The compassion of strangers: Intimate encounters with assistance in Moscow

Abstract

While conducting research on faith-based social service programs in Russia, I asked clergy, congregants, volunteers, social workers, and other aid workers to reflect on the challenges facing assistance programs. The most common responses addressed such issues as insufficient resources, especially a lack of funding from domestic sources; Russia’s complicated bureaucracy and the hurdles facing organizations that pursued legal registration; and difficulties in cultivating a culture of altruism and philanthropy among Russian citizens and officials. Most notably, aid workers identified pervasive apathy and structural hindrances as significant problems that distanced aid workers from their intended beneficiaries. Hence I was surprised by a somewhat different response voiced by a minister in Moscow. When asked about the greatest challenges facing the members of his congregation in their social service projects, he responded without hesitation that it was that they tried to do too much and became too invested in their benevolent activities. One of his tasks, he reflected, was to help his congregants understand that their own well-being and that of their families could suffer if they devoted themselves too much to alleviating the hardships of others. Thus, he tried to encourage his congregants to refocus their attentions on themselves periodically. While the minister was not advocating that his congregants remove themselves entirely from their charity work, he was acknowledging that members of his congregation could easily find themselves overwhelmed, both materially and emotionally, by the tremendous demand for assistance in Moscow.