City Without Drugs: How Vigilantes Targeted One of Russia's Most Drug-Ravaged Cities

In Yekaterinburg, a city in Russia, there were whispers of a man who could do what the police, the doctors, and even the government had failed to do: break the city’s drug epidemic. His name was Yevgeny Roizman. To some, he was a savior. To others, he was a gangster in a suit.

In the late 1990s and early 2000s, heroin was everywhere in the Urals. Addicts lined stairwells, families were ruined, and morgues were filling up. In the midst of this chaos, Roizman, a former convict who had already served time for fraud and theft, took responsibility.

He would later become mayor, but he hadn’t run for office at the time, and he definitely wasn’t interested in waiting for the legal system to do its part. Instead, he founded something called City Without Drugs—a vigilante rehab movement that promised to clean the streets by force, if necessary. And force is exactly what he used.

Addicts were dragged off the streets by his volunteers, locked into rehab centers, and kept there against their will. Families desperate for help sometimes cheered him on, while human rights groups called what he was doing torture.

The story of Roizman trying to build a city without drugs is about what happens when a society becomes so desperate that it welcomes cruelty, as long as it looks like control.

The Heroin Epidemic in Yekaterinburg

If you ask people who lived in Yekaterinburg in the late 1990s what the city smelled like, some will tell you it was iodine. Not the disinfectant itself, but the faint chemical odor of heroin being cooked in apartments, and drifting into stairwells of the gray Soviet tower blocks. Others will say it smelled like damp basements, because that’s where sons and daughters, sometimes only 14 or 15, were crouching on concrete floors with a lighter and a syringe.

Yekaterinburg, Russia’s fourth-largest city, had always been proud of its position on the edge of Europe and Asia. It was a city of industry, heavy machinery, and metallurgy—a place that supplied steel and weapons during Soviet times. But when the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, that industrial backbone fractured. Entire factories closed almost overnight, leaving thousands jobless. What followed was economic free fall: unpaid wages, inflation, and criminal gangs moving into the void.

And with the gangs came drugs.

At the time, Afghanistan was the world’s main supplier of opiates, and the trade routes that carried heroin out of the country threaded directly through Central Asia, up into Russia. Yekaterinburg, sitting in the Ural Mountains, became one of the key waypoints. By the mid-1990s, the flow of heroin through the city was beyond control. The local market became so saturated that doses were cheap enough for teenagers to buy with pocket money.

By 2000, heroin wasn’t just a subculture problem. It was the city’s air, its wallpaper, its conversation. The BBC described entire staircases in apartment blocks where every step was dotted with syringe caps, cotton filters, and dried blood. Parents would leave their apartments, carefully sweeping their eyes across the floor, watching for a used needle that could stick in their shoe.

Addicts injected in courtyards, in stairwells, in public bathrooms. They collapsed in playgrounds, slumped on benches. To live in Yekaterinburg was to live in a city where nodding, half-dead bodies were as common a sight as schoolchildren walking home with backpacks.

The exact statistics are hard to pin down because official figures in Russia often underreported sensitive issues, but multiple sources estimated that by the early 2000s, Yekaterinburg had one of the highest overdose death rates in the country. Some reports put the number of heroin users in the city at tens of thousands, a significant portion of its youth population.

What made the situation unbearable was the sense that no one was coming to help. The police were either powerless or unwilling. Dealers operated openly in some neighborhoods. People whispered that certain officers were on the take—paid to look the other way, or worse, to protect shipments.

Hospitals and rehab clinics offered little hope. At best, they had short detox programs. At worst, they sent people back onto the street with almost no treatment or aftercare. Relapse was nearly guaranteed. Methadone, a common substitution therapy in much of the world, was—and is still—illegal in Russia. For many families, there was no roadmap out.

By the end of the 1990s, the ground was prepared for something radical. Families were desperate enough to support actions that, under normal circumstances, they would never tolerate. The stage was set for a figure like Yevgeny Roizman—a man with a checkered past, charisma to spare, and a willingness to say openly what many whispered: that saving lives was more important than following the rules.

For a city drowning in heroin, he was a lifeline. That desperation—the feeling that anything was better than doing nothing—is the reason a vigilante movement like City Without Drugs could take root in Yekaterinburg.

Yevgeny Roizman: Ex-Con to Savior?

When Yevgeny Roizman first walked into the story of Yekaterinburg’s drug crisis, he didn’t look like a reformer. He didn’t even look like a politician. At first glance, he was the kind of man your parents might warn you about.

Born in 1962, Roizman grew up in Sverdlovsk, which was known as Yekaterinburg during Soviet times. His father worked in a factory; his mother was a teacher. By his own account, he was restless, easily bored, always looking for trouble. At 14, he ran away from home. A few years later, he was arrested and eventually served time in prison for theft.

That criminal record should have buried his future. In the Soviet Union, being an ex-con carried a permanent stain. But the collapse of the USSR scrambled the rules, and by the 1990s, Yekaterinburg was a place where gangsters, businessmen, and politicians all blurred together.

Roizman reinvented himself in that chaos. After prison, he studied briefly in college, worked odd jobs, and eventually found his way into the jewelry trade. Since Yekaterinburg had long been a hub for precious stones, Roizman learned to navigate that world. The jewelry business gave him money, connections, and most importantly, the kind of swagger that made people look up to him.

People who met him in those years often describe two things: his sharp tongue and his intensity. He wasn’t a polished speaker, but he was magnetic. He could talk to intellectuals about literature—he had a taste for poetry and Russian history—and then turn around and trade jokes with men who had prison tattoos on their knuckles.

And his ability to do both mattered because when Yekaterinburg’s heroin crisis hit, Roizman had that rare superpower of inspiring hope in grieving parents and commanding street-level enforcers who could make things happen.

In 1999, Roizman teamed up with a group of businessmen and activists to create what they called “Gorod Bez Narkotikov”—City Without Drugs. On paper, it was a charitable foundation. In reality, it was something stranger and more volatile: part rehab network, part vigilante squad, part political platform.

The philosophy was brutally simple, summed up in one of Roizman’s own lines: “Saving people is more important than obeying the law.” In practice, it meant that for the parents who came to the foundation’s office, there was finally someone who would take action when the state refused. They could walk in, explain that their son or daughter was hooked, and Roizman’s people would intervene.

Sometimes, that intervention looked like a police operation, just without the police. Groups of men from City Without Drugs would burst into drug dens, drag out addicts, and destroy stashes of heroin. Dealers were beaten, threatened, sometimes handed over to the authorities, sometimes not.

It wasn’t really a secret. Roizman saw no need to hide what his people were doing. And whenever he spoke about his foundation, he did it with the air of a man who dared anyone to stop him. And his “vigilantism” didn’t stop on the streets. His foundation also set up rehabilitation centers, though “rehabilitation” might not be the right word. These centers were Spartan, almost prison-like. Addicts were often brought there against their will, delivered by family members, or dragged in after raids.

And once they were inside, leaving wasn’t an option until they were declared clean by whoever was in charge. Roizman framed all of this as necessary toughness. In his view, letting addicts walk away was a death sentence. It was better for them to endure the strict discipline than overdose in a stairwell.

But from the beginning, there was moral ambiguity. Human rights activists pointed out that City Without Drugs was breaking the law, kidnapping addicts, denying them medical care, and subjecting them to degrading treatment. Some former patients told stories of beatings, of being locked in freezing rooms, of begging to leave and being ignored.

Roizman brushed this off. “Of course they complain,” he said. “Addicts will say anything to get back to their drugs.”

Surprisingly, this defiance was part of his appeal. He portrayed himself as a man willing to do what politicians and police would not. And the more critics accused him of illegality, the more his supporters praised his courage. In their eyes, he wasn’t a criminal; he was the only one honest enough to fight fire with fire.

The Harsh Methods & Allegations

The stories from City Without Drugs were horrific. Former patients told reporters that during the first days of withdrawal, when the craving hit hardest, they were chained to radiators, beds, or pipes. The justification was that withdrawal makes people thrash, vomit, beg, and sometimes run into the street half-dressed in search of a fix. Chaining them, according to Roizman’s people, was the only way to keep them alive.

But of course, it was torture for the people going through the experience. Imagine sweating, vomiting, hallucinating, writhing in pain, all the while shackled, unable to move more than a few inches.

Food was another weapon. Meals were deliberately sparse. They were served a quarter of a slice of bread three times a day, and a bit of onion. There was no attempt to make rehab comfortable. Some survivors recall being so hungry they stole scraps from the kitchen, or fought over pieces of bread. Again, the defenders called this necessary toughness: addicts had to be broken down before they could be rebuilt. But human rights monitors called it degrading treatment, more likely to traumatize than heal.

Then there were the beatings. Reports vary—some say they were rare but deliberate, others that they were routine. What is clear is that violence was always present, hovering as a threat. Staff members, often ex-criminals themselves, did not hesitate to use fists, sticks, or boots when there was disorder.

Patients who tried to escape were dragged back and beaten as a warning. Those who resisted too loudly during withdrawal sometimes received the same treatment. “They hit you until you shut up,” one former patient told the BBC. Another described being locked in a freezing room for hours after refusing to follow rules.

Roizman again brushed off these accounts. “You’re listening to addicts,” he said. “Of course, they will lie. They always lie.”

But the brutality wasn’t confined to the rehab walls. Roizman’s squads raided drug dens, kicking down doors, hauling out addicts, and even sometimes roughing up dealers. Their raids were often theatrical, with masked men storming buildings, and piles of syringes displayed like trophies for reporters.

In a city where police were accused of corruption, of protecting the very dealers they should arrest, Roizman’s raids had a vigilante appeal.

What made all of this so complicated were the parents. They knew what was happening in those centers. Many had visited their children, seen the chains, smelled the hunger, watched their kids beg to be let out. And still, they often supported Roizman.

Why? Because in their eyes, the alternative was worse. For them, a child locked to a radiator was at least alive, while a child left to wander the stairwells might be dead by morning.

This bleak calculation explains why, even as the allegations mounted, City Without Drugs still had public backing. Families were desperate, and desperation makes cruelty look like mercy.

On the part of the Russian media, there was division. Some independent outlets treated Roizman like a hero, celebrating the raids, publishing dramatic photos of heroin seized, and quoting parents who praised him as a savior. Other news outlets dug into the testimonies, publishing horrific accounts from survivors who described the centers as hellholes.

Meanwhile, Roizman was gaining significant popularity and being hailed as a villain by some and a savior by others. His critics called him a gangster playing god, while his defenders insisted the critics were ivory-tower liberals who didn’t understand the streets of Yekaterinburg.

But beyond the numbers and headlines thrown around were individual lives. Some broken. Some saved. For every survivor who condemned Roizman, another praised him. This made it hard to determine whether his strategies were a success or a failure, but the harsh methods of City Without Drugs did raise very uncomfortable questions.

Was Roizman’s model truly about saving lives, or was it about power, about building a persona as the man willing to do what the state wouldn’t?

The chains, the hunger, and the beatings were all justified as tough love. But once you accept chaining a man to a radiator for his own good, where does that line stop? How far can cruelty go when it comes dressed up as salvation?

The Scandals

In 2010, Yegor Bychkov, the 23-year-old head of the movement’s branch in the industrial city of Nizhny Tagil, was convicted of kidnapping. His team had snatched addicts off the street and out of apartments—sometimes with parents begging them to do it—and dragged them into makeshift rehab houses.

Inside, men were chained by their wrists or ankles to iron bed frames. That was how they spent the first week of withdrawal, writhing through fevers and convulsions without medical help, and sweating out the heroin and krokodil coursing through their bodies.

Bychkov insisted he was saving lives. Of course, the court disagreed and handed him a three-and-a-half-year sentence. But, he didn’t serve it. Since a majority supported what was happening at City Without Drugs, there was a public outcry, which led to the sentence being suspended, and he walked free.

But the case had already cracked the image of Roizman’s movement. For the first time, a judge had said outright that some of these rescues were, legally, abductions.

Two years later, police raided the women’s quarters of a rehabilitation center tied to City Without Drugs. Investigators said they had received complaints of beatings and illegal detention. And what they found looked more like a lock-up than a clinic.

According to reports, officers sawed through the grille covering a cell window and forced open the locked door. Inside, they found three women and one man. The patients told police they had been held against their will, cut off cold turkey from heroin with no medical supervision, and beaten by staff. Prosecutors opened a kidnapping case.

Then, in the summer of that same year, came the death that made national headlines.

Tatyana Kazantseva was 29, a patient at one of the women’s clinics. She collapsed and was rushed to the hospital, where she died. Police arrested Igor Shabalin, a former addict turned volunteer, on suspicion of involvement. And human rights groups pointed to her death as the cost of an unregulated, unsupervised system that treated medicine as an afterthought. Cold-turkey withdrawal, they argued, wasn’t therapy. It was plain cruelty.

Roizman, as usual, pushed back. He said Kazantseva had long been in poor health, with infections and a weak immune system. Her death, according to him, was the result of years of drug abuse, not of the clinic.

And yet, there were other stories—good stories— told about City without Drugs. A CBS News photo essay from 2013 captured a very different rehabilitation centre from all the claims flying around in striking images. One showed a former addict, Andrei, working in the kitchen of the rehab house, ladling soup for new arrivals. Another showed teenagers sitting at desks, doing schoolwork in group homes funded by the foundation. Young men were photographed exercising, playing football, and learning trades.

The same organization accused of chaining addicts to beds was also giving children of addicts a roof, feeding them, and returning some to education. For every horror story, there was another about someone who had kicked the habit and rebuilt a life inside those same walls.

Perhaps it was because of this contradiction that the movement was never fully shut down by law enforcement. Instead, it stayed in the gray zone, officially condemned, unofficially tolerated, and in many neighborhoods, openly admired.

Public Reception, Politics, and Legitimacy

In most countries, chaining addicts to iron beds would be enough to end a political career before it began. In Russia, it became the springboard for one.

By the early 2010s, City Without Drugs was more than a grassroots crusade. It was a brand—one that carried the name of its founder, Yevgeny Roizman, through the streets of Yekaterinburg. For every human rights complaint filed against his rehab houses, there were two or three parents standing on television, saying that without him, their children would be dead.

When Roizman ran for mayor of Yekaterinburg in 2013, he was already a folk hero. Polls showed him leading among working-class families who felt abandoned by Moscow and its endless bureaucracies. His language was blunt, even crude. Where other politicians spoke of “policy solutions,” Roizman spoke of dragging dealers into the street and humiliating them. He promised safety in a city suffocated by heroin.

And it worked. Against the odds, against state-backed rivals, he won. For the first time, a man who had built his reputation on breaking the law was elected to enforce it.

Russian media split into two camps.

On one side were the state channels, eager to frame Roizman as a dangerous vigilante undermining state order. They emphasized the allegations: chaining, beatings, and illegal detentions. His clinics, they reported, weren’t treatment centers but torture chambers masquerading as charity.

On the other side were independent outlets, such as Novaya Gazeta, which highlighted the failures of the official system. They ran pieces showing parents lined up outside Roizman’s office, begging for his help. Some of these stories read like desperation letters: We called the police, they laughed at us. We called the hospitals, they turned us away. Roizman was the only one who answered.

International observers were less forgiving. Human Rights Watch and domestic rights groups condemned City Without Drugs as a flagrant violator of civil liberties. They pointed to the 2012 police raid, the testimonies of patients held against their will, and the death of 29-year-old Tatyana Kazantseva as evidence of systemic abuse.

In their reports, the “treatment” sounded indistinguishable from punishment: cold-turkey withdrawal, humiliation, even violence. Roizman, they argued, was running a private prison under the guise of charity.

And as for the Kremlin, their relationship with Roizman was uneasy at best. On paper, he was a liability: a former convict, a vigilante, a man openly critical of Moscow’s drug policies. But his popularity made him hard to ignore.

When he became mayor of Yekaterinburg, the government’s response was to strip the office of much of its power quietly. Real authority was shifted to the city manager, an unelected post controlled by Moscow’s allies. Roizman was left with the title but little ability to enact policy.

He knew it, and he didn’t hide his frustration. His public clashes with state authorities became part of his brand—one more reason his supporters admired him. He wasn’t just fighting drug dealers, they said, he was fighting the whole rotten system.

The story of City Without Drugs was never just about addiction. It was about Russia’s deeper fractures—between law and justice, rights and survival, state power and grassroots desperation.

For Roizman’s supporters, he was the only one who cared enough to fight. For his critics, he was proof of what happens when society abandons its institutions. And in Yekaterinburg, that paradox wasn’t theoretical. It was a lived reality. Voters went to the polls knowing full well who Roizman was and what he stood for. They chose him anyway.

Key Takeaways

• Yevgeny Roizman’s City Without Drugs movement emerged in Yekaterinburg to combat heroin addiction through forceful interventions.
• Roizman’s methods, including chaining addicts and using harsh conditions, were controversial and drew both support and criticism.
• The movement’s popularity stemmed from the desperation of families who saw Roizman as a lifeline in a city overwhelmed by heroin.
• Roizman’s political career, including his election as mayor, was built on his vigilante reputation and defiance of state authorities.
• The City Without Drugs movement operated in a legal gray area, officially condemned but tolerated due to public support.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is Yevgeny Roizman?

Yevgeny Roizman is a former convict who became known for founding the vigilante rehab movement ‘City Without Drugs’ in Yekaterinburg, Russia. He later became the mayor of Yekaterinburg.

What was the drug situation like in Yekaterinburg in the late 1990s and early 2000s?

In the late 1990s and early 2000s, Yekaterinburg was severely affected by a heroin epidemic. Addicts were common in public spaces, and the city had one of the highest overdose death rates in Russia.

What methods did City Without Drugs use to combat drug addiction?

City Without Drugs used forceful methods, including dragging addicts off the streets, locking them into rehab centers against their will, and subjecting them to harsh treatment such as chaining, sparse meals, and beatings.

How did the public and media in Russia react to City Without Drugs?

The public reaction was divided. Some families desperate for help supported Roizman, while human rights groups and some media outlets condemned the methods as torture and illegal. The Russian media was split, with some outlets praising Roizman and others criticizing him.

What was the legal status of City Without Drugs?

City Without Drugs operated in a gray zone, officially condemned but unofficially tolerated. Some of its actions, such as kidnapping and illegal detention, were legally problematic, but the movement was never fully shut down.

What was the international response to City Without Drugs?

International observers, including Human Rights Watch, condemned City Without Drugs for violating civil liberties and subjecting addicts to inhumane treatment. They described the rehab centers as private prisons masquerading as charity.

How did Roizman’s political career develop?

Roizman ran for mayor of Yekaterinburg in 2013 and won, despite his controversial past and methods. His popularity among working-class families who felt abandoned by the government helped him secure the victory.

What was the Kremlin’s relationship with Roizman?

The Kremlin had an uneasy relationship with Roizman. While they saw him as a liability due to his vigilante past and criticism of Moscow’s drug policies, his popularity made him hard to ignore. They stripped his mayoral office of much of its power after his election.

What was the impact of City Without Drugs on Yekaterinburg?

City Without Drugs highlighted the deeper fractures in Russian society between law and justice, rights and survival, and state power and grassroots desperation. It also raised questions about the effectiveness and ethics of its harsh methods in combating drug addiction.

Sources

• Original Into the Shadows video: City Without Drugs: How Vigilantes Targeted One of Russia’s Most Drug-Ravaged Cities
• Hero image source by Photographer: Mosbatho / openverse, by.

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