Two against the system. How residents of a futureless village were left without housing

Unflinching citizens went to court for justice, and as a result, they lost their homes and received penny compensation. How it happened - in the material of "Novye Izvestia".

Alexander Dybin

Few people know about the Cheslavka station settlement in the Chelyabinsk region even in the Southern Urals. In 2010, according to the census, 13 people lived there. The village lived thanks to a railway line and a rare electric train, by which it was possible to get ships from the regional center - the city of Kusy. But in 2013, the regional authorities decided that it was too expensive to subsidize this message for the sake of 13 people and the station was liquidated.

“In recent years, one carriage has been running, when it was canceled for another three or four years, an all-terrain vehicle with food came to us along the forest road, it was possible to go to the area if there were cases”, - recalls Zoya Gumarova.

The residents of Cheslavka learned that they would be resettled in 2018. People were promised to buy new housing. But two - Zoya Gumarova and Nikolai Butorin - categorically refused to leave the village. Instead of full-fledged houses with households, they were offered apartments in the neighboring district in the city of Satka in old Stalin-era houses, which could fall under the definition of "barrack". Apartments on the ground floor, no renovation and mold on the walls. Lonely pensioner Butorin was offered to move into a 4-room apartment with a huge utility bill.

“We did not agree to these apartments”, - says Zoya Butorina, “we bought the worst ones, they didn’t show them to us, they didn’t agree with us, they just put it before the fact - now it’s yours. Under the program, large sums were calculated for us, 940 thousand for me, 1300 for Butorin, and apartments are clearly cheaper than these amounts. Where is the difference? Whose pocket did she go into? It would be good to ask the sellers of these apartments how much they were paid for this. The rest of the villagers agreed to such options, but their housing was much worse, someone had ruins. So they got apartments and are silent. And we had something to lose: a well-established life, this is my homeland, my parents are buried there, my husband. I just locked everything up and walked out of there. For what? For this rotten apartment? We did not ask to be relocated, we would have continued to live there. It was all the officials who decided that the village should be liquidated. We've just been destroyed".

Judgment is like a slap in the face

Soon, the authorities filed a lawsuit against two recalcitrant residents of Cheslavka demanding to deprive them of their ownership of houses in the village and oblige them to accept the purchased apartments. People filed a counterclaim: to issue the required amounts in cash so that they themselves would buy the housing they considered necessary. Both Gumarova and Butorin lived all their lives in the countryside and wanted to buy private houses.

The litigation dragged on for several years, but in the end, no one got any easier from the decisions of the courts. On the one hand, the court recognized that the officials were wrong in imposing apartments in a foreign city to people. On the other hand, instead of the amounts determined by the resettlement program, the court decided to pay the settlers the “residual” value for their housing in Cheslavka – approximately 200 thousand rubles for each.

“You can’t even buy a doghouse with this money”, - says Zoya Gumarova , “Butorin had an excellent house, which he built himself, and now he has actually become a homeless person. After all these trials, his health failed, he lay in the hospital for a long time. Now he will be discharged and he is essentially homeless. It's a shame that the prosecutor's office purposefully took the position of the administration and in all courts spoke clearly for them. And we were essentially robbed and thrown out of the house. I'm worried about the impunity of officials, how amicably they decided everything. They operated on the fact that our houses were in emergency conditions and they blamed us for not looking after our houses in recent years. And how could we follow if we were forced to leave from there, but there was no transport there. Even the expert did not get there, who did the examination for the court”.

According to the deputy of the Kusinsky district, Nadezhda Urvacheva, one of the mistakes is the resettlement of Cheslavka residents as part of the resettlement program from dilapidated housing. Why they did not take advantage of the resettlement program for hard-to-reach settlements, where it was possible to issue certificates to people and there would not be a conflict with the “residual cost of housing”, it is not clear.

“Of course, my soul hurts for these people”, - says Nadezhda Urvacheva, “I participated in the court as a deputy, talked about what I saw in the apartments. Which they were offered, in what condition they were. There is no need to be an expert to see that this is unsuitable housing. Now people are on the street. Zoya Gumarova's children were able to buy a small house in the village of Kusinsky Pechi, and Butorin was simply homeless. This is how the resettlement program was carried out. Think. If they went to meet people, showed them what they wanted to buy in advance, involved them in the discussion, then there would be no problems. And it all ended sadly, people are 70 years old, these stresses crippled their health".

New Judgment Ahead

As Olga Mukhometyarova, deputy of the Legislative Assembly of the Chelyabinsk Region, told Novye Izvestia, a complaint is being prepared to the Supreme Court, in addition, the deputy is trying to attract the attention of the Prosecutor General's Office.

“Quite recently, the Prosecutor General spoke about the need to take special control over the resettlement of dilapidated housing,” says Mukhometyarova, “and now the administration has problems too. Since there is such a court decision, apartments were not handed over to people, the Ministry of Construction of the region requires the municipality to return the allocated money, because the district received 900 thousand for Gumarova, and 1.3 million for Butorin. In addition, we will insist that Butorin be recognized as in need of better housing conditions, since he has become homeless. Although the goal of the state program was precisely to improve the living conditions of citizens. In fact, she failed. We hope that the Supreme Court will eliminate the violations committed during the proceedings, we put a number of questions before the court, but no one gave answers to them. Simultaneously with the regional prosecutor's office, we are trying to change the judicial practice, when people are paid not the market value for dilapidated housing, but the residual value. With this practice, people cannot buy anything and, in fact, remain homeless”.

In the meantime, the purchased apartments remain the property of the municipality and the budget has to pay a communal apartment for them.

“They were bought at the end of 2019 - for three years the Kusin administration has been paying utility bills for empty apartments and no one is responsible for this bungling”, - concludes Zoya Gumarova.