ABSTRACT
This new visibility of street homeless people can partly be explained by the end of criminal prosecution for vagrancy and parasitism. From the beginning of the 1990s, persecution of ‘vagrants and parasites’ stopped and the Law of the Russian Federation ‘On Amendments and Additions to the Criminal Code of the RSFSR’ of 5 December 1991 abolished articles 209 and 198. Prohibition of settlement in specific territories also ceased to exist.1 In 1990, a resolution of the Council of Ministers of the USSR removed all the limitations on propiska for ex-prisoners.
