The entertainment is over. Izhevsk is converting a shopping center into a drone assembly plant

Julia Suntsova

The third part of the tenants, among whom there are also major federal players – the grocery store "Magnet", the electronics store "M.

Video", the amusement park "Superland", the cinema "Uncle Fedor" - notifications have already been received. Tenants with long-term contracts are also advised to move out in a good way, a 20–year contract, for example, was concluded with Izhevsk Therms, a popular bath and spa complex in the city.

Residents of the neighborhood believe that the military plant under the windows is a direct threat to life. In the event of terrorist attacks or someone's plans to destroy a strategic object implemented, civilians will also suffer.

The nearest multi–storey residential buildings are really located just a few dozen meters from the current shopping center, 100 meters from the school, there is always a full parking lot nearby, and a busy t–shaped intersection on the approaches allows you to surround the building in moments.

Last year's shooting of Izhevsk school No. 88, which claimed the lives of 18 people, did not entail full-fledged work on mistakes. After just a year, an even more fertile ground for emergencies is being created in the city.

The category of land under the Italmas shopping center allows you to place commercial objects on it, but not industrial or special (regime) ones.

The land under the shopping center has not yet been turned into an industrial zone. But even if the processes are launched, it will take at least a year and a half to repaint the Master Plan, pass state examinations.

However, as the inhabitants of the shopping center tell us, the owners of the future plant have already moved in and are settling in the squares, fenced off from everyone, hired a security service and prefer not to conduct any dialogues with neighbors, except for "paper" ones.

A few years ago, these neighborhoods were populated under the targeted state program "Young Family". According to common sense, it is impossible to deploy weapons production here, in densely populated residential areas.

A shopping mall cannot become a military factory at the click of a button. In addition, the secret production of weapons, well, cannot remain secret in any way, as long as its two-story base is freely visible from apartments, balconies, driveways, fire passages, attics of adjacent nine-story buildings, and everyone who has ever called a taxi from here knows the address.Business is also at a loss from a sudden storm in the usual life.

About a third of the tenants of the premises in the Italmas shopping center have already received notifications from the new owner of Aeroscan LLC "on unilateral extrajudicial refusal to execute lease agreements on the initiative of the lessor." As noted in the notifications, entrepreneurs were given a month to leave.

Tenants do not understand the logic of the decision - why is it necessary to land military production, even if it is in demand, sitting on the heads of civilian business? The city, once closed and rebuilt as the weapons capital of the Russian Empire, is full of much more suitable places.

"The situation is atypical, to put it mildly. "Italmas" has been sold more than once during its existence, a standard story in principle. Owners change, tenants stay. However, in December, even the battered management was amazed by the intentions of the new owner to drive everyone away without exception and open a factory in the shopping and entertainment center", - says entrepreneur, owner of the bath complex Yuri Bychkov..At the same time, if a third of tenants have really fast–terminating contracts, and they can be evicted by unilateral decision, only notifying a month before the X hour, then many tenants have so-called non-cancellable (multi-year) contracts with registration in the Federal Register and a phased investment program.

It is logical that the investor should be guaranteed to calculate what period of time he is allowed to work, what rent he should pay and how much he will be able to earn as a result (based on this, permissible investments are calculated). The contract with Izhevsk Therms, for example, was concluded for 20 years, of which six have passed. 250 million rubles were invested in the project, currently the transition to payback is just taking place, and in order to earn as planned, the remaining years are required.

"One thousand squares. Everything was done for a specific location: aquagorks, baths, saunas, hammams, swimming pools, fonts, underfloor heating, engineering equipment, sewage treatment plants, ventilation system, decoration. During dismantling and transportation, all this loses 70-80% in value. But the main problem is that there is nowhere to move.- Since the opening of the Term, we have been in dialogue with the Mayor's office and the republic about providing us with another site for the second complex. The city does not say "no", but neither does the plot", - says Yuri Bychkov.

According to the contract, the landlord has only two legal ways to terminate it: 1. Rent is not paid, 2. Recognition by the court as bankrupt.

- I don't see any reasonableness here at all. Why did they climb? It was as if they wanted to make fools of everyone, counting, perhaps, on federal patronage.

Thus, realizing that according to the law it is impossible to say goodbye to the "Izhevsk terms", they, like other "stubborn" ones, are trying to smoke out morally, the entrepreneur says. They lock one entrance, then another. A rope with a sign - "A tow truck is working" - is hung over the parking lot. Instead of the calm muted music stipulated by the agreement, they put military songs, the group "Lube". But even all this does not hit the business as much as the weakening of the general flow of visitors due to the fact that many tenants are gradually moving out.

The new owner offered "Magnet" and "Cinema Center" compensation "for the inconvenience". In principle, the big players don't care whether they move out or stay, their legal services work according to algorithms written in blood, and the final price list includes not only all the costs of moving and downtime, but also the lost profits for the planned future years. According to sources, the new owner has not agreed with Magnit on compensation, and he has a current contract until 2030. "Magnet" counted "very expensive", more expensive than the cost at which the mall was bought. The grocery chain therefore continues to operate in the very heart of the future "secret production".

Indeed, what is the catch – why was this particular site chosen, obviously problematic, obviously with encumbrances in the form of long-term contracts, clearly not suitable for a military conveyor?

The sites of Avtovaz, Gearbox, Radio Plant, Bearing Plant, Baikal reconstructed in the 2000s are transformed much easier, and in the engineering view, as they were industrial plants, they remained so.

The shopping center was purchased by Aeroscan LLC in December 2022 for 850 million rubles. The calculation of the new owner was probably that free equipment would be attached to the purchased complex as a bonus. In other words, those "essential improvements", finishing, engineering networks that entrepreneurs really can't take with them to a new place, suggests Bychkov. At least, the cinema has already been offered to leave everything as it is when leaving – "We will show our movies." At the same time, according to the new owner, all body kits should go to him "by inheritance", for free.

The most burning issue in this story, of course, remains the issue of security – what the residents of the city are most worried about.

Military production itself is dangerous. But in the case of deploying it in a shopping mall, we reach the top of the absurd.

At real defense enterprises, none of the civilians knows where the workshops are located, mostly outside the city, but the coordinates are not known to anyone. The buildings are built of such materials so that in case of a direct hit by aerial bombs, a raid, a terrorist attack, the building withstood, the employees survived, the equipment was preserved, the technological chains were not disrupted. There is a bomb shelter nearby, so that you can move to shelter at a signal.

- How will employees be able to protect themselves in walls 2 centimeters thick of basalt fiber on thin metal? These walls can't protect anyone, but they can destroy one or two. For a tragedy, it is enough just to pour gasoline on the walls and bring a light. And how to protect residents, residential buildings? Come a stranger from foreign countries, rent an apartment with an overview and, please, watch the strategic object directly from your balcony, or even just click on a radio-controlled rocket. After all, it is very convenient to get to a t-shaped intersection from a busy highway. KAMAZ, shooting the building at point-blank range. The plant works ostensibly for the sake of defense, while it itself can be easily destroyed, - Yuri Bychkov notes.

We asked Aeroscan LLC questions about the expediency of placing a military plant in a shopping complex, in residential areas and about existing security threats.

No response has been received at the time of publication. Entrepreneur Alexander Zakharov, at least, does not hide his involvement in the production of drones (his son Nikita Zakharov is listed among the founders of the company). The media quoted him as saying "about the world's first project to convert a shopping center into mass production of drones."

At the same time, Zakharov rejoices in the revival of the former glory of the city of gunsmiths and the creation of new jobs, which ultimately should lead to new developments and increase the prestige of the country.

"As a person who gave birth and works in the city of gunsmiths, it was bitter for me to see how powerful factories built in Soviet times turned into shopping centers one after another. But there is a way to quickly and repeatedly increase the production of unmanned vehicles. We have developed a concept for the conversion of shopping centers, in which, before the start of the SVO, mainly goods of Western brands were traded, into factories for the conveyor production of three types of domestic drones," Zakharov was quoted as saying by TG—channel."I have long kept the idea that the time will come and the industry will return to the places where we lost factories for various office and shopping centers in the 90s.

Now we need to look at the departure of foreign companies as an opportunity to create new jobs and provide the market with products necessary for our consumption," he adds.

Izhevsk entrepreneurs find forgery and deception in the words of the owner of the production of drones.

- To put business on the brink of survival, especially those who cannot easily transfer their tightly built-in property. To deprive the city of 1000 jobs for the sake of creating 150 new ones, what? In addition, you can forget forever about the colossal taxes paid to the city and the republic by 160 tenants – small and medium-sized local businesses. The new owner of the Italmas shopping center LLC Aeroscan is a Moscow company, respectively, taxes from its activities will go to Moscow. Finally, is the life of the whole Izhevsk microdistrict worth driving on military rails? How expedient is it to destroy the "ecosystem" now, if, for example, a special military operation ends soon or there simply will be no state order? – our interlocutors comment.

Residents of the microdistrict foresee that the cost of their housing will soon begin to fall, it will be impossible to exchange it for an equivalent one. And young families who moved in 6-8 years ago with grown-up children just need to expand. Will apartments in these houses be sold and bought? Few people want to live side by side with a military enterprise that many on the planet might want to wipe off the face of the Earth.

The head of Udmurtia and the authorities of the republic have never publicly commented on the first military renovation of a shopping center in Russia… In conversations with residents, they answer that the dispute of economic entities is not their competence.

A petition against the placement of a factory for the production of unmanned ammunition in the Italmas shopping center in Izhevsk was signed by more than 3,000 people.


"We want Russia to be a strong and prosperous country with reliable defense and happy people! Unfortunately, this is not the case in Izhevsk. What is happening here is either greed or sabotage against Russia, its people and its security," the creators of the petition write."Izhevsk is a city of gunsmiths.

And we know that all such production facilities are located in specially protected areas, far enough from residential buildings, preschool and educational institutions. The building for such production is being built in secrecy mode under the control of the state in compliance with building regulations, the requirements of civil defense standards and the Ministry of Emergency Situations. We know that it is IMPOSSIBLE:

— to write about such construction on the Internet;
— to hide behind the connections from the Ministry of Defense, that supposedly everything has been decided and they support this project;
— shout to the whole world: there will be a drone factory here.
— It is impossible to place a defense enterprise right at the intersection of busy highways, where more than 60 thousand cars pass every day! And this actually sticks a large target on the residential areas of Izhevsk, which can be seen even from space.

We believe that cheap PR and the desire to earn extra money under the guise of state interests, in any case, fraud and betrayal, the petition says.