At the rural orphanage where I volunteered, the place resembled a Dickensian workhouse. The staff’s main tools were antipsychotics and violence. The experience gave me a window into Putin’s Russia
In the summer of 2007, I joined a group of 30 Russian and English students to work on a month-long summer camp at a state orphanage for mentally and physically disabled children in the Pskov region, south of St Petersburg. We lived in a house nearby, or in tents pitched in the garden. Every day, we walked up to the orphanage to put on developmental activities, sporting events, solve puzzles, play games, stage shows and go on camping trips.
I volunteered at the orphanage, in the village of Belskoye Ustye, for almost a decade, but it was the first visit that made the biggest impression. I had seen nothing like it. My closest reference point was probably workhouses or orphanages from a Charles Dickens novel. I vividly remember the smells – cooked food, unwashed bodies, chlorine and urine – and how the children crowded you, grabbing hands and clothes, pinching, pulling hair, jostling and asking questions. Dressed in an odd collection of what seemed to be adult castoffs, the kids spent most of their waking hours in rooms furnished with just a few scuffed tables and chairs, a bookcase and television. At night, and for long periods during the day, cast-iron metal grilles across corridors were locked, confining the older teenagers to their dormitories at one end. Children vulnerable to self-harm were tied up.
