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MOSCOW — 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.”
Across the globe, the pandemic has tanked economies as the world faces its worst collective downturn since the Great Depression. Russia has been particularly hard hit by the twin blows of the coronavirus and the collapse in oil prices. Russia relies on taxes from the oil and gas sector for 40 percent of its budget.
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.
‘You’re on your own’
Ivan Molchanov, 33, is staying in a hostel in Moscow for people in crisis during the pandemic. (Oksana Yushko for The Washington Post) According to Russian federal statistics agency Rosstat, an estimated 4.5 million people were out of work at the end of May — a number that has soared 85 percent since March. Before the double crises hit, Russia had 1.3 million people listed as unemployed, according to official figures. The jobless rate now stands at 6.1 percent, compared with 5.8 percent in April. The U.S. unemployment rate in June was 11.1 percent, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported, down from a peak of 14.7 percent in April.
In May, Russia’s industrial output slumped by 9.6 percent compared with May 2019 as restrictions on oil production under a deal with OPEC hit home. The auto-manufacturing industry was particularly hard hit, down by 42.2 percent in May compared with the same period last year. The International Monetary Fund expects the Russian economy to contract by 5.5 percent this year. The Russian Central Bank said it could shrink by up to 6 percent. The U.S. economy shrank at a 5-percent rate in the first quarter of this year, the Commerce Department reported in late June.
Thousands of small businesses in Russia have gone bankrupt. The government was slow to respond, and belated, patchy measures left millions of people adrift.
“You’re on your own,” said Ivan Molchanov, a welder who spent 20 nights on the streets after his employer…
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Read More: Russia’s economic crisis is drawing in more desperate families
