Beggars of St. Petersburg

St. Petersburg has a lot of beggars, after a fashion. Very few of them are actual beggars, though. The most common kind are people selling boxes of inexpensive stuff--little toys, or flowers, or small selections of produce. Fine. These are boring.

There are also street musicians. These are generally more enthusiastic and better organized than in the US. Twos and threes are almost as frequent as lone street musicians; I once saw a singer and an accordion player capitalizing on the fact that SPB is supposed to be the "Venice of the North." I have also seen people playing electric guitars, a family playing Celtic music, and--I am not making this up--a string quartet playing in a pedestrian underpass close to Red Square. So the street musicians are good.

After this are people who aren't really beggars, but aren't selling anything, either. These are mostly people with animals--usually a box full of kittens; sometimes a dog with a litter of puppies. These are almost always suckling--not just still nursing, but actively doing so when you walk by. Sometimes you'll see tourists taking pictures of this; I imagine that the people with the animals are thrilled every time someone asks to do this. These people aren't genuine beggars, of course, but you have to give them credit for being clever.

Finally there are the real beggars. They come in two varieties: old women, and cripples. They can be seen along main thoroughfares--there's a veteran missing half his arms and legs (half of each of them, not all of one arm and all of one leg) who frequents Nevsky prospekt, and I once saw an old woman on her knees in front of an icon, apparently praying for money. Mostly they gather around the churches, though; there are old women near the entrance to Kazan Cathedral and at the foot of St. Isaac's, and the walkway into Alexander Nevsky Monastery is strewn with veterans missing their legs.

It's important to point out, though, that you will almost never see old men begging in Russia. This is because there are almost no old men in Russia; I think the life expectancy for men in Russia is something like 58 (versus, I don't know, 73 for women. Wait...CIA World Factbook confirms). There are old women everywhere, though--old women whose pensions, I assume, aren't big enough or maybe aren't existent enough after the fall of the Soviet Union. Usually they are wearing galoshes and overcoats and shawls, and of course they carry their things around in plastic bags--basically everyone does. As a rule, they're pretty short, too, generally as much due to stature as the to the fact that they tend to be bent about double. I think, though, that they're probably the most distinct people in all of Russia--or at least St. Petersburg. I would take pictures to show you (I may have one--she was looking the other way), but I'm afraid that if they noticed it would just be one more insult.

Anyway. Those are the beggars of St. Petersburg, more or less.