Leela is replaced by one pair of gloves. She has 11 wards in the children's department. She must wash the patients, change diapers, change linen, make the bed, take them to lunch, feed the smallest one — the baby. The gloves are disposable, but they are the only ones, so Lilya washes them, disinfects them, dries them and puts them on again after each patient. Lilya works in the Surgut TB dispensary. Surgut is the second most prosperous city in Russia.
Lilya, like other heroines of this material, speaks extremely frankly on the record, but asks not to give her last name and flatly refuses to be photographed. People who were united by a common grief — the death of two nurses from the Surgut trauma center, which Novaya Gazeta recently reported on — are ready to talk about injustice. But they are very afraid for themselves and their families. And we, remaining on the side of the reader, cannot but tell about it. The full data of the heroines and the documents confirming their stories are at the disposal of the editors.
“The head physician asked: do you get paid extra for this?”
Surgut is the oil and gas center of the country. Oil could flow from taps here. Permafrost begins a little to the north. The average annual air temperature is minus 2 degrees. The region is equated to the Far North — this gives salary bonuses and long northern vacations. Once every two years — a free road to vacation. The average salary, according to official measurements, exceeds 80 thousand rubles, but this is taking into account shift workers and security officials. There are more visitors at the oil industry than locals: the shift is more profitable for the owner — no long holidays, no benefits. In the «budget» earnings are twice as low.
Surgut. Photo: Alexander Onopa/Kommersant
Surgut is a place of exile and shackle ringing. Portraits of the Decembrists hang in the local museum, near the river station there is a monument to special settlers who died here in hundreds of hunger and cold. Around the monument are small cedars, next to each is a sign with the name of the deceased in the Gulag. In the snow on the embankment of the icy Ob, this tiny grove looks like a small cemetery. From here they did not return to the mainland. And now they are not returning: people who complain about difficult working conditions and humiliation on the part of their superiors say: there is nowhere to go. Everyone asks not to give their names in the newspaper — you will lose your job, and write wasted.
On the facade of the terminal there is a mosaic «Surgut Madonna» — a woman with a child at the window of the aircraft. In the industrial zone there is a huge siding-covered building behind barbed wire — the OMON barracks. A little further — a local landmark — a monument to a can of condensed milk. The sweet life in Surgut is only in dreams. The center is like a large sleeping area. There is not a drop of feeling of a city with a 430-year history. At the entrances are bags of garbage. A man on a bicycle passes by. It's minus 25 outside.
< p> Sweet life in Surgut — only in dreams. Photo: Tatyana Britskaya/Novaya Gazeta
I meet Lilyaat the parking lot, where she works part-time on days off from shifts at the hospital. She has kids and a mortgage. Lots of people here have mortgages – the city is being actively built, the birth rate is high. She is a junior nurse at Tubanar, the district TB dispensary, where she left the infamous Surgut Trauma Hospital, where two nurses recently committed suicide.