‘Cockroaches In The Ward'

Russia is trying to rebrand itself as a resurgent superpower. But its health care system is frighteningly bad—and getting worse

- Marc Bennetts

IT WAS LATE at night when Hanna Rún, a 26-year-old ballroom dancing champion from Iceland, woke up with searing chest pains in Penza, a city some 400 miles southeast of Moscow. Alarmed by her worsening condition, her Russian in-laws did what anyone else would do— they called an ambulance. Rún would soon wish they hadn’t. After an ambulance ride down potholed roads, Rún was placed in a hospital ward with moldy walls, filthy sheets and screaming nurses who crudely administered an intravenous drip. In the corridors, patients sat or lay on grimy floors.

But it was the hospital’s restrooms that shocked her most. “The floor was soaking wet and muddy, and the toilet was jammed full of urine and feces,” she wrote in a blog post, since deleted, about what she called her “nightmare” in Penza. Holding her sweater over her nose to keep out the stench, Rún tried not to touch anything in the restroom: “The sink was full of blood,” she wrote.

After doctors suggested carrying out an operation to “make sure” her internal organs were “working properly,” Rún decided to leave. It later turned out she had been suffering from heartburn. Rún declined to discuss her hospital stay with Newsweek, but Icelandic and Russian media widely reported the story. “A foreign woman in a Russian hell” was how Ilya Varlamov, a well known Moscow-based blogger, described the dancer’s experience.

Others saw it differently. “It’s possible it was difficult for her to adapt after hospitals in Iceland,” said Dmitry Zinovev, the head doctor at the Penza hospital. He suggested the much-discussed blog post was a deliberate attempt to discredit Russian medical facilities.