Soviets Find a Problem in Their Sheltered Midst : They Now Acknowledge Homelessness, Which May Lead to More Insecurities

For years Moscow’s answer to Western charges of human-rights violations has been that the Soviet people enjoy the most important of all human rights--free education and medical care, and the guarantee of a job and a roof over their heads. The Soviets have been especially critical of the unemployment and the shameful level of homelessness that exists in the United States.

The Soviets like to point out that the right to work is enshrined in their constitution, which states that “citizens of the U.S.S.R. have the right to work, that is, the right to guaranteed employment. . . .”

Soviet newspapers and magazines often publish photos of homeless people in American cities. In contrast, Premier Nikolai I. Ryzhkov primly told a United Nations commission a year ago, “there are no homeless people in the Soviet Union.”

Alas, it turns out, this isn’t so.

Under the impetus of Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev’s policy of glasnost, or greater openness, the Soviet press has made some intriguing revelations.

It seems that brodyagi (tramps) and bomzhi (persons of no fixed address) are to be found living in coal bins, garbage dumps, railroad stations, abandoned houses--and in special detention centers run by the police.

The profile of the homeless in the Soviet Union is not much different from that of their counterparts in the West. They include the senile and insane, ex-convicts who were denied residence permits in their home towns and alcoholics who can’t find or hold down a job.

Literaturnaya Gazeta, the Soviet literary newspaper, opened a window on the problem with an article about vagrants and homeless people in Kazakhstan.

The weekly magazine Ogonek followed up with a remarkable exercise in investigative reporting by journalist Aleksei Lebedev, who emptied his pockets of money and identification, donned a tattered overcoat and spent six months living the life of a bomzhi.

He described the places where homeless people take shelter, the temporary jobs that they take to survive and the detention centers for vagrants that can be found in every large city. These centers hold vagrants for a month while their identities are checked and attempts are made to find them a job and a place to live. If these efforts are unsuccessful, the bomzhi are put back on the street--where they become vulnerable to arrest and prosecution as “parasites.”

Lebedev held back from calling the unfortunates he encountered “homeless,” asserting that there are plenty of empty dormitory bunks in the Soviet Union.

However, the existence of homeless people has now been explicitly admitted by none other than Izvestia. The government newspaper published a letter from one Leonid Kirienko in Sverdlovsk, who wrote, “Judging from articles in the (Soviet) press, editors believe that homeless people exist only abroad. Well, there are enough of them in our country.”

Kirienko knew whereof he spoke. He had been homeless since 1980. The police had directed him to a couple of local factories, but neither offered him a job.

“Kirienko was right,” concluded Izvestia, after further investigation. “There are homeless people in our country, too.”

There are no official figures on the extent of the problem. Journalist Lebedev offered an estimate of “hundreds of thousands.” It’s reasonable to suspect that the actual number is higher.

Laudable as the glasnost -inspired revelations are, they do threaten to make life more difficult for the regime.

Take the human-rights issue.

For years the Soviets had a two-pronged reaction to Western attempts to discuss violations of such basic human rights as freedom of speech, freedom of movement and protection from arbitrary arrest.

First, they accused the West of interference in Soviet internal affairs. Then they insisted that true human rights are the “social and economic rights” of the sort supposedly guaranteed in the Soviet Union.

Lately Soviet spokesmen have taken to acknowledging that “isolated” violations of human rights do occur and must be rectified. But they still insist on the primacy of “social and economic rights,” and this is expected to be the predominant Soviet theme if and when their proposed international conference on humanitarian issues actually takes place.

It must be a mite embarrassing to have the Soviet news media raising questions about the real-life fulfillment of the “social and economic rights” guaranteed by the Soviet system.

More serious, the disclosures come at a time when millions of Soviet workers face displacement from their old jobs because of Gorbachev’s thrust for greater economic efficiency. This raises the danger that the problem of homelessness could get worse before it gets better.

Since housing is often tied to the workplace, it would be surprising if Soviet workers didn’t worry about losing the roofs over their heads--and if this insecurity didn’t increase the opposition to Gorbachev’s reforms.