She still has her dreams: to raise a doctor, an engineer, a military general and an athlete. But as the coronavirus pandemic swept over Russia, bankrupting businesses and families, Yekaterina Gorbunova, her husband, Alexander, and their four children lost nearly everything. In her darkest moments, she wept. In moments of hope, she wrote to President Vladimir Putin and the office of Moscow’s mayor asking for help getting an apartment. But no help came in time.
“We feel absolutely abandoned. It’s as if you’re in a boat and it’s sinking and no one will come to rescue you,” she said after her husband lost his job and the family was evicted from their apartment. “Nobody pays any attention to the people in need,” she said. “Instead of doing good, no one cares.”
Since March, Russian charities and nonprofit organizations experienced a surge in the kind of clients they have not had before: families that had never been in financial crisis, but are now desperate. Some of them were unable to buy even food. Some were left homeless.
According to Russian federal statistics agency Rosstat, an estimated 4.5 million people were out of work at the end of May. The nation’s economy is predicted to shrink by 5.5 percent this year.
Thousands of small businesses have gone bankrupt in Russia’s economic crisis caused by the pandemic and the collapse in oil prices. The government was slow to respond, and belated, patchy measures left millions of people adrift.