[ Photography:Series ]
"The Underclass and Its Bosses"
Artist: Donald Weber
[Copyright 2005]
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Description:Crime and Punishment in Ukraine:
It’s another grey January day in Dneprodzerzhinsk, an industrial city on Ukraine’s Dnieper River, population 350,000 – and declining. The unemployment rate is nearly 50%, and if the nation’s Orange Revolution has happened, its benefits haven’t arrived here yet.
A huge underclass of alcoholics, drug addicts and petty criminals live here, abandoned by the world to forage among the decaying ruins of heavy steel and big coal. Apartment entrances are pitch dark, the light bulbs are gone. The elevators don’t work because the gangs steal the iron pulleys for scrap. Children scavenge aluminium pop cans from desolate waste sites, learning to survive in a social squalor that Gogol or Dostoevsky would have recognized from two centuries before. It’s the 18th Century with jets flying overhead.
This is life on the edge of Europe, where the bosses run the show with sudden fists and midnight raids in force.
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