Politics
Back to USSR: Bulldozers, demolition crews destroy luxury homes in Moscow suburb
Reading Time: 6 minutesNearly a week after bulldozers, police, and demolition crews moved in to destroy several luxury homes in the western Moscow neighborhood of Rechnik, they returned in force early today to tear down two more.
By Kevin O’Flynn, Mumin Shakirov, Vera Volodina
With ‘Land Grabs’ On Rise, Will Russians Find New Issue To Rally Around?
Nearly a week after bulldozers, police, and demolition crews moved in to destroy several luxury homes in the western Moscow neighborhood of Rechnik, they returned in force early today to tear down two more.
City officials defended the move, saying they were acting on a court ruling stating that the houses had been built illegally. In all, 42 Rechnik buildings are slated for destruction — including the house belonging to Aleksandr Navrodsky, who watched today’s early-morning demolition with despair.
WATCH VIDEO: Residents look on helplessly as demolition crews tear down their families’ dachas.
"They’re demolishing the house next to mine now,” Navrodsky said. “Some decent police officers — a few of them still serve in the police, fortunately — told me my house is next."
Many Moscow residents accuse the city government, and its mayor, Yury Luzhkov, of staging regular "land grabs" in order to clear prime real estate of low-budget tenants in order to move ahead with lucrative development plans.
One such case made headlines earlier this month when the historic Muromtsev dacha, at the center of a bitter property dispute, was nearly destroyed in a fire its residents believe was set deliberately to force them from the property.
But the Rechnik controversy stands apart: many of its residents are not poor dacha-dwellers but some of the city’s comfortable middle class. Navrodsky said that the latest controversy seems destined to return Russia to a 1990s-style divide between the very rich and very poor.
"To be honest, I was hoping there would be order in our country,” he said. “But they’ve destroyed the poor, and now, I guess, they’re destroying the middle class. So there will be only oligarchs and the very poor left in the country."
Garden Community
The Rechnik community, based along the Moskva River in the city’s Krylatskoye district, has an unusual status. The cooperative settlement was founded in 1956 as part of a system to reward distinguished transportation employees; current residents include a number of World War II veterans.
According to the original agreement, residents had the rights to build "garden communities," but not to build actual houses. Since then, however, nearly 200 dachas and larger, more extravagant homes have cropped up on the territory.
Long-term residents say they should be allowed to hold on to their property, according to the Russian civil code, which says people can claim a residence as their own if they inhabit it for 15 years or more. A so-called dacha amnesty also allows people who built on Soviet-era cooperative territories without proper documents to apply to have them legally registered.
But the city sees it differently. Several years ago, it expanded the territory of a nearby national park to include the Rechnik settlement and said that the houses violated environmental-protection laws governing the park and must come down.
On January 21, city demolition crews made their first incursion, entering Rechnik at 3 a.m. backed by security forces to hold off angry residents attempting to blockade the one road into the settlement.
Over the next two days, six structures were torn down. Speaking over the din of one home being destroyed, Lyudmila, a Rechnik resident, described the late-night confrontation.
"Around 3 a.m., 200 people in black turned up, Lyudmila said. “We can’t say whether they were OMON [riot police], or who they were. They started to attack our cars. People who were near the cars were taken away to the police."
No Compensation
The battle for Rechnik has become a kind of cause célèbre in recent days, with the mainstream media following the controversy. Several of the residents have offered colorful pledges to defend their property — some by coating incoming roads and paths with ice, and, in the case of one man, by setting his pet leopard on any approaching city officials.
Residents describe the destruction that has taken place so far as illegal and brutal. Inhabitants were not served with appropriate eviction notices, or given sufficient time to properly remove their belongings.
In some instances, people were left to stand outside in temperatures dipping below -20 degrees Celsius as their houses were torn down. Police also cordoned off the area, preventing several ambulances from getting through to reach older residents who felt unwell.
For many long-time Rechnik residents, the issue is deeply emotional. But there is a commercial sting as well. Residents are currently being offered no compensation for property worth a small fortune. In some cases, residents may even be expected to cover the cost of the demolition, which can be as much as 2 million rubles ($65,000) per house.
Resident Vladimir Chernov said even a fraction of the land’s actual value would be an acceptable payoff for some of the local inhabitants.
"We weren’t bothering anyone. We were living here for 53 years, quietly and calmly,” Chernov said. “And then some kind of oligarch, a very big one, needs this land. This land is worth approximately $1 million dollars per 100 square meters. That same oligarch could come and calmly say to us, ‘Excuse me, could you vacate this land? We need it. Here’s $100,000 per 100 square meters. Take a hike.’"
Residents are also embittered by the fact that a nearby community of high-end luxury homes called Fantasy Island has escaped the bulldozers’ wrath, despite falling under the same no-build environmental-protection guidelines as Rechnik.
Sergei Mitrokhin, the head of the liberal Yabloko Party, raised the issue before Dmitry Medvedev and Vladimir Putin at a State Council meeting on January 22, saying, "They are knocking down the houses of the middle class. Fantasy Island, where bureaucrats and big-business heads live, is nearby. It has the same environmental protection, but no one has touched it. Why?"
Some Russian media have reported that Rechnik is being demolished because it blocks Fantasy Island’s access to the Moscow River. But Vladimir Pribylovsky of the Panorama think-tank says Rechnik, despite its solidly middle-class status, is too poor to fight its neighbors.
"Rechnik has ordinary residents. Of the [houses slated for destruction], there about five rich people,” Pribylovsky said. “And the rest are middle class, not even upper middle class — pensioners from the Agriculture Ministry who were given houses in 1957 and moved there. In Fantasy Island there are generals, FSB officers, lawmakers, and Rechnik closes off their access to the river."
Hot-Button Issue
The city government has clearly been unnerved by the blanket media coverage of the Rechnik controversy, which is seen as part of the state’s continued campaign against Moscow Mayor Yury Luzhkov. The city’s environmental chief, Leonid Bochin, told "Rossiiskaya gazeta" yesterday that Rechnik was slated to become a public park and that Fantasy Island would also face demolition.
The Rechnik issue may also strike a chord with many Russians, who have steadily bought up property and possessions amid the Putin-era stability that followed the financial and legislative chaos of the 1990s. Many Russians were seen as willing to turn a blind eye to the perils of centralized government and regular crackdowns on civil liberties in exchange for a relatively comfortable standard of living.
But several Kremlin moves have stirred middle-class resentment in the past year, as the economic crisis heightened Russian anxiety. Mass demonstrations caught officials by surprise in the Far East in early 2009, when motorists protested a stiff government tariff on imports of affordable Japanese automobiles.
Will property rights be the next rallying call? Sergei Udaltsov, a coordinator with the Left Front political movement, succeeded in gathering some 100 people to protest the Rechnik operation. He says the Rechnik case is an issue that should be of interest to all Russians, who may someday face their own property battles.
"Today they came to Rechnik, yesterday they went to Butuvo, and tomorrow they’ll go to any courtyard, to any apartment block,” Udaltsov said. “How can we count on the help of our neighbors in the future if we fail to help them today, simply because it’s not our problem? This kind of philosophy only serves those in power because they want to divide us. What we need to do is come together."
But others are more skeptical. Nikolai Petrov of the Moscow Carnegie Center says the Rechnik controversy may lack the mass appeal of the auto-import protests, and that many Muscovites may sympathize with the city’s argument that it is trying to protecting an environmentally sensitive zone.
"There are violations connected with environmental legislation. I think [Rechnik is] a special case, not a popular one. The masses find it hard to identify with the victims of this conflict,” Petrov said. “When you personally have a car with a right-hand drive, then you understand that there are a million or 2 million citizens who drive these cars too, and you’ll take [those protests] to heart. [With Rechnik], it’s hard for a person to see it as linked to him in any way."
Pribylovsky of Panorama adds that it may be difficult to drum up mass support for a story that involves relatively comfortable people in the country’s most prosperous city, no matter how unjust their predicament.
"What’s happening in Rechnik has happened in places like Astrakhan dozens of times,” Pribylovsky said. “People’s houses are knocked down, people are thrown out on the street, and nobody knows about it. It doesn’t rate even a small mention in ‘Novaya gazeta’ or a Communist pamphlet. There’s no kind of scandal."
Vladimir Kara-Murza and Nikita Tatarsky of RFE/RL’s Moscow bureau also contributed to this report.
A new football club has earned a leading place in the UEFA Champions League groups and starred in the headlines of worldwide football news yesterday. The Football Club Sheriff Tiraspol claimed a win with the score 2-1 against Real Madrid on the Santiago Bernabeu Stadium in Madrid. That made Sheriff Tiraspol the leader in Group D of the Champions League, including the football club in the groups of the most important European interclub competition for the first time ever.
International media outlets called it a miracle, a shock and a historic event, while strongly emphasizing the origin of the team and the existing political conflict between the two banks of the Dniester. “Football club from a pro-Russian separatist enclave in Moldova pulls off one of the greatest upsets in Champions League history,” claimed the news portals. “Sheriff crushed Real!” they said.
Moldovans made a big fuss out of it on social media, splitting into two groups: those who praised the team and the Republic of Moldova for making history and those who declared that the football club and their merits belong to Transnistria – a problematic breakaway region that claims to be a separate country.
Both groups are right and not right at the same time, as there is a bunch of ethical, political, social and practical matters that need to be considered.
Is it Moldova?
First of all, every Moldovan either from the right or left bank of Dniester (Transnistria) is free to identify himself with this achievement or not to do so, said Vitalie Spranceana, a sociologist, blogger, journalist and urban activist. According to him, boycotting the football club for being a separatist team is wrong.
At the same time, “it’s an illusion to think that territory matters when it comes to football clubs,” Spranceana claimed. “Big teams, the ones included in the Champions League, have long lost their connection both with the countries in which they operate, and with the cities in which they appeared and to which they linked their history. […] In the age of globalized commercial football, teams, including the so-called local ones, are nothing more than global traveling commercial circuses, incidentally linked to cities, but more closely linked to all sorts of dirty, semi-dirty and cleaner cash flows.”
What is more important in this case is the consistency, not so much of citizens, as of politicians from the government who have “no right to celebrate the success of separatism,” as they represent “the national interests, not the personal or collective pleasures of certain segments of the population,” believes the political expert Dionis Cenusa. The victory of FC Sheriff encourages Transnistrian separatism, which receives validation now, he also stated.
“I don’t know how it happens that the “proud Moldovans who chose democracy”, in their enthusiasm for Sheriff Tiraspol’s victory over Real Madrid, forget the need for total and unconditional withdrawal of Russian troops from Transnistria!” declared the journalist Vitalie Ciobanu.
Nowadays, FC Sheriff Tiraspol has no other choice than to represent Moldova internationally. For many years, the team used the Moldovan Football Federation in order to be able to participate in championships, including international ones. That is because the region remains unrecognised by the international community. However, the club’s victory is presented as that of Transnistria within the region, without any reference to the Republic of Moldova, its separatist character being applied in this case especially.
Is it a victory?
In fact, FC Sheriff Tiraspol joining the Champions League is a huge image breakthrough for the Transnistrian region, as the journalist Madalin Necsutu claimed. It is the success of the Tiraspol Club oligarchic patrons. From the practical point of view, FC Sheriff Tiraspol is a sports entity that serves its own interests and the interests of its owners, being dependent on the money invested by Tiraspol (but not only) oligarchs.
Here comes the real dilemma: the Transnistrian team, which is generously funded by money received from corruption schemes and money laundering, is waging an unequal fight with the rest of the Moldovan football clubs, the journalist also declared. The Tiraspol team is about to raise 15.6 million euro for reaching the Champions League groups and the amounts increase depending on their future performance. According to Necsutu, these money will go directly on the account of the club, not to the Moldovan Football Federation, creating an even bigger gab between FC Sheriff and other football clubs from Moldova who have much more modest financial possibilities.
“I do not see anything useful for Moldovan football, not a single Moldovan player is part of FC Sheriff Tiraspol. I do not see anything beneficial for the Moldovan Football Federation or any national team.”
Is it only about football?
FC Sheriff Tiraspol, with a total estimated value of 12.8 million euros, is controlled by Victor Gusan and Ilya Kazmala, being part of Sheriff Holding – a company that controls the trade of wholesale, retail food, fuels and medicine by having monopolies on these markets in Transnistria. The holding carries out car trading activities, but also operates in the field of construction and real estate. Gusan’s people also hold all of the main leadership offices in the breakaway region, from Parliament to the Prime Minister’s seat or the Presidency.
The football club is supported by a holding alleged of smuggling, corruption, money laundering and organised crime. Moldovan media outlets published investigations about the signals regarding the Sheriff’s holding involvement in the vote mobilization and remuneration of citizens on the left bank of the Dniester who participated in the snap parliamentary elections this summer and who were eager to vote for the pro-Russian socialist-communist bloc.
Considering the above, there is a great probability that the Republic of Moldova will still be represented by a football club that is not identified as being Moldovan, being funded from obscure money, growing in power and promoting the Transnistrian conflict in the future as well.
Photo: unknown
Prime Minister of the Republic of Moldova, Natalia Gavrilita, together with Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Foreign Affairs, Nicu Popescu, pay an official visit to Brussels, between September 27-28, being invited by High Representative of the European Union for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy, Josep Borrell Fontelles.
Today, Prime Minister had a meeting with Charles Michel, President of the European Council. The Moldovan PM thanked the senior European official for the support of the institution in strengthening democratic processes, reforming the judiciary and state institutions, economic recovery and job creation, as well as increasing citizens’ welfare. Natalia Gavrilita expressed her confidence that the current visit laid the foundations for boosting relations between the Republic of Moldova and the European Union, so that, in the next period, it would be possible to advance high-level dialogues on security, justice and energy. Officials also exchanged views on priorities for the Eastern Partnership Summit, to be held in December.
“The EU is open to continue to support the Republic of Moldova and the ambitious reform agenda it proposes. Moldova is an important and priority partner for us,” said Charles Michel.
Prime Minister Natalia Gavrilita also met with Paolo Gentiloni, European Commissioner for Economy, expressing her gratitude for the support received through the OMNIBUS macro-financial assistance program. The two officials discussed the need to advance the recovery of money from bank fraud, to strengthen sustainable mechanisms for supporting small and medium-sized enterprises in Moldova, and to standardize the customs and taxes as one of the main conditions for deepening cooperation with the EU in this field.
Additionally, Prime Minister spoke about the importance of the Eastern Partnership and the Deep Free Trade Agreement, noting that the Government’s policies are aimed at developing an economic model aligned with the European economic model, focused on digitalization, energy efficiency and the green economy.
A common press release of the Moldovan Prime Minister with High Representative of the European Union for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy/Vice-President of the Commission, Josep Borrell Fontelles, took place today, where the agenda of Moldova’s reforms and the main priorities to focus on in the coming months were presented: judiciary reform; fighting COVID-19 pandemic; promoting economic recovery and conditions for growth and job creation; strengthening state institutions and resilience of the country.
“I am here to relaunch the dialogue between my country and the European Union. Our partnership is strong, but I believe there is room for even deeper cooperation and stronger political, economic and sectoral ties. I am convinced that this partnership is the key to the prosperity of our country and I hope that we will continue to strengthen cooperation.”
The Moldovan delegation met Didier Reynders, European Commissioner for Justice. Tomorrow, there are scheduled common meetings with Oliver Varhelyi, European Commissioner for Neighborhood and Enlargement, Adina Valean, European Commissioner for Transport and Kadri Simson, European Commissioner for Energy.
Prime Minister will also attend a public event, along with Katarina Mathernova, Deputy Director-General for Neighbourhood Policy and Enlargement Negotiations.
Photo: gov.md
Politics
Promo-LEX about Maia Sandu’s UN speech: The president must insist on appointing a rapporteur to monitor the situation of human rights in Transnistria
The President of the Republic of Moldova, Maia Sandu, pays an official visit to New York, USA, between September 21-22. There, she participates in the work of the United Nations General Assembly. According to a press release of the President’s Office, the official will deliver a speech at the tribune of the United Nations.
In this context, the Promo-LEX Association suggested the president to request the appointment of a special rapporteur in order to monitor the situation of human rights in the Transnistrian region. According to Promo-LEX, the responsibility for human rights violations in the Transnistrian region arises as a result of the Russian Federation’s military, economic and political control over the Tiraspol regime.
“We consider it imperative to insist on the observance of the international commitments assumed by the Russian Federation regarding the withdrawal of the armed forces and ammunition from the territory of the country,” the representatives of Promo-LEX stated. They consider the speech before the UN an opportunity “to demand the observance of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights by the Russian Federation with reference to this territory which is in its full control.”
“It is important to remember about the numerous cases of murder, torture, ill-treatment, forced enlistment in illegal military structures, the application of pseudo-justice in the Transnistrian region, all carried out under the tacit agreement of the Russian Federation. These findings stem from dozens of rulings and decisions issued by the European Court of Human Rights, which found that Russia is responsible for human rights violations in the region.”
The association representatives expressed their hope that the president of the country would give priority to issues related to the human rights situation in the Transnistrian region and would call on relevant international actors to contribute to guaranteeing fundamental human rights and freedoms throughout Moldova.
They asked Maia Sandu to insist on the observance of the obligation to evacuate the ammunition and the military units of the Russian Federation from the territory of the Republic of Moldova, to publicly support the need for the Russian Federation to implement the ECtHR rulings on human rights violations in the Transnistrian region, and to request the appointment of an UN Human Rights Council special rapporteur to monitor the human rights situation in the Transnistrian region of the Republic of Moldova.
**
The Promo-LEX Association concluded that 14 out of 25 actions planned within the National Action Plan for the years 2018–2022 concerning respecting human rights in Transnistria were not carried out by the responsible authorities.
The association expressed its concern and mentioned that there are a large number of delays in the planned results. “There is a lack of communication and coordination between the designated institutions, which do not yet have a common vision of interaction for the implementation of the plan.”
Promo-LEX requested the Government of the Republic of Moldova to re-assess the reported activities and to take urgent measures, “which would exclude superficial implementation of future activities and increase the level of accountability of the authorities.”
Photo: peacekeeping.un.org
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