A country doctor, a tiny, dilapidated village hospital, an indifferent health bureaucracy — and now, coming to the rescue, volunteers from distant Moscow, bringing furniture, equipment, money and, maybe most important, good cheer.
In the background, though, is the Parliament — weighing a law to bring any volunteer activity under the purview of the state, on the theory that people who organize themselves to do good works are a threat to the state's power.
The past year or so has seen an upwelling of a trend unprecedented in Russia — people getting together on their own to help others in need. Personal initiative, always suspect there, is suddenly taking off. Drivers deliver medicine to shut-ins. Women cook meals for hospitals. Volunteers use rubles and hammers to renovate shelters for battered women, teenage orphans and abandoned pets.