MOSCOW, Aug. 13 (UPI) -- Russian authorities are turning down visa applications filed by potential Peace Corps volunteers in an attempt to get rid of the unqualified staff applying for teaching jobs, Moscow's Kommersant newspaper reported Tuesday.
Russian consulates in the United States recently turned down 30 out of 64 visa applications filed by Peace Corps volunteers, the report said. The volunteers were due in Russia in September.
Russia's regional authorities have complained many of the volunteers are poorly trained and some lack professional qualifications. Peace Corps workers in Russia mostly teach English and the fundamentals of management, Kommersant said.
Despite the criticism, the organization boasts of a frequent demand for its services, Peace Corps Russia Director Jeff Hay told the paper.
"Since 1992, 700 Peace Corps volunteers have worked in Russia," he said. "We still get about 150 requests from (Russia's) different regions each year to send over our volunteers."
However, not all of those who hired Peace Corps volunteers are content.
"The volunteers can't speak Russian and often have a low level of education," wrote officials from the city administration in Nizhny Novgorod in their complaint to Russia's Education Ministry.
Peace Corps officials acknowledge that at least 90 percent of its staff lacks teaching experience or appropriate professional training.
Some of the teachers of management in Russia's remote Far Eastern province of Khabarovsk included former waiters and porters and other volunteers lacking college education. In Samara, southern Russia, a biography of a volunteer identified only by his last name, Brown, revealed a stint with the CIA. Brown was a former spy who spent the 1970s recruiting Soviet military officers based in Berlin to work for the agency.
The paper also cited the case of a Peace Corps volunteer who was detained at a secret military facility in the Khabarovsk region as his curiosity took him too far from the classroom.
