'To live in hard labor': why the children of the GULAG still cannot escape from exile - ForumDaily
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'To live out in hard labor': why the children of the Gulag still cannot escape from exile

The Russian government and the State Duma actually refuse to provide the victims of the Stalinist terror with apartments in Moscow and other large cities where their parents lived before the repressions. The right to return home has been guaranteed to them by law since 1991, but the authorities, contrary to the decision of the Constitutional Court and the support of the UN, offer the children of the Gulag to wait for their turn on a par with the beneficiaries. On average, the queue to receive an apartment can last 20-30 years, says Air force.

Memorial to the victims of the Gulag in Moscow. Photo: Shutterstock

On Thursday, November 26, the State Duma adopted in the first reading a government bill on changing the rules for providing them with housing. However, even according to it, the victims of Stalinist repression will not receive guaranteed housing to return to their families' former habitats earlier than in a few decades.

“This is called robbery”

When Vladimir Gorobets is in Moscow, he goes to Arbat to look at house No. 38, where his father once lived in apartment 12.

“What was confiscated from my father is called “robbery.” For no reason, firstly, he was arrested, a man’s entire life was ruined... For ten years [my father] felled the forest for the benefit of our homeland. [Secondly,] they robbed everything. The state that existed then robbed him, and now - return him? The loot, in my opinion, is never returned,” Gorobets laments. For more than 10 years he has been trying to return this apartment to his family.

Gorobets is 64 years old. He lived almost half of them in the place of exile of his parents - the village of Yazaevka, about 200 kilometers north of Krasnoyarsk. Now it is a tiny point surrounded by taiga on the banks of the Yenisei with a couple of hundred inhabitants. In the late 1950s and early 1960s, almost the entire small population were convicts, Gorobets explains.

His parents met there - in Yazaevka. Both are exiles. Mom was from Lvov. She received six years in the camps and permanent settlement in a remote Siberian village for allegedly participating in underground cells and distributing anti-Soviet literature.

My father is from the Kyiv region, but worked in Moscow. Before his arrest, he held a high position in the food supply sector and lived in an apartment in the very center of the city - on Arbat. In 1942, Leonid Gorobets was arrested on a false denunciation, says his son Vladimir. It was written, he believes, by Gorobets Sr.’s colleagues, whom he caught stealing food.

“[The thieves] suggested to him that he should not interfere with them or should assist them in this matter. They offered apartments, gold, whatever you wanted - in 1942 in Moscow you could exchange food for anything. He refused this offer and sent him away. In the morning they came to him: they say that a statement was written against him that he is a saboteur and sells food,” Vladimir Gorobets recalls his father’s story.

An additional role in his case was played by the things of a neighbor: in Gorobets's packed apartment, shortly before the search, a tenant of one of the rooms died. Its new owners put the belongings of the deceased in the corridor. Gorobets Sr. left them in his room before the relatives showed up. During a search, photographs of the Politburo staff with members of the Politburo who had fallen out of favor by 1942 and repressed were found in these things.

In May 1943, Leonid Gorobets was found guilty under Article 58-10 of the RSFSR Criminal Code on agitation to undermine Soviet power and sentenced to capital punishment. The execution was replaced by a 10-year term in a camp and subsequent exile to the Krasnoyarsk Territory, where his son Vladimir was born.

Gorobets was discharged from the apartment on Arbat, according to an extract from the archival house register, in November 1945 “in connection with the arrest.”

“Evictions in the USSR were an integral part of political repression,” wrote the head of the Memorial society, Jan Rachinsky, in his address to the Chairman of the Constitutional Court Valery Zorkin.

“The seized apartments often went to employees of the repressive bodies - for example, in Moscow for the period from August 17, 1937 to October 1, 1938, out of 6 rooms sealed in the houses of the district councils, 887 were transferred to the NKVD and only 6 were at the disposal of the Moscow Soviet,” - says the letter from the head of Memorial.

Who moved into Leonid Gorobets’ apartment after his arrest remains a mystery to his son. Vladimir doesn’t know the current owners either.

“I found out on the Internet who lives there... Some people live there. I wanted to go there and talk, but the security simply didn’t let me in,” Gorobets recalls one of his visits to Moscow.

In 2007, he began collecting papers to prove his right to reimbursement of a Moscow apartment and get in line to receive housing. In Moscow, the waiting time in this queue is on average 25 years.

“We shouldn’t bet on receiving it, but on returning housing,” notes Vladimir Gorobets. — Did your father once stand in line, was he once given this housing for something? And now, it turns out, we have to get in line again.”

But the man has not even managed to get into the 25-year-old line: the Moscow property department and the courts have repeatedly denied him this right for several years.

On the subject: 'The reddest of all blacks': the story of an African-American communist who died in the Gulag

200 years for three

The 1991 Law on the Rehabilitation of Victims of Political Repression obliges Russian authorities to compensate those who were sent into exile or Gulag camps, as well as their children born in these places. Most of those repressed have already died, and after almost 30 years only the children of the Gulag fall under the law. They have the right to return to their parents’ previous place of residence and receive housing from the state to replace the one their families lost due to repression.

It is almost impossible to realize this right. In 2005, the State Duma transferred to the regions the authority to put forward the conditions under which former political prisoners can return home. Moscow put forward the most stringent requirements: just to get on the general waiting list for social housing, a victim of Stalin’s terror must have lived in the capital for at least 10 years (in most regions they began to require at least registration for this), not have their own living space and have low-income status, wrote Kommersant.

For the majority of repressed families, the path to obtaining housing is closed. In fact, they have remained in exile for over 70 years. This is exactly what happened to the daughters of three Muscovites who were repressed in the late 1930s and early 1940s.

Alisa Meissner from the Kirov region, Evgenia Shasheva from Komi and Elizaveta Mikhailova from the Vladimir region have been unsuccessfully suing the Moscow authorities for a long time, and eventually reached the Constitutional Court. From the rostrum of the Constitutional Court, they told the judges how they were born in special settlements and exiles, after the state took away their parents' property.

Alice Meissner comes from a German family. Before her deportation, her mother lived with her parents near Chistoprudny Boulevard in the center of Moscow. In 1941, they were all expelled from the capital to the Karaganda region.

Soon the family was separated. Alice’s grandfather died in a new place a year later, and two years later his two daughters were sent to logging in the Kirov region. Only one of them, Alisa Meissner’s mother, survived to be released from the special settlement.

She herself has been living in the village of Rudnichny in the Kirov region for almost thirty years - in the late 1980s, her husband was transferred to work there. In 1991, the couple was given an apartment in a hostel, where the 70-year-old woman still lives. The apartment is filled with black mold spreading across the walls, and the place is depressing - there is an abandoned kindergarten next to the house, the city is full of buildings in ruins, and on the outskirts there is an abandoned mine and a cemetery for German prisoners of war.

Meissner tried to sell an apartment for 90 thousand rubles and move in with her daughter in order to save at least on utility bills. But there were no people willing to buy housing, says Grigory Vaypan, a lawyer and representative of victims of repression in the Constitutional and other courts.

“Now she is trying to re-privatize it and return it to the municipality for free. They don’t take it that way,” he says.

Previously, Alisa Meissner traveled to Moscow every year, taking advantage of the right of repressed people to preferential travel. I visited cemeteries where loved ones were buried. In an interview with Kommersant, she said that one day she “plucked up courage and rang the doorbell of an apartment on Chaplygina Street to see with her own eyes where her relatives were taken from in 1941. But as soon as she began to explain her story, the door was silently slammed in her face.”

Evgenia Shasheva is Meissner’s peer, she is also 70 years old. Shasheva was born in a special settlement for exiles in Komi.

Her father is from a wealthy merchant family from Simbirsk (now Ulyanovsk). In the post-revolutionary 1920s, Shasheva’s ancestors moved to Moscow: her grandfather got a job at the Main Directorate of the Canning Industry, her father studied at the Faculty of Biology of Moscow State University and worked as a biochemist. In 1937, both were arrested and accused of spying for Japan.

Evgenia Shasheva’s father was given eight years in camps in Ukhtizhemlag in Komi, and after his liberation in 1946 he was forbidden to return to Moscow and “regime areas.” There, at a special settlement, he met her mother, a former prisoner of German labor camps, sent to Soviet camps on charges of working for the enemy.

The father died in 1987, and lived there in the surrounding area until his death, Evgenia told the BBC. She herself and her family live in the village of Nizhny Odes, near Ukhta, 100 km north of the place where her father served his sentence.

“Since the beginning of November 2020, the third bear has appeared in our village,” says Evgenia.

About how the fate of her grandfather, Shasheva found out only in the early 2000s, when she got access to his file in the archive. He was shot almost immediately after his arrest and was buried at the Butovo training ground.

Elizaveta Mikhailova and her two daughters live in a tiny village at a stop in the Vladimir region - in a room they bought in half of an old wooden house.

Her parents are from St. Petersburg, but in the last years before their expulsion they lived in Moscow. My father made a career in the chemical industry. In 1937 he disappeared. Only a month after his disappearance did the family learn that he had been arrested on charges of participating in a counter-revolutionary organization.

My father was sentenced to eight years in the camps and sent to Magadan. He was released in 1946 with a “wolf ticket” in his hands. His wife left Moscow and together they settled in Moldova, where their daughter Elizabeth was born.

Soon after her birth, arrests of “repeaters” began - those who had already served time in the camps. In 1949, Elizaveta Mikhailova’s father was arrested again and sent into exile in the Krasnoyarsk Territory for 25 years. His relatives did not go after him: Elizaveta and her sister were constantly sick - the parents were afraid that the children would not be able to withstand life in Siberia.

Years later, Elizaveta Mikhailova found herself on business in Moscow. It was 1990, she stopped at the KGB building on Lubyanka and decided to go inside.

“So she said: “Times are different now, so tell me, finally, what was dad to blame for? Why do we suffer so much all our lives?” The employee listened to everything carefully, wrote down the data and went to investigate, and when he returned, he said: “Your dad is not guilty of anything. Make inquiries about rehabilitation. A special law will come out soon, then you will have the right to an apartment in Moscow and will be able to return.” I arrived, told my mother, she was so happy, so hopeful...” Elizaveta recalled in a conversation with Kommersant.

In 2019, the Constitutional Court (CC), following complaints from Meissner, Shasheva and Mikhailova, decided to change the rules preventing their return to the capital. The Constitutional Court recognized that the current mechanism of compensation for damage to the families of Gulag victims violates their rights and compensation for harm should be “as complete as possible.”

“You’ll have to live out your life in hard labor”

Elizaveta Mikhailova has been trying to prove to the Moscow courts the right to compensation for the Moscow housing lost by her family for 18 years. In 2004, the Khoroshevsky District Court denied her, finding that her mother herself decided to leave Moscow for her expelled husband, and therefore could not be considered forcibly evicted due to repression.

The outcome of the court hearings was not even influenced by the decision of the Constitutional Court on the need to revise the current procedure for the reimbursement of once seized apartments and the position that moving into exile for reunification with a repressed family member cannot be considered voluntary. Already seven months after this decision, in July 2020, the Khoroshevsky District Court again did not recognize the fact of forced resettlement, and in October this position was confirmed by the Moscow City Court.

“Now we continue to seek a review of court decisions in favor of Mikhailova, we are preparing cassation appeals,” says lawyer Grigory Vaypan.

A 72-year-old woman living in half of an uninhabitable wooden house in the Vladimir region is one of several hundred citizens who have the right to claim compensation for their apartment.

A descendant of the repressed Vladimir Gorobets also made several unsuccessful attempts to prove in court his right to living space.

After the Constitutional Court decided to change the procedure for compensation for harm, Gorobets decided to try again to get compensation. In August 2020, he submitted documents to the Moscow Property Department for inclusion in the queue. There is still no answer.

“In November 2018, he wrote us a letter: “I am a pensioner, I live in my father’s former hard labor camp, I have been left without his support since I was 2,5 years old... I will have to live out my life in hard labor and in exile - despite neither the Constitution nor the laws. There is no money in the state for people like us,” lawyer Vaipan quotes Gorobets’ letter as saying.

According to the head of the Duma Committee on Housing Policy, Galina Khovanskaya (A Just Russia), no more than 500 Russians are now trying to obtain compensation for housing taken away during the years of repression or compensation for it. “When we were making estimates, we thought that there would be 1 people (the Ministry of Construction previously stated this. — Approx. BBC). But we made inquiries and it turned out that there were much fewer of them - those who somehow showed themselves and tried to register. Mainly in Moscow - 190 [appeals] and St. Petersburg, a little in Nizhny Novgorod, some in Krasnodar,” the deputy lists.

On the subject: How to find out about their repressed and deported relatives

"They die every day"

The Ministry of Construction of Russia took over the amendment of the law on the rehabilitation of victims of political repression at the direction of the Constitutional Court.

The document, presented in April 2020, received more than a hundred negative reviews and not a single positive one at the public discussion stage. Among those who criticized him were Commissioner for Human Rights Tatyana Moskalkova, government representative in the Constitutional Court Mikhail Barshchevsky, specialists from the Institute of Legislation and Comparative Law, Kommersant previously noted.

Nevertheless, the amendments developed by the Ministry of Construction received the approval of the government commission and eventually got to a vote in the State Duma.

As follows from the text of the draft, the government proposes to make virtually the only change in the existing law. Previously, the regions had the right to establish the same rules for the rehabilitated as for any waiting list. Now, in case of returning to their former place of residence, the authorities must provide housing for the rehabilitated citizens, regardless of the length of time they have lived here; of what property they have and whether they have grounds for being recognized as needing housing, the project says.

But this is where the innovations end: according to the government’s project, rehabilitated people and their children must, as before, stand in line to return home. They will have to wait for many years to receive an apartment (in Moscow - 25) - “in the manner prescribed by the constituent entities of the Russian Federation.”

Preserving the principle of a “general queue” for the children of repressed people means that the majority of those who have the right to this will not receive housing, says lawyer Grigory Vaipan, who represents the interests of three families.

“They die every day. An important point that not everyone understands: this is a non-renewable category [of applicants for social housing]. According to Article 13 of the Rehabilitation Law, only those who were directly repressed and their children if they were born in a camp or exile have the right to housing. Grandchildren, great-grandchildren and so on do not have this right,” he explains.

Shortly before the vote in the State Duma, it became known that UN representatives had called on the Russian authorities to provide the children of the repressed apartments or compensation for illegally confiscated housing within 2 years.

“Most of them are elderly people over 70 years old. Many live in remote areas and their living conditions range from moderately livable to dilapidated, with no sewerage, hot water or heating,” the letter from the UN special rapporteurs says.

According to critics of the project of the Ministry of Construction in Russia, housing should be provided to victims of political repression in a special order: for example, in a separate queue only for this category of citizens or at a specific time.

In September 2020, spravedlivorossi deputies Galina Khovanskaya and Sergei Mironov submitted an alternative bill to the State Duma. Under these amendments, victims of repression must receive payments from the federal budget for the purchase or construction of housing in those cities that the victims were forced to leave within a year after their appeal.

“[When considering the project in the committee] they said: we have orphans, disabled children... I myself am fighting for them, but this is a completely different order. This is not an improvement in living conditions. This is compensation for the harm that was caused to families,” explains Khovanskaya.

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“We strictly and clearly implemented the decision of the Constitutional Court”

Consideration of both bills in the State Duma was scheduled for November 26. Deputies voted for the government option - 280 votes to 20.

“The bill clearly prohibits regions from imposing additional conditions on the provision of housing,” Deputy Minister of Construction Nikita Stasishin said before the vote.

But he does not establish any terms for the provision of housing and preferences to other categories of those in need, follows from the speech of a government representative.

“We strictly and clearly implemented the decision of the Constitutional Court - the way we interpret it,” Stasishin emphasized. According to government estimates, about 1600 people can now claim housing compensation.

The author of the alternative bill, Khovanskaya, responded to this by noting that the Constitutional Court said about the need for immediate compensation for damage. “We are not talking about improving living conditions, and there is no need to speculate on other categories in the queue. We are talking about compensation for harm,” the deputy said.

“We made requests to the regions. 442 applicants. Listen, can’t we close this problem? The cynicism of government representatives raises many questions. In general, will these people pass the test of humanity and empathy? - asked Khovanskaya. “[The children of the repressed] stand in a general line that will reach them at the coffin... They will see justice only in the cemetery in the context of such a law.”

“Those who appealed to the Constitutional Court will have the right to appeal [to it] again” if the government bill, from their point of view, does not correspond to the position of the Constitutional Court, a deputy from United Russia suggested on November 11 during a discussion in the relevant committee. Mikhail Terentyev.

“This is practically a mockery of people. They will be put on a waiting list and will stand there for 25 years. We don’t live that long,” says Khovanskaya. “There are very few of these people... I don’t know them... I just need to feel sorry for them.”

After the Constitutional Court ordered changes to the existing rules in 2019, the Moscow Property Department registered two of the three applicants. Alisa Meissner was in 54th place in the queue for an apartment, and Evgenia Shasheva was in 967th place.

72-year-old Elizaveta Mikhailova is not in this queue.

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