Time to read: 22 minutes(s)

"We have a psychiatrist theatre"

On April 25, a court upheld the prosecutor's office's claim and ordered the closure of the private homeless shelter "Helping Hand" in the village of Kumskoy in Stavropol Krai. The shelter houses 75 people. A film or a book could be written about each of them—shelters owner Olga Shiryaeva remembers all their stories. She says she will still figure out how to prevent her residents from ending up on the streets again. Journalist Lola Romanova visited the "Helping Hand" shelter and reports on the people at risk of becoming homeless again. 

We are publishing this story together with the publication New Tab 

Author: Lola Romanova. Photo: Alina Desyatnichenko.

Behind a tall, two-meter-high fence stands a two-story brick house. It's a private shelter for the homeless, "Helping Hand." Two whole, untouched cigarettes fall from the balcony of a resident, Polina. Polina has schizophrenia.

"Are you on a date?" she asks cheerfully, waving. People rarely come here to see their families. 

Katya, a friendly young woman with her hair hastily pulled back into a bun and flour stains on her shirt, greets me at the fence. She used to live here too, but then she met a man and got married. Katya has settled in the neighborhood and comes to the shelter every day as a volunteer. She says there are about a dozen other volunteers in the building. When asked how she ended up at Ruka Huppa, Katya sheepishly lowers her eyes: "It's a secret."

Valery is wheeled around the courtyard in a wheelchair. His legs were amputated just below the knee. He speaks reluctantly and admits that he doesn't interact with anyone in the house yet. He arrived at the shelter just a month ago and is currently "fattening up." According to Valery, before this, the Roma forced him to beg at the central market. tying the stroller to the tree with a chain. 

House

Katya leads me through the spacious dining room into the house. A red "No Smoking!" sign hangs on the ground floor. The residents finished their breakfast of syrniki a couple of hours ago, and liver cutlets are already ready for lunch. The shelter's residents help the volunteers prepare meals, clean, and care for the bedridden residents. Every day, they agree on who does what around the house. 

The shelter has eleven rooms, divided into male and female. Each room accommodates five to six people, with the largest rooms housing eleven. Small nightstands containing the residents' belongings are wedged between the white metal beds, reminiscent of hospital beds. Several beds line the hallways, where people also sleep. 

On the ground floor is a common room with clean, whitewashed walls, where men and women live together. There's no door; a curtain covers the passage. A large patterned rug covers the floor. A flypaper with insects still attached hangs from the ceiling light fixture. 

Fifty-seven-year-old Marina lies in a crib near the entrance. She has a shaved head and her legs have been amputated at the knees. Marina says that a year ago, rats gnawed at them while she was living in an abandoned tuberculosis clinic. She says her legs were numb from the cold, and she didn't even feel the bites. When Marina woke up in the morning, she could no longer walk. She had to crawl to a wide road, and passersby called an ambulance. At the hospital, it was discovered that her feet were frostbitten and the wounds were infected. After the amputation and hospital treatment, Marina was admitted to a shelter in Kumskoye in March 2023. 

"I help her, bring her water and food," another shelter resident, Nikolai, interrupts Marina's story. An empty plate sits on the table next to the crib. He holds a book about World War II, which he reads aloud to Marina.

We climb the steep stairs to the office, the entire wall of which is covered with letters of gratitude from volunteer organizations and the Mineralnye Vody Urban District administration. Polina's cries can be heard in the hallway: her mood has suddenly changed, and she needs to be listened to. 

While Katya takes medicine for her patients out of the cabinet and runs off to do some errands. Kristina Bagandova comes into the office. coordinator Shelter. She says she learned about the shelter in August 2019, when she saw a man on the street in an "unnatural pose" on a concrete curb. "It felt like the pea coat was sitting there, but there wasn't a person in it," Kristina says, recalling how maggots fell from the amputated leg of homeless man Mikhail. 

The ambulance service told Kristina that the man had refused help, but after she dressed Mikhail in his husband's clothes and "cleaned him up," she managed to get him admitted to the hospital. After his discharge, Kristina arranged with the shelter to bring Mikhail and supervise him.

"I'd come with buckets of boiled pelmeni," Kristina recalls. She says she works for a Moscow branch of a company, so she can help people with her "Moscow salary." Kristina pours my unfinished coffee into a separate mug to give to one of the other guests later. "They'll kiss me for it," she laughs. 

Cigarettes are even more prized at the shelter: almost everyone smokes, even the bedridden ones. The smell of tobacco permeates the sewer odor—the toilet on the second floor is being renovated. 

"They [the patients] are motivated: if you want to smoke, you have to walk," says Omar, Kristina's husband. "They try everything they can to get back on their feet, even taking off their casts early enough to go out and smoke." 

Stories from the past

The shelter has been housing homeless people since 2005. The shelter's owner, Olga Shiryaeva, is a 53-year-old woman wearing a T-shirt with the slogan "Ain't no time for shaving." Shiryaeva says the T-shirt was a gift. When she learned the English translation of the phrase—"no time for shaving"—she thought it resonated with the theme of homelessness. 

Olga Vasilievna—that's what they call her around the house. "It just happened that way," she explains in a faint southern Russian accent.

Olga was born in Mineralnye Vody and lived with her parents in Krasnoyarsk Krai for several years, but then the family returned to Stavropol. Olga was seven years old at the time. At school, Shiryaeva says, she got C's:

"I didn't understand the Pythagorean periodic table, I'm not a nerd, but I told my mom, 'Nadezhda Natalovna [the homeroom teacher] doesn't have a garden. Let's give her half of ours?'"

At 12, Olga cut pensioners' hair in a park in Mineralnye Vody. They thanked her with candy, and she distributed the sweets to her peers. Olga says she was an only child in a wealthy family, but "didn't grow up in a selfish environment." 

Olga, the owner of the house, doesn't like to talk about herself, focusing on the people she cares for. On her phone, she scrolls through photos and videos from a chat with the shelter volunteers and recounts the stories of the homeless in detail. 

"They smashed her head with an axe and took away her pension. It's like worms in her head," Shiryaeva pauses at one of the photographs. "She's in the hospital now."

Olga assures that she has already learned not to take all this too emotionally, but she is still worried.

"I don't go to any theater performances. I see everything here. We have a theater psychiatrist. The harem owner is a poor soul," Shiryaeva says of herself.

According to Olga, she's been helping the homeless for almost 30 years. Over the years, she's accumulated many stories of people's lives. In 1995, Shiryaeva opened a grocery store, and her first customer was Svetlana, a refugee from Afghanistan. Olga helped her complete the paperwork and get her admitted to a psychiatric hospital in Stavropol, as she was in "a serious condition, like a bullet in the head." The woman's nine-year-old son, who had developmental delays, was placed in a boarding school. 

To confirm whether helping people was truly her calling, Olga Shiryaeva consulted a clairvoyant friend in the late 90s. According to Olga, the clairvoyant saw her as a "savior" and told her that if she supported Svetlana, Olga's life would change and she would be able to help many others.

"Choose: either me or your homeless people"

After Olga helped Svetlana restore her documents, Shiryaeva was offered a position as a social worker at a psychiatric hospital in Stavropol. She completed training in the social rehabilitation program at the University of Calgary in Canada and wanted to create her own shelter. She then began letting people from the hospital, who had nowhere to go after being discharged, live in her house in Mineralnye Vody. 

"My husband told me, 'Choose: either me or your homeless people.' Well, I chose the homeless people and moved out for eight months," Shiryaeva recalls with a smile. 

True, 16 homeless people and the children remained to live with her husband, Yuri. By the time Olga returned home, he had already resigned himself to it. Yuri says it was God's will:

"One day, my brother's grandmother came to him asking for help, but he refused. Some time later, his little son crawled under the refrigerator and ate [poisoned] mouse seeds. He then spent a month in intensive care. And since then, I've realized that you can't refuse to help people. God shows you that if you don't help people, you're bound to have some kind of problems." 

Olga's four children, the youngest of whom is 20 years old, now live separately from their parents, but also support their mother. 

To buy the house where the homeless currently live, Olga Shiryaeva took out a mortgage and asked her friend Irina Milyukhina (who owns a share in the house) for financial assistance. To furnish it, Olga says she sold gold jewelry inherited from her parents and mother-in-law. Olga and her husband are currently unemployed; Yuri is a beekeeper.

When asked how they manage to maintain such a large shelter—75 people currently live there—Shiryaeva says that benefactors help, bringing food, medicine, and household appliances. She says the residents' pensions cover utility costs—approximately 50 rubles a month. This supposedly suffices, but Olga is reluctant to discuss finances. In 2021, Rossiyskaya Gazeta Wrote, that the monthly maintenance of the “Helping Hand” shelter costs 150–200 thousand rubles.

Lady Bitch

Our conversation is interrupted by an incoming call on Kristina's phone. Her phone number is listed on the shelter's Instagram account (banned in Russia). 

A traveler calls. In the mountains of Karachay-Cherkessia, about 170 kilometers from Mineralnye Vody, he encountered a 73-year-old woman in "old, filthy clothes" selling honey by the roadside. It turns out she lives without papers in a grimy trailer with no electricity. 

The traveler agreed with Kristina to help the pensioner get to the shelter. The next day, he drove her down the mountains on his motorcycle and called a taxi to take her to the "Helping Hand" shelter. 

"Lady, lady-bitch," the new resident jokingly replies when asked how to address her. Her name is Zinaida. Arriving at the shelter, she immediately notices the empty garden and declares she'll help with the chores. While introducing herself, Zinaida constantly adjusts her long gray hat: she doesn't want anyone to see her dirty hair. 

Zinaida lived in Kislovodsk, but in the late 90s, she had a falling out with her daughter, threw her passport in her face, and left for the village of Yessentuki. From there, she says, she ended up "on the sheepfold" in Karachay-Cherkessia—on a mountain farm, where she spent 11 years looking after sheep, rams, and cows. The owner of the farm—the "master"—lived elsewhere. Occasionally, she says, new people would show up, but they would run away, and recently she lived completely alone. She couldn't leave the mountainous area on her own. There was no gas in the trailer, so she cooked with firewood, which she chopped herself with an axe. Zinaida gave the money from selling her honey to the "master," who, she says, never paid her anything. 

"You idiot!" Zinaida twirls her fingers at her temple, wondering why she didn't save up enough money to escape the farm. The pensioner is put up on the ground floor and given clean white sheets.

Tears well up in Olga Vasilievna’s eyes: Zinaida’s appearance reminds her of her mother, who died four years ago. 

Writer

An elderly woman with blue eyes and neatly pulled-back hair lives in the room next to the study and small library. She reluctantly looks up from Steven Van Dine's novel "Death of a Canary" to speak with the journalist. 

Olga Konstantinovna is known in the house as "The Writer." She claims to have written fifteen science fiction novels, the last of which she wrote in the orphanage. However, no one in the house has ever seen her manuscripts. Olga Konstantinovna claims she was deceived by the publisher, who released the novels under a different name.

The writer says that she was born in Stalinsk (now Novokuznetsk. — Approx. Ed.), trained as a translator, gave birth to a son, and left him with her mother. In the 90s, Olga Konstantinovna moved to Stavropol, where she worked as a translator, renting an apartment. She says there were times when she didn't even have enough money for food. Her son now lives in the apartment she inherited from her parents. 

The writer calls the question of why she doesn't want to move in with him "stupid": "I don't want to be a housekeeper." According to Olga Shiryaeva, her son also doesn't want to communicate with his mother. "I once needed her, but she didn't understand," Shiryaeva recalls him saying. 

"If the devil hadn't brought me to church, I wouldn't be here," says Pisatelnitsa. Although she's a staunch atheist who grew up in a military commissar's family, three years ago she "dragged herself with all her belongings out of desperation" to the church. There, she was advised to go to Olga Shiryaeva's shelter. 

Although Protestant believers often visit the shelter, Olga Konstantinovna has never converted to religion. She loves her Protestant guests for their "luxurious" gifts—candy, cookies, tangerines, and pies. "Humans are weak, but I love sweets," Olga Konstantinovna laughs. 

She doesn't really want to remember her life, but she is ready to talk about literature for a long time. 

"I only read foreign detective stories because they're less dishonest. Our own, under Soviet rule, lied mercilessly, covering up all the evils of the socialist system. Even in my youth, I disdained them," the writer shares. "Today's Russian writers are frivolous. Dontsova, for example, constantly boasts about being on friendly terms with Paris, but she's only been published in Russia." 

Olga also dreams of publishing her novels, and that's the only reason she agreed to get a passport: in the 90s, she didn't exchange her Soviet passport for a Russian one, and she still doesn't have one. She currently translates texts from English into Russian for the "contingent" in Mineralnye Vody and Stavropol, and receives royalties by verbal agreement.

"Do you think that because I'm 78, I'm on death's door? I still have my whole life ahead of me. You know, all my organs are healthy, so I'm not thinking about kicking the bucket yet. It's still a bit early for me," the Writer muses.

The only thing that's upsetting her now is the disappearance of the old cat she brought to the shelter. Olga Konstantinovna hopes her beloved pet will return.

Second house

Several years ago, Olga Shiryaeva and her husband moved to another house a ten-minute walk from the shelter. According to Olga, Yuri inherited it. The walk to the house passes a former Muslim cemetery and a cliff nicknamed Anfiskin, named after a local woman who fell from it into the river. 

The doors of the house are practically always open: Olga Vasilyevna's residents often drop by. A young man in a neat blue vest, Alexander, came to pick up his documents. He left them two years ago because he was "afraid of drinking them away." Alexander ended up in the shelter because of alcoholism and promised to quit, but relapsed two months later. He says he left because he felt ashamed: "I realized I'd disappointed Olga Vasilyevna." While living at the shelter, he worked as a head cook in a café. Now he earns money in construction and shares an apartment with a friend.

"From a poor man's shoulder," Alexander hastily throws a folded thousand rubles on the table to help the shelter. He says he doesn't have much money yet, but he's leaving Olga Vasilyevna his phone number in case she needs his help. 

Alexander is one of the few who worked while living at the shelter. Most of the residents are elderly. 

The Shiryaevs' new home includes Borka the cat and 15 other guests, all of whom Olga has known for a long time. She has known Rita, a petite woman originally from Georgia, for almost 17 years.

In December 1999, Rita gave birth to a son in Russia and gave him her mother's Russian surname because she was afraid to reveal her Georgian one due to the "difficult political situation." All her documents remained in her home country. Rita says that after the birth, she was extremely stressed, "her thoughts began to get jumbled up in her head," and she couldn't walk.

Olga Shiryaeva met Rita in a psychiatric hospital in Stavropol, where she had been admitted after two suicide attempts. Before that, Rita says, she had been driven to despair by her life with her ex-lover and his mother. They, she recalls, pressured her for her constant bed rest, telling her she was a "fool" and incapable of raising a child. Olga took Rita and her son to a shelter.

"I weighed 40 kilograms. Everything was falling off my skin, like a lizard's," Rita says, gesturing at her now-healthy arms. "Now I've gained 20 kilograms."

Rita still takes medication to avoid "serious illnesses." "We communicate as patients, and somehow we understand each other," she says of life in the shelter. 

"When she starts to withdraw, I distract her. Sometimes she'll lie down and fold her arms, you know? Like in the movie, 'Brother Mitka is dying and asks for fish soup.' Then, even if, for example, the fish doesn't need cleaning, I'll tell her that it does," Olga Vasilievna explains. 

Authority in the Madhouse

On the wide dining table, which Rita begins to set, lies a pile of recently arrived mail. In addition to a letter from Olga's youngest son from the army, written in a childish handwriting, there's a new letter of thanks from the administration of Penal Colony No. 5 in Stavropol for their "cooperation in the resocialization" of prisoners after their release. 

Olga Vasilyevna admits that she learned how to communicate with former prisoners from crime boss Leonid Svinukhov, known by the alias Limon. "I came to him, and he had one leg shorter than the other, and his badik was next to him," Shiryaeva recalls of their first meeting. "When I tell one of these [former convicts under my wing] about Limon and how I was friends with him, they respect me for it... 'I'm an authority in the prison zone, and you're an authority in the madhouse,'" Olga Vasilyevna quotes Svinukhov as saying. 

A few days ago, the “Helping Hand” sheltered Sultan Asmayev, a 20-year-old priest from the Urals, who had just been released from prison. who served time He was serving time in Correctional Colony No. 10 in Yekaterinburg for murder and robbery. Three years ago, he wrote a letter to Olga Shiryaeva outlining his version of events, claiming he was framed. "I believe him," says Olga Vasilyevna. 

State claims

In February 2024, the prosecutor's office filed action The Mineralnye Vody City Court filed a complaint demanding the shelter be closed. Law enforcement officials found fire safety violations in the building and determined that the land was designated for private housing construction, not "missionary activity." During the pandemic, the shelter was required to install a fire alarm system, but due to the high cost of the equipment and the supply issues that arose at the time, the system is only now being completed. 

The shelter says a local pensioner is constantly filing complaints against them, which is why the prosecutor's office is investigating. 

In early April, the press service of the regional prosecutor's office they saidIf the shelter closes, the residents will be relocated to municipal facilities. Conditions there are much worse, says Shiryaeva:

"I took people to the boarding school, and my heart bled," she recalls the time before she took in homeless people. "It was like imprisoning them for life, giving them no chance to find relatives and live with a family."

According to Olga Vasilyevna, they sometimes manage to find relatives of residents. In 2023, 73-year-old Tamara arrived at the shelter: she dreamed of meeting her children, whom she hadn't seen for ten years. Kristina posted a photo of Tamara on social media, and soon the shelter received a call from the woman's daughter, who lives in Kazakhstan. She bought tickets for her mother, and Olga Vasilyevna accompanied Tamara to the airport. In March, Shiryaeva received a message from Tamara's daughter that the pensioner had died.

Even more important is the chance to find oneself. Yuriy Polischuk lives in a spacious room in the shelter's attic. "Karlson on the roof," he says of himself. He acts as the shelter's "supervisor," handing out clothes to the residents. Yuriy calls them "family" and sometimes sings and plays the guitar for everyone. In February, he invited on the television program “Songs from the Heart,” and on April 24 on the Internet came out his first original song. 

"Today, someone who has never given to others is begging for alms," Yuri sings slowly, singing Oleg Gavrilyuk's "Old Man." Olga Vasilyevna calls it the shelter's "motto."

"This won't make things any easier for anyone."

The shelter's residents are certain that if it closes, most of them will end up on the streets again: 

"This won't make things any easier for anyone. Maybe it will for them [the authorities], but certainly not for those who are here," says 63-year-old Nikolai.

He boasts about the silver wedding ring that Shiryaeva bought him: he recently got married to Svetlana, whom he met at the shelter. 

 "At least there's some treatment here, they help with paperwork, they feed me. And what about the fact that people slept by the trash can and ate from it? Is that good? Let them come and ask everyone [how they feel about the shelter]. Even if the shelter closes, I won't abandon anyone; I'll stay here. They've done so much for me that I wouldn't be mean enough to do something like that. And if they are, let them throw everyone back out onto the streets. But what kind of conscience will they have? Eat the government food and not lift a finger?" the pensioner asks, surprised.

Nikolai is a veterinarian. When he moved into the shelter, he asked Olga Vasilyevna for a goat. Eventually, there were 30 goats. 

"Lucy, Katya, Rose, Belochka, Malutka, Verochka, Beryozka, and another Belochka," Nikolai lists the names with a smile. "Now their children have also produced offspring."

"Where are people supposed to go? Be homeless on the streets, scavenge through garbage dumps? There are already plenty of people in the dumps there," fumes 60-year-old Galina, Olga Vasilyevna's neighbor. "Here I am now, living with my children watching over me. What if something happens and I get stabbed somewhere too? I'm not a young woman anymore, forgive me." 

The pensioner says the shelter's residents help her with the housework: "The boys brought me a sack of potatoes yesterday." The potatoes were donated by benefactors, but there were too many, so Olga Vasilyevna decided to share with her neighbors. 

Before the pandemic, Galina worked as a cook at a shelter for five years and met a man there. 

"He lived in Yessentuki, but his wife kicked him out. He was homeless for a whole year," Galina cries. "I registered him with me, and he was on his knees. We cried a lot! He helps me a lot, but now he's very ill. Cancer. I won't survive a second death [after my first husband]."

She had to leave her job after her health deteriorated due to COVID. Galina's cousin currently lives in the shelter, but she cannot take him in because of the small size of her own house. 

***

On April 25, the Mineralnye Vody City Court upheld the prosecutor's office's claim and banned Olga Shiryaeva from providing social services. 

"I'm so upset for them [the people in my care]! For our charity, for the state. I'm upset for everything," Olga Vasilyevna commented on the court's decision. 

According to Shiryaeva, even if she fails to appeal this decision, she will still care for the homeless—if necessary, she will transfer the sole proprietorship to her son or daughter. 

A portrait of Putin hangs behind her in her office. Olga Shiryaeva believes the attempt to close the shelter is because the president doesn't know about it. Her son recently wrote a letter to him. Olga hopes this will help.

She thinks Putin isn't getting the word out about the homeless. Shiryaeva recounted how, in 2018, when he visited Mineralnye Vody, city authorities brought her all the homeless people from the local Broadway—so the president wouldn't see them on the streets. 

"Or maybe [Putin knows]..." Shiryaeva ponders. "And where will they [the authorities] get the money [to help the homeless]? All the money goes to the SVO."