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A Rechnik War Veteran Fights a New Battle

Filipp Tsiglakov, a 90-year-old WWII veteran who says his participation in the war prevented Mayor Yury Luzhkov from becoming "Hitler's slave." Vladimir Filonov

In the troubled Rechnik neighborhood, a 90-year-old veteran of World War II has become a local celebrity and a symbol of civil resistance.

“If I hadn't fought in the war, Luzhkov wouldn't be the city's mayor but Hitler's slave. Now he wants to make me homeless,” said Filipp Tsiglakov, the oldest resident in Rechnik.

Like most Rechnik residents, Tsiglakov is angry about Mayor Yury Luzhkov's efforts to demolish the neighborhood, located on a bank of the Moscow River in western Moscow. Luzhkov says the houses owned by Tsiglakov and other residents were built illegally.

The first houses came down Jan. 21 when court marshals brought bulldozers into the sleeping neighborhood in the wee hours of the morning. A total of 22 houses — both humble shacks and posh mansions — have been destroyed, and a similar number have been targeted for destruction over the next 10 days.

The residents have wept and pleaded, threatened to set themselves and their Russian passports on fire, promised lawsuits, petitioned President Dmitry Medvedev and Prime Minister Vladimir Putin and appealed to foreign embassies for asylum — but found little mainstream support in their efforts to stop the bulldozers.

The demolition, however, has united opposition activists, nationalists and radicals in accusing the authorities of violating property rights and committing human rights abuses by evicting people during the bitter cold of winter.

Luzhkov has proclaimed the razings a triumph of the law.

For Tsiglakov, the “triumph of the law” means losing the modest house that he built with his bare hands more than 50 years ago.

“It was just sand here and nothing else. I had to bring a lot of black dirt over 10 to 15 years to grow apple trees here. Then I built a small cabin to live in because I had no money to build a palace,” he said.

Many of the luxury houses surrounding Tsiglakov's small home are estimated by property consultants to be worth upward of $1 million. Among Tsiglakov's neighbors are several State Duma deputies, including Dmitry Svishyov of the Liberal Democratic Party. Svishyov visited Rechnik on Saturday to support his neighbors in their standoff with the authorities.

The affluent homeowners have found themselves in the same situation as those who live in plywood cabins: Most of them lack proper deeds for their land plots and documentation for the construction of the houses. The homeowners blame their paperwork problems on the complicated laws that regulated the use of land during Soviet times and land ownership in post-Soviet Russia. Many of the Rechnik plots were provided to their initial owners by their state employer for “indefinite use,” without any documents that could be used to register the plots and the houses in the new Russia.

The residents have complained that their attempts to obtain new documents for the plots had been firmly and systematically rejected by city officials and city courts. This left them in legal limbo, with the demolition of the neighborhood being just a matter of time.

Tsiglakov showed a letter from the prefect of the city’s western district, Yury Alpatov, saying the decision to raze Rechnik dated back to the late years of the Soviet Union and that it could still be carried out by the authorities of modern Russia. “We ask for your understanding as you accept the current situation,” the letter said.

This letter was a response to an appeal that Tsiglakov had earlier sent to Medvedev, asking for him to intervene. 

Rechnik was founded in 1956 as a gardening-only area covering 200,000 square meters on plots given to workers of the nearby Moscow Canal state water management company. Soviet authorities only permitted the construction of summer cabins, but after the Soviet collapse Rechnik evolved into a mix of elite houses and old-fashioned wooden houses belonging to the offspring of the plots' initial owners.

In 1998, Rechnik became part of an environmentally protected area that included the nearby Moskvoretsky Park. In 2006, its land was registered as the property of Moscow Canal, a federally owned company providing water transportation, among other things.

Calls to Moscow Canal went unanswered Friday.

Also in 2006, Rechnik residents received a wake-up call from Oleg Mitvol, then-deputy head of the Federal Inspection Service for Natural Resources Use, the government's environmental watchdog. Mitvol claimed that some residents had built their houses too close to the riverbank and had violated environmental rules.

Residents said municipal officials have long pushed them to leave, going so far as to cut electricity and heating to the houses nearly three years ago. Many of them have installed their own power generators and water pumps since then. But the electricity cuts forced Alexander, 46, who said he did not have money to buy the equipment, to move out of his wooden-plank house with his 10-year-old child and only return during the summer months.

Alexander, who asked that his last name be withheld to protect his family, said he inherited the land plot at Rechnik from his father, who had worked for the Soviet Water Transportation Ministry.

“If they want to take the house, they should compensate us for our labor,” he said.

“We are not oligarchs. We are just simple, working-class people,” said his neighbor Valentina Neskuchayeva, standing nearby outside her green one-story house.

Luzhkov has no plans to offer any compensation and has said Rechnik residents will be billed for the cost of demolishing their homes, a sum that could run into the tens of thousands of dollars per house.

The head of City Hall’s environmental department, Valery Bochin, has said the authorities plan to transform the place into a recreational park. Residents, however, fear that they are being driven out to make room for a golf club or wealthy town-house community, similar to the neighboring Fantasy Island residential complex settlement, which boasts apartments and houses worth millions of dollars each. Luzhkov, incidentally, said last week that Fantasy Island would also be demolished because it was built illegally.

Dozens of Rechnik residents gathered on Saturday afternoon near a press center set up by the community's leader to discuss their plans to save their homes. Sipping instant coffee from plastic cups, they shared newspaper clippings with one another and discussed the latest news.

The previous day, several dozen residents organized a car protest drive from Rechnik to the Mayor’s Office at 13 Tverskaya Ulitsa. Police stopped the procession near Pushkin Square, briefly detaining several drivers.

A Public Chamber committee dedicated a session to Rechnik on Monday, but no City Hall officials showed up as requested. Lawyer Anatoly Kucherena, who oversees the chamber's committee overseeing the work of law enforcement officials, said the head of City Hall's department for land resources, Viktor Damurchev, and the head of its department for natural resources, Leonid Bochin, cited work-related conflicts for their absence, RIA-Novosti reported. Alpatov, prefect for western Moscow, gave no reason for his nonattendance, Kucherena said.

Kucherena said his committee had wanted to ask the officials why they had not stopped construction of the houses from the beginning if they were built illegally.

Kucherena added that his committee would ask the Prosecutor General's Office to investigate the actions of the court marshals who are overseeing the demolition.

Rechnik residents also want to know why they were allowed to build. Among their staunchest defenders is Spravedlivost, or Justice, a small public organization supporting civil rights. Its head, lawyer Andrei Stolbunov, has opened a makeshift office in the neighborhood. As Stolbunov videotaped Saturday's meeting to post on Spravedlivost’s web site, his assistants collected documents from residents in preparation for a lawsuit to the Supreme Court.

“I think we have developed the right strategy," Stolbunov said. "We have to collect all the information about the houses so we can defend the rights of the residents." 

Meanwhile, some residents have painted graffiti reading, “No court decision yet” on the walls of their houses in a protest against the demolition. But many residents have already lost their court battles.

One who hasn't had his day in court yet, Boris Piskunov, has already lost his house. It was one of the first to be razed last month. Piskunov, who is in his 30s, was inside the house when bulldozers arrived to demolish it at 3:30 a.m. in weather of minus 27 degrees Celsius.

“The year that I was born, my parents planted an oak tree and an elm tree near our house," Piskunov said. "They [the demolishers] have destroyed the elm tree, but the oak tree is still standing. That means they have destroyed me only halfway."

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