SOCIETY
‘With No Money to Pay Rent,
She Had to Start Cleaning Apartments’
She Had to Start Cleaning Apartments’
August 8, 2025
- Inna Denisova
Journalist and documentary filmmaker
Journalist Inna Denisova disagrees with the image of emigration in France presented by former TV Rain presenter Denis Kataev in an interview with Yuri Dud. Her experience and view of the French state and society are markedly, and negatively, different from what Kataev describes.
The original text in Russian was published in Republic. A slightly shortened version is being republished here with their permission.
Three years ago, the rope snapped on my social elevator, and it plummeted, along with my status. I went from being a foreign student to an unemployed emigrant.
I was unable to exchange my Russian driver's license for a French one quickly, but it turned out that this new status opened doors. After all, France is proud of its principle of égalité des chances – equality of opportunity. Here, health care and education are free, the state provides benefits and subsidies, and if you need a driving school because you missed the deadline to exchange your license, or a discounted travel pass, the system will provide.
But the road to equal opportunity winds through a labyrinth of bureaucratic obstacles, and the odds of making it through without a guide are zero.
The first thing an immigrant must understand is how the system works. It is more important to distinguish CAF from Pôle emploi than Sartre from Camus, Baudrillard from Althusser, or Mélenchon from Zemmour.
Where in my previous life, in Russia, I had Gosuslugi (an e-government app) for resolving all administrative matters quickly and easily in one place, here there are a dozen portals that lead nowhere, return a 403 error or, most often, display “access denied.” And a mailbox where multipage forms regularly arrive, each needing to be filled out.
The freedom-loving French, who will cheerfully cross the road at a red light, are critical of their bureaucracy. But they do not fight for its digitalization or simplification; the hearts and minds of those loyal to paper forms and envelopes are unmoved by the need for reform. As a result, expectations of the state, as the architect of social life, are moderate. After all, intricate and ornate architecture can be beautiful.
So go ahead and battle the Minotaur of the French bureaucracy, you immigrant with imperfect French. Pass a C2-level exam for your records, which will always be missing some document. Call a number that has been disconnected. Or move under a bridge: in a country of equal opportunity, anyone can live under a bridge.
In Moscow (forgive the imperial reference, but I have no other), a social worker named Natasha brought my 90-year-old grandmother food and medicine every day. But it is a centralized autocracy, where Moscow is showcased while there are holes in the ground instead of toilets 40 kilometers outside of the city.
I was unable to exchange my Russian driver's license for a French one quickly, but it turned out that this new status opened doors. After all, France is proud of its principle of égalité des chances – equality of opportunity. Here, health care and education are free, the state provides benefits and subsidies, and if you need a driving school because you missed the deadline to exchange your license, or a discounted travel pass, the system will provide.
But the road to equal opportunity winds through a labyrinth of bureaucratic obstacles, and the odds of making it through without a guide are zero.
The first thing an immigrant must understand is how the system works. It is more important to distinguish CAF from Pôle emploi than Sartre from Camus, Baudrillard from Althusser, or Mélenchon from Zemmour.
Where in my previous life, in Russia, I had Gosuslugi (an e-government app) for resolving all administrative matters quickly and easily in one place, here there are a dozen portals that lead nowhere, return a 403 error or, most often, display “access denied.” And a mailbox where multipage forms regularly arrive, each needing to be filled out.
The freedom-loving French, who will cheerfully cross the road at a red light, are critical of their bureaucracy. But they do not fight for its digitalization or simplification; the hearts and minds of those loyal to paper forms and envelopes are unmoved by the need for reform. As a result, expectations of the state, as the architect of social life, are moderate. After all, intricate and ornate architecture can be beautiful.
So go ahead and battle the Minotaur of the French bureaucracy, you immigrant with imperfect French. Pass a C2-level exam for your records, which will always be missing some document. Call a number that has been disconnected. Or move under a bridge: in a country of equal opportunity, anyone can live under a bridge.
In Moscow (forgive the imperial reference, but I have no other), a social worker named Natasha brought my 90-year-old grandmother food and medicine every day. But it is a centralized autocracy, where Moscow is showcased while there are holes in the ground instead of toilets 40 kilometers outside of the city.
“In democracies, inequality is not flaunted – it is hidden behind slogans of equality.”
The Palais-Royal, residence of the Conseil d'État, Paris. Source: Wiki Commons
French person, trained from childhood in the art of bureaucratic navigation, knows which window to knock on. A foreigner always knocks on a closed one.
My social worker, Madame Dupont, is not Natasha. A couple of weeks later, she will reply: “madame, we do not handle this. Please contact Pôle emploi.”
I do not have, and will not have, a French driver's license – and that is fine. It is worse not to have health insurance. I have wrestled with the online platform Ameli, the national health insurance system, for three months now.
None of this underside of French life appears, however, in the Dud interview with Denis Kataev, where he discusses his emigration in Paris. Instead, there is a tourist postcard from the Luxembourg Gardens.
Work
This interview perpetuates the meritocratic, liberal myth that in France, you can achieve anything through your own hard work – only if you work hard and well.
But this notion is contradicted not only by the reality on the ground, for those willing to look without rose-colored glasses, but also by the data from INSEE, the National Institute of Statistics and Economic Studies.
In France, graduates of the grandes écoles – ENA, Sciences Po, Polytechnique, HEC – from the “right” French families can indeed succeed through hard work. The rest attain the minimum wage, the so-called SMIC (Salaire minimum interprofessionnel de croissance), around EUR 1,400-1,500 a month. And if they work very hard, perhaps a couple of thousand euros more.
Another two and a half million people or so will achieve nothing at all. France has one of the highest unemployment rates in Europe. These individuals receive the RSA (Revenu de solidarité active; EUR 607), and are told to be grateful.
Despite the rhetoric of equality, French society is rigidly stratified. INSEE identifies France as the country with the lowest social mobility in Europe. A child from a poor family is unlikely to get into a good lycée if he does not live in the right neighborhood, meaning he is unlikely to “get out.”
My social worker, Madame Dupont, is not Natasha. A couple of weeks later, she will reply: “madame, we do not handle this. Please contact Pôle emploi.”
I do not have, and will not have, a French driver's license – and that is fine. It is worse not to have health insurance. I have wrestled with the online platform Ameli, the national health insurance system, for three months now.
None of this underside of French life appears, however, in the Dud interview with Denis Kataev, where he discusses his emigration in Paris. Instead, there is a tourist postcard from the Luxembourg Gardens.
Work
This interview perpetuates the meritocratic, liberal myth that in France, you can achieve anything through your own hard work – only if you work hard and well.
But this notion is contradicted not only by the reality on the ground, for those willing to look without rose-colored glasses, but also by the data from INSEE, the National Institute of Statistics and Economic Studies.
In France, graduates of the grandes écoles – ENA, Sciences Po, Polytechnique, HEC – from the “right” French families can indeed succeed through hard work. The rest attain the minimum wage, the so-called SMIC (Salaire minimum interprofessionnel de croissance), around EUR 1,400-1,500 a month. And if they work very hard, perhaps a couple of thousand euros more.
Another two and a half million people or so will achieve nothing at all. France has one of the highest unemployment rates in Europe. These individuals receive the RSA (Revenu de solidarité active; EUR 607), and are told to be grateful.
Despite the rhetoric of equality, French society is rigidly stratified. INSEE identifies France as the country with the lowest social mobility in Europe. A child from a poor family is unlikely to get into a good lycée if he does not live in the right neighborhood, meaning he is unlikely to “get out.”
“Meanwhile, immigrants in France are pushed toward construction, cleaning and food service.”
The system has developed various mechanisms to keep social climbers in check. Take the intermittence du spectacle, a uniquely French law regulating creative workers and requiring a minimum number of hours a year.
“It feels as if everything is meant to prevent you from focusing on one meaningful, important project; you are forced to run around collecting hours,” says Evdokia Moskvina, a documentary filmmaker who previously worked with Current Time and directed the film Forbidden Children.
The result is predictable: my friends, who are talented artists, fry potatoes in theater buffets and work as entertainers, donning chicken, unicorn and Obelix costumes in children’s parks.
Moskvina has lived in Paris for a decade, but more and more finds herself thinking about America, which she sees as a land of straight roads instead of French bureaucratic labyrinths.
Once, under the influence of illusions (now long gone), I chose to study film in France. After all, France is known for its prestigious film schools (Le Fresnoy, La Fémis), renowned directors (Alain Guiraudie, Philippe Grandrieux, Bertrand Bonello), and, most of all, state support of cinema (which, however, foreigners cannot tap into without a French connection. I found one; I was lucky).
As a result, my professional life in France looks like the following: my producer has been submitting a financing application for six months, and my social worker has been applying for unemployment benefits. Nothing is working out, though everyone reassures me that I am simply being too impatient. In France, they say, one must learn to wait, be calm and be persistent. A friend recently attended a Bonello master class – he too waits idly, losing enthusiasm. At least in this respect, there is égalité des chances.
Gradually, Kataev’s former compatriots are being drawn into what one emigrant called the “new proletariat.”
“It feels as if everything is meant to prevent you from focusing on one meaningful, important project; you are forced to run around collecting hours,” says Evdokia Moskvina, a documentary filmmaker who previously worked with Current Time and directed the film Forbidden Children.
The result is predictable: my friends, who are talented artists, fry potatoes in theater buffets and work as entertainers, donning chicken, unicorn and Obelix costumes in children’s parks.
Moskvina has lived in Paris for a decade, but more and more finds herself thinking about America, which she sees as a land of straight roads instead of French bureaucratic labyrinths.
Once, under the influence of illusions (now long gone), I chose to study film in France. After all, France is known for its prestigious film schools (Le Fresnoy, La Fémis), renowned directors (Alain Guiraudie, Philippe Grandrieux, Bertrand Bonello), and, most of all, state support of cinema (which, however, foreigners cannot tap into without a French connection. I found one; I was lucky).
As a result, my professional life in France looks like the following: my producer has been submitting a financing application for six months, and my social worker has been applying for unemployment benefits. Nothing is working out, though everyone reassures me that I am simply being too impatient. In France, they say, one must learn to wait, be calm and be persistent. A friend recently attended a Bonello master class – he too waits idly, losing enthusiasm. At least in this respect, there is égalité des chances.
Gradually, Kataev’s former compatriots are being drawn into what one emigrant called the “new proletariat.”
“A theatre producer is now a hotel clerk; a celebrated actor a gardener.”
The Place des Vosges, Paris. Source: Wiki Commons
The most unusual career path belongs to Naum Blik, a poet, well-known rapper and one of the founders of Yekaterinburg’s hip-hop scene.
First and foremost, I am a poet – that is forever. Even if you stop writing poems, you remain one. As for my artistic career, I accepted that I would not earn anything from it, at least at first. So I decided to take a regular job. At the time, I was not yet confident enough in my French to deal with customers, so I opted for fast food.
Burger King was the first to respond. Blik worked there for two years.
Imagine a full house, everything has to be done fast. If something goes wrong, people get anxious and start shouting. The management can yell too. When you are a student, you shrug it off. But when you are 42, have performed at festivals and are used to a certain level of respect, and suddenly you find yourself at the bottom of the social ladder, it is a blow to your pride. Still, I treated it as part of my spiritual path: that kind of experience destroys the ego and helps you to understand who you really are. My entire post-emigration life has been a continuous experiment on myself.
His second job was at a hotel, carrying suitcases. But it did not work out there. The third was at a funeral agency – the poet and hip-hop star now carries coffins.
In France, funerals are conducted differently. Here, everything is more dignified and solemn. You work in a suit, outdoors. One or two ceremonies are held a day, each with several stages: collect the coffin, take it to the church, then to the cemetery and lower it into the grave. We do not dig the grave ourselves. Overall, it is not difficult work and is interesting philosophically.
Blik watched the Dud-Kataev interview for 20 minutes before he had “to go fry potatoes and get to bed, so I could get up at five in the morning. You need to be well-rested to bury people. That’s all I can say about that.”
Actress Maria Chuprinskaya (Kitoboy, Vodoprovodchik), who upon arriving in France helped organize the Russian-language drama festival Echo of Lyubimovka along with her colleagues, shares her experience of working in France.
At first, she taught drama at a private Russian-language school, but she left after failing to find common ground with the administration on politics. With no money to pay rent, she had to start cleaning apartments.
I cleaned for one woman to make ends meet. Word of mouth spread, and more jobs started coming in. It was terribly difficult, mentally and physically. Moldy corners, reeking refrigerators. The last place I cleaned was the home of the stay-at-home wife of a wealthy Frenchman. For some reason, she began telling me she had seen Kitoboy and that she really wanted to discuss the film with me. And there I am, listing and scrubbing the floor.
First and foremost, I am a poet – that is forever. Even if you stop writing poems, you remain one. As for my artistic career, I accepted that I would not earn anything from it, at least at first. So I decided to take a regular job. At the time, I was not yet confident enough in my French to deal with customers, so I opted for fast food.
Burger King was the first to respond. Blik worked there for two years.
Imagine a full house, everything has to be done fast. If something goes wrong, people get anxious and start shouting. The management can yell too. When you are a student, you shrug it off. But when you are 42, have performed at festivals and are used to a certain level of respect, and suddenly you find yourself at the bottom of the social ladder, it is a blow to your pride. Still, I treated it as part of my spiritual path: that kind of experience destroys the ego and helps you to understand who you really are. My entire post-emigration life has been a continuous experiment on myself.
His second job was at a hotel, carrying suitcases. But it did not work out there. The third was at a funeral agency – the poet and hip-hop star now carries coffins.
In France, funerals are conducted differently. Here, everything is more dignified and solemn. You work in a suit, outdoors. One or two ceremonies are held a day, each with several stages: collect the coffin, take it to the church, then to the cemetery and lower it into the grave. We do not dig the grave ourselves. Overall, it is not difficult work and is interesting philosophically.
Blik watched the Dud-Kataev interview for 20 minutes before he had “to go fry potatoes and get to bed, so I could get up at five in the morning. You need to be well-rested to bury people. That’s all I can say about that.”
Actress Maria Chuprinskaya (Kitoboy, Vodoprovodchik), who upon arriving in France helped organize the Russian-language drama festival Echo of Lyubimovka along with her colleagues, shares her experience of working in France.
At first, she taught drama at a private Russian-language school, but she left after failing to find common ground with the administration on politics. With no money to pay rent, she had to start cleaning apartments.
I cleaned for one woman to make ends meet. Word of mouth spread, and more jobs started coming in. It was terribly difficult, mentally and physically. Moldy corners, reeking refrigerators. The last place I cleaned was the home of the stay-at-home wife of a wealthy Frenchman. For some reason, she began telling me she had seen Kitoboy and that she really wanted to discuss the film with me. And there I am, listing and scrubbing the floor.
“There is a truth no French person will openly admit: a nation that publicly prides itself on inquisitive multiculturalism does not like or trust foreigners.”
A Gilets jaunes, or yellow-jacket protest in Paris. January 2019. The movement was initially motivated by a high cost of living, and economic inequality. The movement argued that a disproportionate burden of taxation in France was falling on the working and middle classes. Source: Wiki Commons
With Eastern Europeans, it is not quite racism, as it is with Arabs or Africans, but rather a deep-seated reflex not to see foreigners as equals. Tarkovsky, Tchaikovsky, Dostoevsky – yes, yes, yes. But you want us to hire you, a foreigner? Sorry, you no French background, no French résumé, such limited French experience.
“The French say, ‘we love different accents,’” says Moskvina. “That is, until they have to work with you. One actor friend with whom I would talk for hours in the café told me: ‘I would not work with you – what if I did not understand what you were saying?’”
Kataev claims that France is being ruined by leftist ideology. But the real problem is petty-bourgeois conservatism and snobbery. They are ruining us first of all.
Still, Denis’s strategy might work – provided you do not try to climb the hard way, provided your first stop is the Élysée Palace. “In France, personal relationships are everything,” says Moskvina. “If you message a stranger about work, he will not reply. But go have a drink and a chat with him, tomorrow you will hear back.”
Housing
Denis says: “Paris is the Left Bank.”
“My neighborhood, Château Rouge, is the Paris I imagined as a child,” says Chuprinskaya. “A shabby poverty and dusty luxury. Remember the cour des miracles from Angélique by Anne and Serge Golon? I live in such a courtyard. And I feel like Angélique at the very bottom of life.”
Chuprinskaya is my neighbor in Château Rouge. Our 18th arrondissement is a living demonstration of the failure of the republican model of integration. Boulevard Barbès marks the dividing line between bourgeois and immigrant Paris.
To the right are the famous steps of Montmartre, vintage boutiques, flower stands, souvenir shops, tourists and the most expensive real estate in Paris (EUR 15,000 per square meter on Avenue Junot and Rue Lepic). To the left is the Dijon market, where pig heads sit on the counters, alongside cigarette sellers in flip-flops outside the metro, women carrying babies on their backs and homeless people lying on mattresses with signs that read: “I want to eat.”
Which side am I on?
By race and class I should be on the right side; by documents and opportunities on the left. In truth, I have yet to find any place for myself in Paris.
My Parisian nights are filled with many voices and accents: sometimes bar patrons shouting over football, sometimes Cameroonians fighting, sometimes crazy homeless people getting restless. At five in the morning, the garbage truck rolls in, turning over bins with a crash of bottles loud enough to split eardrums.
In Paris, to rent an apartment, your salary must be at least three times the rent. Blik has moved 11 times. Esther Bol, six. She is a playwright whose works were staged before the war at the Chekhov Moscow Art Theater, the Taganka, the Bolshoi Drama Theater and the Alexandrinsky.
“I cannot rent a place officially – I have to prove that my [economic] situation is stable. And it is not,” says Bol. At one point, she had no apartment and ended up in a hostel. “It was scary. There was a [mentally] sick person in the room who screamed terribly, hit himself and spewed curses. I sat in the lobby until morning.”
Moskvina recalls how she once fell behind on her electricity bill, and an employee of the national electricity provider EDF showed up at her door with giant metal shears to cut the line.
Another feature of Parisian emigrant life is the stories of how Ukrainian refugees are refused temporary housing if they have pets, and sometimes temporary social protection altogether. How they are evicted from the la Villette refugee center (“you came at an inopportune time”) and spend the night under bridges or on benches. How aggressive the French police are toward immigrants.
“Does it make you angry that someone else’s life is carefree?” Esther Bol asks. “No, it does not.
No, we – who are living through the deep pain of emigration and the even deeper pain of the war and the bombing of Ukraine – do not envy those who are doing well.
We just live in Paris, not in a fairy tale.
“The French say, ‘we love different accents,’” says Moskvina. “That is, until they have to work with you. One actor friend with whom I would talk for hours in the café told me: ‘I would not work with you – what if I did not understand what you were saying?’”
Kataev claims that France is being ruined by leftist ideology. But the real problem is petty-bourgeois conservatism and snobbery. They are ruining us first of all.
Still, Denis’s strategy might work – provided you do not try to climb the hard way, provided your first stop is the Élysée Palace. “In France, personal relationships are everything,” says Moskvina. “If you message a stranger about work, he will not reply. But go have a drink and a chat with him, tomorrow you will hear back.”
Housing
Denis says: “Paris is the Left Bank.”
“My neighborhood, Château Rouge, is the Paris I imagined as a child,” says Chuprinskaya. “A shabby poverty and dusty luxury. Remember the cour des miracles from Angélique by Anne and Serge Golon? I live in such a courtyard. And I feel like Angélique at the very bottom of life.”
Chuprinskaya is my neighbor in Château Rouge. Our 18th arrondissement is a living demonstration of the failure of the republican model of integration. Boulevard Barbès marks the dividing line between bourgeois and immigrant Paris.
To the right are the famous steps of Montmartre, vintage boutiques, flower stands, souvenir shops, tourists and the most expensive real estate in Paris (EUR 15,000 per square meter on Avenue Junot and Rue Lepic). To the left is the Dijon market, where pig heads sit on the counters, alongside cigarette sellers in flip-flops outside the metro, women carrying babies on their backs and homeless people lying on mattresses with signs that read: “I want to eat.”
Which side am I on?
By race and class I should be on the right side; by documents and opportunities on the left. In truth, I have yet to find any place for myself in Paris.
My Parisian nights are filled with many voices and accents: sometimes bar patrons shouting over football, sometimes Cameroonians fighting, sometimes crazy homeless people getting restless. At five in the morning, the garbage truck rolls in, turning over bins with a crash of bottles loud enough to split eardrums.
In Paris, to rent an apartment, your salary must be at least three times the rent. Blik has moved 11 times. Esther Bol, six. She is a playwright whose works were staged before the war at the Chekhov Moscow Art Theater, the Taganka, the Bolshoi Drama Theater and the Alexandrinsky.
“I cannot rent a place officially – I have to prove that my [economic] situation is stable. And it is not,” says Bol. At one point, she had no apartment and ended up in a hostel. “It was scary. There was a [mentally] sick person in the room who screamed terribly, hit himself and spewed curses. I sat in the lobby until morning.”
Moskvina recalls how she once fell behind on her electricity bill, and an employee of the national electricity provider EDF showed up at her door with giant metal shears to cut the line.
Another feature of Parisian emigrant life is the stories of how Ukrainian refugees are refused temporary housing if they have pets, and sometimes temporary social protection altogether. How they are evicted from the la Villette refugee center (“you came at an inopportune time”) and spend the night under bridges or on benches. How aggressive the French police are toward immigrants.
“Does it make you angry that someone else’s life is carefree?” Esther Bol asks. “No, it does not.
No, we – who are living through the deep pain of emigration and the even deeper pain of the war and the bombing of Ukraine – do not envy those who are doing well.
We just live in Paris, not in a fairy tale.
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