Petersburg Times, Yakovlev also argues that the homeless earn more than "working Russians" by begging. Yakovlev goes on to say that it is nevertheless necessary to provide social assistance to the homeless. Armed with that document, Nochlezhka began to formally document reports of deportations from the city, and in the past six weeks it has collected written testimonies from more than 20 homeless people.

Mourners Bid Staroitova Farewell

Thousands stood in a kilometer-long line to say farewell to the human rights champion Galina Starovoitova, who was buried in St. Petersburg on Tuesday.

Starovoitova was shot dead on the staircase of her downtown St. Petersburg apartment building last Friday evening, a political murdersupposedly. Tuesday she was eulogized by prominent national politicians and remembered by crowds in St. Petersburg and Moscow.

Outside the Russian State Ethnographic Museum in St. Petersburg, where Starovoitova's public viewing took place, a line of some 10,000 stretched for more than a kilometer in the cold. Police where at the door with megaphones to hold the crowds back with promises that the coffin would remain in place until everyone had seen it.

Inside, Starovoitova's body lay in an open casket with wreaths and black ribbons. Friends, family, three former prime ministers and other politicians eulogized her. At the end of the service, mourners walked past the coffin as classical music played.