Whose old are you?

The company that wants to build a shopping and entertainment center on the bones of the Porporovsky cemetery decided to allocate money for a monument to children of war.

Around the alleged buildings of the former Por2 cemetery, passions boil: urban defenders organize pickets and rallies, citizens sign letters of protest. “New” spoke about this more than once (“Fight for the cemetery”, “Leave the dead alone”, No. 10 and 13 for 2013). Developers - the Group of Companies Konrad - say that they purchased this section and received a building permit under the law. Graduate citizens and deputies of the ZAS make up requests to the prosecutor's office with a request to verify the legality of the issued permits.

Recently, the International Association of Public Organizations of the Blocades, headed by Valentina Ivanovna Leonenko, has been in defense of the “construction site on the bones”. She sent a letter to the media in the media that says that, as far as she remembers, “in all city cemeteries and in places of mass burials - the burials were designated (year, month) and recorded in administrations. The dead in hospitals were recorded, and then buried in Piskarevsky and other cemeteries, in specially designated places. Later, in the places of such burials, military memorials were created, to which we come to pay tribute to the dead and dead in these terrible years. Yes, there were single and group burials in many areas of the city. Perhaps they were also produced in the former Porporovsky cemetery. But there should not be military burials in the Parforovsky cemetery ... 70 years have passed, the Lomonosovskaya metro station, the satellite cinema, was built in the Nevsky district - and no one was indignant or protested. And besides, think: how relatives, public organizations and authorities allowed such a fact of unconsciousness! What, until today, these heroic people have been forgotten, and their graves are abandoned?! ” From the report of the city department of utility services for work for the year of war from June 1941 to June 1942, the section “funeral work”, dated April 5, 1943, it follows that in the church building at the Kemychenskaya St., 4 (today Grandmoshkina St.) during the blockade of Leningrad, the district morgue (Volodarsky) was located. The names of several buried there during the war. For example, Private Gusev Ivan Nikolaevich, 1906 - 06/13/1942.

The main argument of Valentina Leonenko in favor of future development is as follows: “There is no cultural center, sports clubs, infrastructure for organizing family and youth leisure and youth in the Nevsky district.”

At this place, letters of a respected blockade must stop in more detail. The fact is that the “solution of the issue” on the development of infrastructure on the site of the former cemetery is the construction of a 12-storey shopping and entertainment complex here. Which is intended to lead the Konrad group of companies, led by Vagif Mamishev.

To Mr. Mamishev Valentina Leonenko is experiencing special confidence. And there is logic in this: it is Vagif Mamishev that finances the production and installation of the monument to children of the war, which was initiated by the International Association of Blocades, it also acted as the customer of the monument. And Valentina Leonenko was part of the jury of the city competition for the best project of the monument (“New” wrote in detail about this story in No. 6 - “Memory for Copper Money”).

The press service of Mr. Mamishev to the request of the “Novaya” sent a response in which she reported that Vagif Mamishev took over all the costs of making and installing the monument. That the city leadership turned to him for help, he responded. For him, this is a great honor. ” And it recalls that Vagif Mamishev is also an assistant to Governor Georgy Poltavchenko on national issues.

The story with the manufacture and installation of the monument to children of war has been drawn since 2009 - mainly because the then leadership of the city did not allocate funds for the monument. Giving blockades to collect the necessary money themselves.

And this, even according to the most modest estimates, is more than a dozen million rubles. Recall that in St. Petersburg there are already three monuments to children of the blockade-a monument to the heroes-pioneers in the Tauride Garden, a flower of life and a monument in an apple garden on a cash street in 2010. But even if you leave the issue of the need to install this monument by brackets, you can understand the gratitude of the gratitude to the most wealthy and very elderly people. It is very pleasant when a generous and rich businessman provides assistance to old blockers, even in the form of another monument. In gratitude, Valentina Leonenko even awarded Georgy Poltavchenko and Vagif Mamishev with signs of honorary members of the International Association of Blocades' Organizations.

And this is also quite understandable.

Another thing is incomprehensible: why high -ranking officials and businessmen close to them did not have any nobility or a sense of tact to understand that in such a situation the protection of the dubious project of construction on the bones that they accepted from the old man’s benefits, it looks like a frank manipulation against old, not the most healthy and helpless people.