St. Petersburg Photo Diary Facebook
October 23, 2021
Orthodontist jumps from 9th floor of Elizabeth Hospital
The young woman made the jump in front of her fellow patients in the ward. The fact was that she had buried both of her parents in the past two weeks. They were also doctors, by the way.
Darya Khorovskaya followed in the footsteps of her parents: she had worked in her field for 10 years.
She was admitted to the Elizabeth Hospital with complications from an infectious disease just a few days after her mother’s death.
Her fellow patients in the ward said that the young women was heartbroken. She constantly talked about the deaths of her loved ones, blaming the coronavirus.
After the fall, she was taken to the intensive care unit, but they could not save her.
Photo courtesy of St. Petersburg Photo Diary. MK.RU Sankt-Peterburgreported this same story on 17 October 2021. They made clear, however, what is not clear from the Facebook post above: that Khorovskaya was being treated for covid-19 when she took her own life, and that her parents had also died of covid-19. P.S. This is a more typical post on St. Petersburg Photo Diary, which partly explains the self-censorship in their post about Khorovskaya’s suicide. Translated by the Russian Reader
I wonder if if I set myself on fire near the entrance of the local FSB headquarters (or the city prosecutor’s office, I don’t know yet), will it bring our country any closer to a better tomorrow, or will my sacrifice be meaningless? I think it’s better to die like this than like my grandmother from cancer at the age of 52.
Thanks to Alexander Chernykh for the link. Photo courtesy of Irina Slavina’s VK page and the Moscow Times. Translated by the Russian Reader
Capitalism kills. Overwork, wage cuts, nasty managers, and the lack of a clear future drive workers to kill themselves.
On the morning of February 19, 2019, in Nizhny Tagil, Sergei Chernykh, a young worker, left his boss’s office, put a noose around his neck, and jumped off a raised area, damaging his spine and suffocating in mere seconds. Arriving on the scene, an ambulance crew (who, to top it all off, were not immediately let into the factory) were powerless to save his life.
The situation in Nizhny Tagil is not merely rough but bloody. Chernykh’s suicide was the fifth suicide in the past year by a worker at the Uralvagonzavod plant.
There have been several dozen similar incidents, but Chernykh’s death stands out from them in that he committed suicide at his workplace.
Chernykh could not bear life’s hardships and so he parted with it right on the spot. Whether he meant it or not, he thus focused the public’s attention on the outrageous working conditions endured by Uralvagonzavod workers.
The plant’s press service has not yet commented on the case, but it is obvious the increasing incidents of suicide have been caused by deterioration of socio-economic conditions and the lack of prospects.
Over the last twenty-eight years, Nizhny Tagil’s population has steadily declined, dropping from 440,000 residents to 350,000 residents. It would be strange not to see this as a telltale sign of what has been happening in the city.
Chernykh’s friends and acquaintances mainly say he was “driven” to kill himself. Many residents of Nizhny Tagil could find themselves in similar circumstances, especially if they work at Uralvagonzavod.
A female worker in Forging Shop No. 170, where Chernykh was employed, said the 27-year-old man’s suicide occurred after he attended a meeting of plant managers that he was not supposed to have attended. The employee asked she not be named since, she claimed, everyone in the shop was afraid, everyone needed a job, and she did not want any extra problems.
“Sergei was a rank-and-file worker, a cutter, but since our section foreman and section manager were on sick leave, Sergei was temporarily appointed foreman. And since there was no manager in our section, Sergei was sent to that meeting,” the woman claims. “It’s at these morning meetings that the shop foreman tells everyone what section has to do what and how much they have to do during a shift.”
“There are emergencies, and the shop foreman forces people to hurry up. He could not care less whether are enough workers to do the job or not, whether they have the tools they need or not. All that matters is that the work be done quickly. If you don’t have any workers, you go do the job yourself,” she says.
Marina Pogrebnykh, a distant relative of Chernykh’s, does not know the particulars of his death, but she likewise has no doubt plant management was to blame.
“I’m certain management are to blame for it. I don’t believe he would just take his own life like that, especially since this was not the first such incident,” says Pogrebnykh.
The anonymous female worker at Uralvagonzavod confirmed Chernykh was the third plant employee to have killed himself in the past three months. On the social networks, there has been talk there may have been more such incidents.
“We are under extreme pressure at work. You can make good wages, but you have to live on the shop floor to make the good money.
“Our section foreman killed himself. Yes, of course, it was a personal situation, but I can say that if he hadn’t drunk he would be alive. But when he was foreman in another shop he never drank, although the workload was huge. So, it’s a little hard to believe in coincidences.
“Our current section foreman, a woman, quite often comes back from meetings with management completely stressed out. She’s already getting up there in terms of age, but they yell at her like they yell at everyone else,” says the late Chernykh’s female coworker.
Two weeks ago, twenty-five Uralvagonzavod workers filed suit against their employer over new rules for calculating wages. According to the workers, the new rules have cut their pay in half while their workload has increased. Although these rules came into force in 2018, the workers have only now decided to file suit.
“Management tells us the the plant has been modernized. Due to this modernization, our workload has decreased, allegedly, meaning we should produce more. It’s on paper that things look good to them. On the contrary, we haven’t noticed any changes,” say the workers by way of explaining why they have sued olant management.
“On the contrary, we now have additional functions, but our wages have been halved. This happened despite the fact that previously we had one of the highest pay grades at the plant due to occupational hazards and the heavy physical workload,” they say.
Nizhny Tagil’s Dzerzhinsky District Court has not yet made a ruling in the case.
Founded in 1936, Uralvagonzavod manufactures military equipment, railroad cars, and road construction equipment. In 2016, the company was merged with the Russian state corporation Rostec.
Poverty and overwork have led workers to hang themselves. It is all quite sad. Workers must realize they need to fight together to improve their condition. They must organize themselves, go on strike, and take other actions.
The nooses should be reserved for other heads.
This text is based on media reports.
Thanks to Tom Rowley for the heads-up. Translated by the Russian Reader
Screenshot of the Safonovo Central District Hospital’s website
14-Year-Old Girl Writes Letter to Putin, Kills Herself Radio Svoboda
November 20, 2018
Identified only as Natasha, a fourteen-year-old girl who complained to Vladimir Putin about her mother’s low wages has committed suicide in the city of Safonovo in Smolensk Region.
According to local news media, the teenager also complained about bullying at school. She was visually impaired. Her classmates teased her by calling her “Cyclops.”
Shortly before her death, she posted the following message on her social network page: “Why are you all so mean?”
The newspaper Smolenskaya Narodnaya Gazeta writes that the fourteen-year-old girl’s mother worked as an orderly at the local hospital. After her daughter wrote a letter to Vladimir Putin and mailed it to the Kremlin, the women was summoned by hospital management and “scolded.”
As the newspaper writes, what happened to her mother was probably a huge blow to Natasha.
According to unconfirmed reports, a suicide note was found on the dead girl. She asked that no one be blamed for her death.
It is not known whether her letter reached the Russian president.
Translated by the Russian Reader. Thanks to Dmitry Kalugin for the heads-up.
Sure, babies are cute, but when they are born in Russia they have every chance of growing up to be “terrorists” and “extremists.” At least, that is how they are regarded by the Kremlin and its fascist guard dogs at the Russian Federal Security Service (FSB). Photo courtesy of New Kids Center
It’s amusing (actually, it’s disgusting) how much the former Soviet socialist republic known as the Russian Federation has been overtaken by bourgeois baby madness, while at the very same time conditions for raising children in a decent, safe place have been deteriorating by the minute in Russia.
This brings me to another, related point that has bothered me for a long time.
Former FSB officer Alexander Litvinenko, who was executed by Russian dictator Vladimir Putin in the most excruciating way possible for his alleged “treason,” is invariably referred to as a “spy” by the remarkably gullible Anglophone press. But Litvinenko was never a spy. He was an FSB officer whose bailiwick was combating organized crime. When he realized, in the late 1990s, that his own law enforcement agency had become as criminal and corrupt as the gangsters it was supposedly combating, he first tried to bring it to the Russian public’s attention.
Do you remember the heavily covered press conference where he spoke about these problems (including the fact he had been ordered to assassinate Boris Berezovsky), his face masked by a balaclava, along with several of his FSB colleagues?
When Litvinenko realized, however, that nothing would come of his campaign, and his life was in danger, he defected to Great Britain.
God knows that Mr. Litvinenko was probably a naïve man albeit a brave and honest one. I wish the same could be said of most of his fellow countrymen, who are crazy about babies but won’t rub two fingers together to make their country a place where young people are regarded as anything other than potential “terrorists” and “extremists.”
Denis Lebedev was seventeen years old. He was a brilliant pupil and an Academic Olympics winner in chemistry. Chemistry was his passion in life. He did experiments in a small laboratory at home and dreamed of attending university.
Neighbors complained to the FSB about “explosions” in Lebedev’s flat, and one day the secret services forced their way in Believing Lebedev was either a terrorist or revolutionary, they turned the flat upside down, stole his telephone, computer, and lab equipments, scared him and his parents half to death, and made them sign a nondisclosure agreement.
On April 23, the day of his birthday, Denis was found dead on the ground outside his high-rise apartment building.
The second page of Denis Lebedev’s suicide note. Courtesy of Ivan N. Ivanov
This is addressed to the police, FSB, and other law enforcement agencies.
I’m just completely fucking exhausted. I don’t need anything fucking more from this life. No one induced me [to commit suicide], it was my personal decision.
The only thing I would like to say in the end is that I really fuck hate you motherfuckers.
You took from me the only passion that gave me joy and distracted me from my problems. I really fucking hate your entire government, whose only impulse is to ban the shit out of everything. Well, then you should fucking ban water, because you can use electrolysis to turn water in a canister into a bomb.
And fuck this system, in which my goddamn life depends on a single exam that has been compiled in such a way you cannot make fucking heads or tails of it. It is total shit, tailored to everyone identically.
You don’t need a people. You need a mob of fucking zombies who follow your orders. A separate portion of shit for Yarovaya.
Also, I apologize in advance to everyone to whom I meant something. That is it. I have nothing else to say. The people will say the rest.
To make it easier to identify the pancake on the cement: I am Denis Lebedev.
You can all go fuck yourselves!
Reports on Mr. Lebedev’s suicide in the Russian media:
17-Year-Old, Winner of All-Russia Academic Olympics in Chemisty, Commits Suicide in Moscow Region Ekho Moskvy
April 25, 2018
The teenager killed himself after the Russian Federal Security Service (FSB) paid him a visit.
In his suicide note, the boy wrote, “The state has no need of gifted people.” He also wrote that people like him are “strangled by inspections.”
The teenager was a straight-A student and winner of numerous Academic Olympics. He built himself a mini-laboratory at home, where he did experiments.
Neighbors reported this to law enforcement. Law enforcement officers inspected his flat, and the teenager and his parents signed a nondisclosure agreement, reports Moskovsky Komsomolets newspaper.
Thanks to Evgeny Shtorn for the heads-up. Translated by the Russian Reader. Image of FSB flag courtesy of Wikipedia
Kuban Farmer Shoots Himself over Illegal Seizure of Land
Gella Litvintseva Proved.rf
October 1, 2016
A farmer in Krasnodar Territory has committed suicide because he was unable to get back a thousand hectares of land that had been illegally seized from him, according to Alexei Volchenko, organizer of the August 2016 tractor convoy and a farmer from the Kalininskaya Distrist.
“Nikolai Gorban, a farmer in the Timashyovsk District, shot himself. It happened three days ago. A thousand hectares of land were confiscated from him by court order. The man wrote a suicide note in which he named the people he blamed for his death. Prior to this, gangsters came to his place, threatening him and promising to do away with his family. His loved ones are now preparing for the funeral,” says Volchenko, head of the Kalininskaya District Peasant Farm Enterprise.
According to Volchenko, the victim received the land plot after buying the shares from the land’s owners. After the court ruled the land confiscated, he tried to get it back, but failed.
“The farmer had his own land. He had bought it from other shareholders, like himself, and had it marked off and registered. But later the meeting of shareholders [at which they had decided to sell the land to Gorban — TRR] was declared null and void by the courts, and the land was returned to the collective farm, which Oleg Makarevich has been trying to get his hands on. The farmer went to see Natalya Kostenko, of the Russian People’s Front [a pro-Putin astroturfed “civil society” organization — TRR], to ask for help. He went personally to see her twice, and he called her. He went to see Andrei Korobka, deputy governor of Krasnodar Territory, and asked him for help. He met with me. He said, ‘I’ve lost everything. I’m going to put a bullet in my head.’ I told him not to do anything, that all was not lost, that in the end it wasn’t worth his life. I told him we would tough it out, we would beat them come what may. But he said, ‘I don’t want to live.’ I tried to dissuade him, but now we’ve found out it’s all over,” recounts Volchenko.
On September 23, convoy participants were in Moscow. Scheduled meetings with the president and the agriculture minister did not take place. They only managed to have a small get-together with Kuban officials. At the beginning of the week, Volchenko announced the farmers would be meeting with a presidential envoy in Yeysk on September 28, but ultimately this meeting did not take place, either.
“We got ready and went to Yeysk. I went into the hotel where the event was going to take place. They looked at me like I was an idiot. ‘Young man, are you smoking something or popping pills? What presidential envoy? What journalists? We have nothing scheduled.’ I went outside and saw cars with tinted windows, FSB officers walking around, and Vyacheslav Legkodukh (the Krasnodar governor’s envoy for farmer relations) sitting in a cafe and eating. I got the picture. I went to the farmers and said, ‘This is a setup. Let’s leave for home on the sly.’ They wanted us to gather outside the hotel so they could arrest us again for holding an unauthorized assembly,” recounts Volchenko.
Earlier, the protesting farmers met with Alexander Chernov, chair of the Krasnodar Territorial Court, who promised he would review all the cases the farmers requested. For now, he is their only hope.
“All the judges say Chernov is a very decent man, and keeps his word. Currently, farmers have won some of the cases that were before the courts. There are positive results, but it’s not clear whether this will be enough, because right now several farmers are under tremendous pressure, Nikolai Maslov, for example. Certain media outlets have been writing that he is a raider, that he has been trying to grab land from Shestopalov and his honest Dmitriyevskoye Agricultural Enterprise. But people just want to mark off and purchase their own land, 200 bloody hectares. Tremendous pressure has been exerted through the press. Andrei Koshik, a Kuban journalist, went to Novaya Gazeta newspaper in Moscow and tried to get the journalists to publish this garbage. They refused and wrote about it on Facebook,” says Volchenko.
The problems of Kuban’s farmers became widely known in the spring, when they decided to travel to Moscow by tractor to tell the president about illegal land seizures in Krasnodar Territory and about corruption in the local courts and district councils. To capture the president’s attention, over the course of seven months the farmers released doves with messages for him, held several rallies in a field, set off for Moscow in tractors, and wrote to the president’s public relations office. Their tractor convoy in August ended on day two in Rostov-on-Don, when the farmers were jailed and fined. Subsequently, convoy participants have been subjected to continual pressure from local authorities and law enforcement agencies.
Translated by the Russian Reader. Thanks to Comrade Anatrrra for the heads-up. Photo courtesy of Viktor Pogontsev and Rossiyskaya Gazeta, where the caption to the photo reads, tellingly, “Record grain harvests in the Kuban region in recent years have bothered certain local farmers. They have been demanding a new redivision of the land.” Rossiyskaya Gazeta is the Russian government’s daily newspaper of record.
Despair as a Sign of the Times The general mood of discouragement has been growing because Russia has shifted into idle, and it is unclear when and how it will end
Nikolay Mironov Moskovsky Komsomolets
September 6, 2016
Pain and despair have seized the country. Russians are losing their jobs. They cannot pay back their debts and feed their children. Due to constant problems and the lack of apparent prospects, families are falling apart. Some make desperate decisions, finally putting an end to their lives. Russia is losing people.
In July, an employee at a sports school in Trans-Baikal Territory committed suicide after he was not paid. In early August, a married couple in Blagoveshchensk, who were up to their eyeballs in debt,. jumped from a fourteenth-floor window, leaving their young child orphaned. This spring, a father of five in Kiselyovsk in Kemerovo Region hung himself because of debts. Large numbers of similar reports have been coming from different parts of the country.
Can you live on a wage of 10,000 to 15,000 rubles a month when prices are rising continuously? [15,000 rubles is currently equivalent to approximately 200 euros. — TRR.] Or on a pension of 8,000 rubles a month? How do you raise children on this kind of money? And what if, God forbid, you have emergency expenses, for example, for expensive medical treatment, whose cost exceeds the family budget many times over? Well yes, Russia has free medical care, so to speak, but we all knew what it is really like.
It has terrible consequences. The wave of cancer patients voluntarily departing from life continues. After a series of well-publicized cases in 2014–2015, the situation has not improved this year. In mid August, a man suffering from the cancer in the Moscow Region committed suicide with explosives. In June, another cancer patient committed suicide in Yaroslavl. Despite numerous similar suicides, the Russian Health Ministry continues to claim there is no link between the suicides of cancer patients and a deficit of pain medication. Just as there is no link, of course, between the despair felt by cancer patients in our country and the state of Russian medical care, which generally gives little chance to defeat the disease to those who have no money.
According to Rosstat, 24,000 to 26,000 people take their lives each year in Russia. But the causes of this and the means of remedying the situation are not discussed seriously. Instead, Rospotrebnadzor (Russian Federal Service for Supervision of Consumer Rights Protection and Human Welfare) have drafted recommendations for reporters on how to cover suicides.
Fewer and fewer people in our country know what they are going to live on tomorrow, how they will pay for rent and medical care. Russia is plunging into poverty. People have lost their sense of stability and security. The government, on the other hand, ignores these problems. It clearly has no strategy or even tactics for solving them.
There are a gazillion “public servants” in Russia, more than in the Soviet Union, but they serve only themselves and their bosses. High-ranking officials and the business clans that have fused with them live in a secure and comfortable world, whereas the common people are forced to survive alone. The civil service has lost its effectiveness. It has turned into a caste of masters and lords from whom we cannot defend ourselves, because they are the power, while we are “cattle.”
Can fear of policemen really be a norm of a civilized life, of a civilized country? Yet lawlessness on the part of the police has remained. All the talk about combating it has been just that—talk. Here is a recent case. Igor Gubanov, a resident of Magnitogorsk, protested against police lawlessness by cutting off two of his fingers. He could find no other way of making himself heard. In January, Gubanov and his wife, who live in a communal flat, were taken to a police precinct where, according to Gubanov, policemen raped his wife. A criminal investigation was launched, but soon the police investigators closed it, accusing the victimized woman of making false charges.
Despair is felt not only by people who have decided to commit shocking acts. The overall mood of discouragement has been increasing due to the fact Russia has shifted into idle and got stuck in the doldrums, and it is unclear when and how it will end.
The national anthem and memories are all that remain of the once-great country: outer space, victories, and prestige. The country’s most recent major achievements happened fifty years ago. The “unbreakable union” has been replaced by “our great power Russia,” but what is next? Great and poor, great and impoverished. Do these notions go together? How long can we live like this?
The Russian welfare state exists only on paper. Such declarations, by the way, have also been inscribed in the constitutions of Latin American, African, and Asian countries. A Brazilian in his favela reads that he lives in an wonderful welfare state, and he is amazed. The same is true of our fellow Russians, with their miserable wages and pensions. True, unlike their brothers from the country “where many wild monkeys live,” they do not live in huts yet. But, as they say, the night is young.
The main problem nowadays is that the country lacks a locomotive capable of pulling it out of crisis. The regime is concerned only with self-preservation. Officialdom is corrupt, inefficient, and lacking any strategic benchmarks. The “elite” (which I put in quotations, because they really are not the best people in the country) have been thoroughly denationalized: they have no stake in developing Russia. Until a normal and non-corrupt state makes the “elite” serve the country, it will never move it forward. In this case, what is wanted is the bloody-mindedness of a Peter the Great, who once put an end to mestnichestvo and forced the boyars and gentry to serve the country, or the statesmanship of Alexander II, who abolished serfdom over the lamentations of the landlords.
Instead, pro-government spin doctors have been increasingly ratcheing up the propaganda machine, searching for enemies, and heavily sugarcoating reality. Jingoism has already bored everyone to death. The people directing the show do not believe in it themselves, and the audience has stopped believing in it as well, despite the sunny ideology foisted on them, because Russia is running in place, and no one is solving its problems. The propaganda spiel that enemies are to blame for everything is still functioning, but even it cannot serve as a perennial explanation for each new outburst of social turmoil and, especially, the government’s extremely poor performance. So fine, Obama is a bad guy, but what does that have to do with indexing pensions?
The only thing the regime can really boast about is reinforcing itself. But it is a regime presiding over a country losing its vitality. As a priority, the self-preservation of the “elite” deprives Russia of the chance to put itself back in motion. Yet the purged political arena, in which there is almost no opposition to speak of, much less plain old independent people who think about their country, has stopped generating leaders. There is only one leader left in the country, and he presides over a multilayered horde of bosses and oligarchs, embezzlers and dolts perched on their estates and thinking only of themselves.
Except for United Russia, a product of the same regime, Russia’s political parties have no weight nationwide. The same goes for grassroots organizations. The media have been muzzled. Those who try and shout louder than the rest face either a harsh crackdown or a trivial payoff. Many people have taken to making oppositional noises in the hope they will be paid to shut up. Imitating protest has become a business, just like imitating patriotism. Amid the mob of clowns and crooks, the reasonable speeches made by the few real patriots who are rooting not for themselves but for their country are drowned out by the overall senseless din.
By eliminating potential enemies, the regime has also destroyed the very possibility of an alternative emerging, of a reboot. The current policies are clearly ineffective, but what and who should replace them? Reasonable prescriptions, for example, for supporting the national non-oil economy and import substitution, restoring consumer demand through social assistance to an impoverished population, ending capital flight, going after offshore companies, and clamping down hard on corruption have been voiced. These ideas, however, have come from second- and third-rank players who can advise the authorities but cannot demand anything from them. So the regime has ignored them year after year, thus exacerbating the crisis.
I am not trying to whip up a frenzy. I would like to say something positive, but the situation is firmly deadlocked. It is clear what reforms are needed. It also clear how to implement them and where to begin: with the “elite,” the civil service, the budget, and the tax system. The only open question is who would be capable of doing all this. We have already talked about the government. Russia’s active middle class is small, and it is extremely demoralized. We are left with the rank-and-file population, who have suffered most from the crisis and seemingly have a stake in launching reforms. But for the time being only a few ordinary people have been willing to take responsibility, allowing the regime quickly to localize protests, as happened with the farmers.
In the current environment, self-organization, society teaming up with honest people in the civil service and law enforcement, could be effective. Those honest people are undoubtedly there, but not in leadership roles. The country needs a grassroots organization, a movement, a party that could unite people and impose its own rules on the authorities. Society has to make the first move itself, which will serve as a signal to the honest people inside the system. We have to get the ball rolling.
Responsibility for what will become of the Motherland and us tomorrow lies with each of us today. As Mahatma Gandhi said, “Be the change that you wish to see in the world.”
All we have to do is not be silent, not relinquish our right to speak and act to someone else, not to count on an unknown savior of the Fatherland showing up. If he has not saved the country already, why would he do it now? And, needless to say, do not be afraid. We have to overcome our isolation to put an end to the senseless suicides, severed fingers, and broken lives, to put an end finally to the shameless plunder of the people and the export of the loot abroad. Even the smallest action, as long as it is collective, carries more weight than the most desperate individual deed.
We can, of course, wait for the moment when the country finally goes to hell in a hand basket, as in Tsarist Russia or the late Soviet Union. But do we really have to go through turmoil and destruction every time we need a new impulse to development? Are victims so necessary to the process of recovery?
The country is at a standstill, and the dump truck of history is rushing toward it. There are two options. Either we start the engine and drive, or we wait to get run over and tossed onto the roadside.
Front entrance of the famous Uralvagonzavod Factory in Nizhny Tagil. Courtesy of Vasily Shaposhnikov and 
Screenshot of the Safonovo Central District Hospital’s 
The first page of Denis Lebedev’s suicide note. Courtesy of Ivan N. Ivanov
The second page of Denis Lebedev’s suicide note. Courtesy of Ivan N. Ivanov
Russian Federal Security Service (FSB) flag
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