Yes we will somehow

President Dmitry Medvedev signed a decree abolishing the Federal Service for Supervision of Compliance with Legislation in the Field of the Protection of Cultural Heritage. Its functions have been transferred to the Ministry of Culture. The decree was signed on February 3, writes Kommersant.

And this decision was prepared back in the summer, when Prime Minister Vladimir Putin instructed the Minister of Culture Alexander Avdeev to prepare the liquidation of Rosokhrankultura. On December 22, Avdeev said that the merger of the service with the ministry was at the final stage. In November, the head of the department, Alexander Kibovsky, moved to the Moscow Department of Cultural Heritage.

According to Avdeev, quoted by the newspaper, “the status of Rosokhrankultura turned out to be underestimated, and its representations to the heads of local authorities and the prosecutor’s office are either not noticed or ignored.” Now, apparently, the minister expects that he will be listened to more. Kommersant recalls that in the dispute over the construction of the Gazprom tower in St. Petersburg, the authority of Avdeev, who opposed it, was not enough - the city authorities reversed the decision only after Medvedev’s intervention. Meanwhile, the newspaper adds that this intervention was caused by loud public protests and lawsuits, which city defenders won with the active support of Rosokhrankultura. The agency confirmed in court the illegality of the entire city system of height regulation. But now the final decision must be made by the Supreme Court, and since Rosokhrankultura no longer exists, the ministry will have to take the rap.

In addition, the abolished department managed to lobby for a mechanism for the preservation of historical settlements, which was provided for by the federal law “On Objects of Cultural Heritage”, but was not actually implemented. This is what caused the stirring letter from the governor of St. Petersburg, Valentina Matvienko, to Putin asking him to remove the city from the list of historical settlements. Then she disavowed her request, and Avdeev promised to issue an order clarifying the scope of the status of the historical settlement. Rosokhrankultura prepared a draft order, after which a decision was made to liquidate the department.

The newspaper refers to Deputy Minister of Culture Andrei Busygin, who oversaw Rosokhrankultura: after the merger, a new position of deputy minister may be created to manage the new structure.

The former head of the now former department, Kibovsky, told the newspaper that he “does not remember a single case when regional authorities ignored his instructions.” In his opinion, “any reorganization is associated with a loss of stability in the work of the department and calls into question its effectiveness.”

The newspaper also mentions that the Duma still will not approve the amendments to the law “On the Protection of Cultural Heritage” in the second reading. One of them provides for lowering the level of decision-making on the exclusion of monuments from the Unified State Register and transferring these powers from the government to the Ministry of Culture. This means that the same government body will include objects in the register of monuments of federal significance and delete them from it. Rosokhrankultura was against it, but it no longer exists.

As Konstantin Mikhailov, a representative of the public organization Arkhnadzor, argued in a conversation with the Daily Journal back in the summer, in light of Putin’s order, “the abolition of the federal head body for heritage protection is a step backward,” since “it threatens a complete loss of control over what is happening with monuments in regions,” if only because in dozens of regions there are simply no monument protection bodies, and where they exist, they cannot resist the authorities. Mikhailov does not have much faith in the ability of the Ministry of Culture to manage the process of protecting monuments, in particular because the ministry has a lot of other problems.