Alison Severs / Vice, “Krokodil: Siberia’s Tears” (2011)
I stumbled across short video clips made by a documentary channel Vice News which specialises in a form of journalism which takes its audience up close to events so you feel as if you’re actually there with the interviewer and camera person. The look is very deliberately amateurish and appears to have very little editing; it might be called guerilla reporting for want of a better term. Host Severs plays multiple duty as investigative journalist, tour guide and travel companion as she leads viewers into Novokuznetsk, a provincial city in central Siberia in Russia and microcosm of an alarming heroin epidemic fuelled by black market imports from Afghanistan.
The short documentary is only 25 minutes long but what Severs uncovers is so depressing and horrific that viewers may be glad it ends when it does. The city itself is immersed in a post-industrial depressive funk and the pasty-faced citizens have little future to look forward to. Poverty seems the only way of life and even buildings have a look of black-dog sadness and dejection. In this world, Severs discovers that apparently 20% of the people have a heroin addiction and some of these people are also addicted to a dangerous heroin substitute which they call Krokodil for the scaly-skin look that is a side effect of the drug. (Although 30,000 people who are hooked on heroin out of a population of over 547,000 in Novokuznetsk turns out to be about 5%.) Properly called desomorphine and made from codeine, iodine and red phosphorus with a drug called Tropicamide sometimes substituting for the codeine, Krokodil is much cheaper than heroin, is easy to make as the ingredients can be bought from pharmacies and gives rise to alarming side effects such as organ failure and severe gangrene that literally rots large chunks of flesh and can leave bone exposed.
Severs traipses around town to find out how communities are coping. The news is not good: she finds an American-sponsored charity assisting addicts to overcome their problem but often at the expense of renouncing Russian Orthodoxy and converting to feel-good clap-happy American populist (and possibly fundamentalist) Christanity. A local Russian Orthodox priest is interviewed but he and his Church seem helpless against the Krokodil problem. One interviewee suggests that the influx of heroin into Russia is intended by outside agencies such as al Qa’ida to undermine the Russian population; given the sorry history of the CIA channelling cocaine into areas of Los Angeles and other American cities where black Americans lived, instigating the crack wars that devastated these districts, in the 1980s, I’m inclined not to discount the man’s opinions as a half-baked conspiracy theory.
Close-ups and handheld camera following Severs very closely indeed lend intimacy and immediacy to the reporting, as does allowing the people Severs meets to speak for themselves and talk about their experiences with using heroin and Krokodil or treating addicts. Footage of Severs walking over rubbish on floors in abandoned buildings and finding empty syringes in the filth drives home the very banality of the settings where Krokodil is used and viewers can easily imagine that such scenes could occur in their own neighbourhoods.
Severs notes the Russian government seems to be ignoring the problem of Krokodil in Novokuznetsk but otherwise passes no judgement on its action or inaction. Why this should be so is interesting in itself; one would think that if the black market importation of heroin or the substitution of Krokodil for it were undermining Russian society, President Putin’s government would be doing something about that. The style of reporting on display here seems sympathetic towards the interviewees, and there is no slack-jawed moralising or evidence of a patronising attitude. This has the effect of drawing out interviewees’ responses so they end up saying much more than they would otherwise if a more confrontational interviewing approach had been used. The danger here is that they might say more than they actually want to and the reporter must bear the responsibility for eliciting more information than the interviewee wants to give.
Quite an informative if sometimes depressing documentary this appears to be though it may very well be biased and manipulative. The VICE team does not interview any medical experts or refer to more authoritative sources about the problem. I appreciate that the VICE team’s budget might have been small but I also wonder whether it might have been better used. There is also the possibility that VICE has a particular political axe to grind in relation to anything to do with Russia, and in its insistent focus on the heroin / Krokodil problem; if so, the documentary may be exploiting the addicts interviewed for cheap gain.