Behind the Silence


  • Photographer
    Gordon Welters
  • Prize
    Honorable Mention
  • Company/Studios
    Gordon Welters Photography
  • Date of Photograph
    2011-2012

The Psycho-Neurological Internat in Peterhof (Russia) is a public home for thousand disabled, but also for older people, homeless and alcoholics. Residents are lying in beds day in, day out and have been supplied only with the most basic needs. Medical care for them is not properly guaranteed due to a lack of staff shortages. Above all, there is a lack of individual support and human warmth. An undignified life – reduced to vegetating until death. New concepts and approaches for the work with the disabled must be established urgent. But it requires a wide public to change this closed system.

Story

Peterhof, not far from St. Petersburg (Russia) is especially well-known for its Grand Peterhof Palace and the Grand Cascade. But only few know about the gray, quite ugly concrete block behind the „Russian Versailles“. It´s the Psycho-Neurological Internat No. 3 (PNI) - a public home for thousands of people with psycho-neurological problems and mental illness,physically disabled but also for homeless, alcoholics, older women and men.

Many of the residents are lying in beds day in, day out and have been supplied only with the most basic needs. In advice by doctors some of the disabled were abandoned by their parents directly after birth – in the belief that the governmental institutions would be care better for them. After periods in baby´s and children´s homes - without neither receiving little or no education nor getting adequate medical care - PNI means end of the line for most of the disabled.

A undignified life – reduced to vegetating until death. It`s a state-dictated and socially-rooted negligence of people in need of protection. Russias social system is not designed to help those people. On the contrary: the residents of such institutions like PNI are locked far away from society and often they live under terrible conditions. Medical care for them is not properly guaranteed due a lack of staff shortages and unskilled and aged nurses. Above all, there is a lack of individual support, human warmth and caring.

After reading Anton Chekhov`s „Ward No. 6“ (published in 1892) - about the strange encounter between a doctor and his patient who suffers from persecution mania - I tried to get access to the Psycho-Neurological-Internat No.3 in Peterhof. 120 years after Chekhov´s short story has been published I wanted to explore the situation for disabled in such internats today.

Although a small number of non-governmental organisations try to achieve an improvement by volunteering services or providing assistance for affected families, today the Psycho-Neurological internats are still places where disabled and other undesirables be kept until they will die. Since Chekhov there are only few things that have changed for the residents of PNI. A reason for that is the Russian system of bureaucracy - which is corrupted on a high level. All too often money from public funds or donations for people with pecial needs disappear never to be seen again into dubious channels. There is only a very little interest to offer a life of human dignity to the weakest in Russian society. And any reform approaches have to deal primarily with this inheritance. Chekhov was right when he wrote in 1892: "The past was hateful — better not to think of it. And it was the same in the present as in the past. (...) society must see its failings and be horrified."

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