EMPLOYMENT

Blind Ghetto Struggles to Survive in Russia

By Amelia Gentleman, in Moscow, for The Guardian (UK), 10/31/1999

Newcomers who stray from the industrial center of Podolsk to the south of the town are usually taken aback by what they find. For more than 50 years this has been the town's blind quarter. Today the community remains - battered and diminished - but fighting to survive.

The people, wearing dark glasses and carrying sticks, feel their way around the district, running their fingers along the brightly painted banisters at the side of the pathways, or listening out for the radios hung as sound beacons by every main entrance.

At the settlement's heart is a factory, struggling to provide work for the blind by producing consumer goods. Around it are blocks of flats built specially for the blind, a mini-supermarket run by five blind men, a braille library, a social club and a small theatre where a blind choir performs.

This community, in the industrial town to the south of Moscow, is a remnant of an unusual Soviet program for dealing with the blind: those who were able to work were offered housing and employment in small communes across the country. Half a mile away, on the other side of town, a settlement for the
deaf has also survived.

Under the Soviet Union the community flourished. The planned economy meant guaranteed orders for the factory, making anything from pins for military medals to electrical fittings for Soviet fridges. But after 1991, few wanted to buy Russian fridges when they could buy cheaper and better imported versions. Workers were sacked, salaries cut and the canteen - once the social center - shut down. The blind community shrank from 300 to 112.

Now a small flow of work is gradually returning: the Podolsk plant is scraping together a living for its workers by making plastic broom heads and light switches. Yakov Maksimov, 60, a former physics teacher who had to abandon teaching when he lost his sight, has been living and working on the Podolsk site since 1972. Although the work is monotonous, he is grateful for it. 'I wouldn't want to live anywhere else. I like having a job; a few years ago when the factory had no work at all, we used to come in every morning and sit at our desks anyway.'

A Russian television documentary recently portrayed the continued existence of these settlements as a scandalously inhumane way of treating the blind, but Maksimov insists: 'It would be wrong to see this as a ghetto. We chose to live here.'

Galia Yureva, 44, came to Podolsk when she was 17. She said: 'The blind need to have contact with each other. The more blind there are together, the better. We're like a big family here.'

In the evenings many residents play chess together and evening entertainment is held at the club. Last week it was competition night, with races to see who was quickest at peeling potatoes and who was the best braille reader.

Yet most complain bitterly about how their lot has worsened in the last decade. Tamara Sidorova came to Podolsk in 1965 and met her late husband on the factory floor. From her flat overlooking the factory, she described how she used to be able to supplement her monthly pension of 500 roubles (just
over £12) with a salary of at least another 500 roubles. Now she only gets occasional work. 'Food prices now are almost at a European level to which our pensions simply don't correspond. Before the economic reforms my fridge was full; now I can't afford to buy meat or butter.'

Sitting beneath a huge portrait of Lenin in his office, the factory's director, Anatoly Bashkatov, one of the few non-blind people in the community, said the responsibility for keeping the settlement alive weighed
heavily on his mind.

He was reluctant to admit the plant has a long way to go before becoming a commercial success. The problem, he said, was that under Communism all he had to do was to produce the goods; now he had not only to produce them but sell them as well.

He said: 'The Russian blind are ready to make brooms for other countries. We can make European standard, ecologically clean brushes, but we need sponsors - otherwise I don't know what will happen to this place.'