Last week, the Moscow City Duma approved a controversial fifteen-year construction plan that will reshape much of the city’s current infrastructure. The plan has provoked fear and outrage from Moscow’s residents, architectural preservationists, and opposition groups who fear that the “Genplan” will destroy many of Moscow’s historic areas, while simultaneously failing to address basic traffic and infrastructure problems.

A diverse array of activists staged a number of protests in Moscow in the weeks leading up to the approval of the Genplan. More than 20 protesters were arrested in a flash mob outside of the City Duma on the morning of the official vote. Also, Interfax reported today that even though the measure passed easily through the politically homogeneous Duma, 30 public organizations have formed a coalition to fight against the Genplan, including opposition groups, architectural watchdogs, religious organizations, art advocacy groups, and others.

The online newspaper Gazeta.ru has published an editorial arguing that not only does the Moscow Genplan spell out a death sentence for the country’s historic capital, but it also exemplifies the endemic corruption throughout the Russian government that allows civil servants to push through projects for their own personal gain, leaving the rest of the country to fend for itself.

Genplan For It’s Own Sake
May 5, 2010
Gazeta.ru

The General Plan for the Development of Moscow is not meant to solve any of the actual problems of the megalopolis; it’s written by civil servants in the interests of civil servants, and will do nothing to hinder the city government’s commercial construction plans. It is a true encyclopedia of the rules and methods that govern Russia.

The Moscow City Duma approved the General Plan for the Development of Moscow [Genplan] in its third reading. It is the primary document for urban development of the city for the next fifteen years.

The need for this plan did not come as a whim from the Moscow mayor’s office; it was required by the Urban Development Codex. But in a sense, the Genplan fails to address any actual issues. Last summer (in August, at the height of vacation season), the city authorities held public hearings on the Genplan; however, the plan did not cease to evoke sharp disagreement within society. During hearings in the Public Chamber as recently as in April of this year, several members called the document “a death sentence” for the city. Nevertheless, the Genplan was approved, and as Moscow City Duma Speaker Vladimir Platonov noted, it defends the people and helps “to get rid of scandalous situations.” “Suspending the law would have been harmful to Muscovites, since the law defends their interests,” Platonov added.

The problem is that the only Muscovites in Moscow whose interests are defended are the Moscow civil servants.

The Moscow Genplan does not resolve the issues of how the city is going to deal with traffic jams or how it’s going to preserve its historic center. On the other hand, it does nothing to limit opportunities for the Moscow authorities (the city mayor will have to be replaced at some point during the fifteen years of the formal operations in this document, for purely physiological reasons) to hand out construction contracts on opaque grounds and continue to build the city up in a way that is profitable for the authorities themselves or for their developers. It does not put any barriers in the way of having another office skyscraper appear instead of another children’s playground.

Therefore, the quality of the Genplan is generally secondary to the fact that this document fails to provide a clear legal framework for the commercial interests of the city’s civil servants, who have become the primary driving force for construction in Moscow.

Overall, not a single large city in the world, especially with an ancient history, has been developed under an officially approved general plan, and ideas by city leadership for urban development at various points in time have evoked protest from city residents (one can read Peter Ackroyd’s remarkable book London: The Biography to become convinced of as much). But civilized development in large cities stems from the fact that the city’s executive government is accountable to the population, and, in practically all foreign megalopolises of the caliber of Moscow, is directly elected. And the experts on the mayor’s public councils on urban development have to opportunity to argue with the authorities, and sometimes even prove that they’re right. As an individual region (and not a municipality), Moscow does not have direct elections for mayor. So the population can’t argue with the mayor’s office, and the mayor’s office doesn’t want to ask the population how to better develop the city in the interest of its maximum number of residents.

It’s unlikely that even passionate supporters of [Moscow Mayor] Yury Luzhkov, of his family, and of his team of bureaucrats would deny that the Genplan for Moscow’s urban development can be summed up altogether in one phrase: “What I want is what I’ll get.” Moscow’s new Genplan doesn’t create the slightest obstacle for civil servants to continue this kind of urban development policy. So, it doesn’t change the situation at its core, and thus remains something that exists only for its own sake.

The Moscow government could easily do everything that the Genplan prescribes without the document itself: the few chances for lawsuits are vanishing, and in situations like what happened with the Rechnik settlement, the federal government intervened only after two dozen houses had already been demolished, and no earlier. Furthermore, given the importance of Moscow for the country’s political stability and for performing state functions, it’s unlikely that the Kremlin, under any president and any mayor, could manage a hands-on approach to urban development disputes.

That said, we need to be aware of the fact that the blatant disregard for residents’ opinions during the process to approve Moscow’s Genplan, and the lack of barriers for contracts to be distributed amongst their own, does not differ, in essence, from the government’s decision to give oil and gas fields to individual companies without competition, or from the actions by the St. Petersburg authorities to construct a tower for Gazprom – the notorious Okhta Center. In that case, as is well known, both the Urban Development Codex and building height regulations were directly violated – but the Petersburg authorities went on with it without batting an eyelid: here we have a political order, and we have the interests of the city’s primary taxpayer – the Gazprom corporation. And in today’s Russia, at any level of the government, the interests of civil servants and the companies close to them are higher than the law, common sense, or the interests of ordinary citizens.

Yury Kladov, a Rechnik resident and village representative, made the accusation at a press conference held on Friday by the federal land registration service, Rosreestr. He claimed that part of the documents needed to legally register the houses, thus theoretically annulling a court order to demolish them, were stolen by government authorities when the residents had filed them. Other necessary documents have been locked in state archives that residents have no access to, he said.

Kladov stressed that civil servants were free to access the documents.

Rosreestr deputy manager Galina Yelizarova rebutted by saying that none of the 80 rejected registrations filed by Rechnik residents in the past three years have been contested in court. Her colleague, Vadim Andropov, added that this was because the residents know they lack the necessary documents to register the homes – seeming to imply that such documents did not exist, as opposed to residents’ claims that the documents are being withheld by the state.

Kladov countered that Rechnik residents lacked faith that the courts would be a viable avenue to obtain registration for their homes, and would do nothing more than postpone the inevitable demolitions.

Moscow city authorities began demolishing buildings in Rechnik on January 21, after a court order deemed the buildings to have been illegally built. Residents maintain that the village was supposed to have fallen under a “dacha amnesty” program that legalized all of the villages similar to theirs, and point to neighboring estates featuring luxury villas as evidence that the city just wants to drive them out to develop the land.

Two weeks later, Russian President Dmitri Medvedev ordered the Prosecutor General to investigate the legality of the buildings, and demolitions were temporarily suspended. By that time, however, several dozen had already been razed. Residents, meanwhile, have attempted to gain refugee status in Germany and the United States, and began claiming genocide after 12 elderly residents died from the stress of losing their homes.

According to Rechnik resident Yury Kladov, the causes of death were all directly related to the constant psychological pressure and fear resulting from the violent destruction of their homes. Before passing away, he says, some of the elderly blamed the Moscow government directly for their impending deaths.

On this basis, Kladov asserts, the residents have reason to accuse the authorities of genocide.

The demolition of several dozen houses in the small Moscow village began on January 21, after a court ruled in favor of a claim by the Moscow government that the houses were built illegally. Residents maintain that the Soviet-era buildings fall under a “dacha amnesty” program that was implemented for other similar villages. Rechnik, they say, was simply forgotten, and charge that authorities now want to use the area’s prime real estate to build luxury villas.

Two Rechnik residents were hospitalized and 25 detained on January 21 after attempting to block demolition teams from reaching their homes. Since then, the village has employed a variety of measures to call attention to their plight, blocking traffic on Moscow’s main roads and appealing to the United States and Germany for refugee status. Sixty-four resident veterans have appealed to the Federal Veterans Council for support.

At a rally on Monday in central Moscow, Rechnik residents were joined by activists from a multitude of rights and opposition groups, burning a portrait of Moscow Mayor Yury Luzhkov and calling for him to resign.

Sergei Udaltsov, activist and coordinator of the Left Front political organization, told the approximately 200 people gathered that the consequences of the demolitions in Rechnik stretch far beyond the village itself. “If they go to Rechnik today, then tomorrow they can go to any other Moscow neighborhood and evict us from our homes,” he said.

As of Tuesday, 22 Rechnik houses have been torn down, with at least another 15 slated for demolition.

Nadezhda Prusenkova of the newspaper’s press service said that the DDoS attack on Novaya Gazeta’s server has increased in strength since its initiation on Tuesday morning. The site now receives one and a half million hits a second, effectively paralyzing it.

“We have prepared and are submitting today an appeal to law enforcement agencies, in which we basically are demanding that criminal proceedings be initiated,” Prusenkova said.

Novaya Gazeta is one of the only newspapers in Russia that remains openly critical of the Kremlin. Four of its journalists have been killed since 2001, including Anna Politkovskaya, whose October 2006 murder shocked the world and drew unprecedented scorn onto the Russian government. “There are visitors in our editorial office every day who have nowhere else to bring their troubles,” Politkovskaya wrote before her death, “because the Kremlin finds their stories off-message, so that the only place they can be aired is in our newspaper, Novaya Gazeta.”

“The editors of Novaya Gazeta consider this attack to be a direct violation of media laws, an impeding the realization of the professional activities of journalists, a violation of the rights of our readers to obtain prompt information and a breakdown of the agreement with our advertisers,” reads a post on the newspaper’s LiveJournal blog, which editors are using to publish material while the website remains inaccessible.

Editors of the newspaper suspect that the attack could be motivated by its recent extensive coverage of controversial house demolitions in the Moscow village of Rechnik. “Our correspondents are on duty in the village around the clock and send the editors photographs and videos, testimony from the victims, and also property ownership documents that still have not appeared in the news,” they said in a blog post.

“According to the information that we have, the house demolitions in the village are planned to be completed by Monday. And the materials that began to appear on our website are an absolutely undesirable background for this,” the post concludes.

Prusenkova noted that editors are attempting to find an alternative domain for the website in addition to LiveJournal. “But the problem is that the attack immediately goes exactly to the domain name ‘Novaya Gazeta’,” she said.

Russian opposition websites are quite frequently subjected to DDoS attacks. They often correspond with important political events, such as elections or large-scale protests. The website for the opposition movement Solidarity underwent such an attack in September 2009, after a presentation of movement leader Boris Nemtsov’s critical brochure on Moscow Mayor Yury Luzhkov.

Update 1/26/10: Excavators resumed house demolitions Tuesday morning, reneging on a statement on Monday that residents would be given several days to voluntarily leave their homes and for recent subzero temperatures to subside. Authorities say that as a court had ordered the demolitions, continuing to halt the demolitions would be in violation of judicial authority.

Meanwhile, residents have largely run out of food and fuel, and fear that they will not be allowed back into their homes if they leave to purchase more. They have additionally sent a delegation to the German and American embassies with a request to be taken in as refugees.

Also on Tuesday, Sergei Udaltsov, an activist leader supporting the residents, was arrested in Rechnik on unclear charges of extremism.

Residents of Rechnik, a small village on the outskirts of Moscow, have pledged “to stand until death” in the face of a city order to demolish their homes, reports Gazeta.ru.

At a meeting on Saturday between residents, activists, police, and government deputies, residents of the small village demanded that authorities put a moratorium on the demolition of their homes, which began Thursday night and is due to continue on Monday morning after a weekend break, as well as create a conciliation committee. They also voiced concern that police were not allowing ambulances through to the village.

On Thursday night, two Rechnik residents were hospitalized and about 25 detained after attempting to stop workers from bulldozing their homes. On Friday, home owners barricaded themselves inside one of several building slated to be razed, but were unable to hinder workers from continuing to demolish other homes. As of Sunday night, altogether six had been taken down.

Moscow city authorities brought the village to court after an environmental watchdog investigated Rechnik in 2006, concluding that the houses had been illegally built on land that had been set aside for collective gardens during Soviet times. Despite being illegal when they were built at the end of the 1950s, the houses in Rechnik were never torn down. Residents say that while other similar villages have long since been legalized through a “dacha amnesty” program, Rechnik had simply been forgotten. Moreover, they say, the village had not been notified of the court’s decision to tear down their homes and had not been invited to contest it.

“The village Vodnik and other similar garden associations also exist in rural Moscow, and it was a difficult situation, but they all fell under the amnesty,” said one resident. “But it’s as if we’re the only ones.” Despite promises that the houses would be replaced with a park, numerous residents expressed certainty that they would be replaced with “some kind of elite housing.”

Sergei Udaltsov, leader of the Left Front political organization and present at Saturday’s meeting in support of the protesters, said that the residents must necessarily be granted a moratorium until Moscow’s recent subzero temperatures subside. “This is simply inhumane – to kick people out into the streets in such cold,” he said.

Rechnik residents promised to use any means possible to stop police from evicting them, including blocking entrances to buildings by pouring water over the walkways, rendering them too icy to walk on. Additionally, one resident veteran threatened to set himself on fire, and another resident said that he would employ his pet leopard against police if necessary.

“We’re going to stand until death,” said Sergei Bobyshev, the leopard’s owner. “Yes, the leopard Cleopatra lives in my house, a very affectionate pet cat with the manners of a dog – she’s already four years old,” he said, adding that he had all the necessary legal documents for the unusual pet.

The village has additionally issued an appeal to Prime Minister Vladimir Putin to personally intervene in the situation, apparently following the example of the town of Pikalevo, where residents successfully appealed to the prime minister in May after being denied long unpaid wages.

Vladimir Vasiliev, head of the State Duma commission on safety, urged residents to bring him all of the home ownership documents that they could find. Owners of the demolished buildings promptly handed him a large packet of papers. Public Chamber representative Anatoly Kuchern promised to investigate whether or not Rechnik was eligible for dacha amnesty.

Despite the weekend moratorium on demolitions, police had blocked off one of the only two roads to Rechnik on Sunday night, preventing residents from returning to their homes. Police claimed that they were blocking the road because a nearby nature preserve was closed.

Russia’s Prosecutor General and Internal Ministry are meanwhile investigating accusations of police misconduct during the demolitions on Thursday and Friday.