House Zero

Millions of Russians live in dormitories without hope of their own corner

Hundreds of thousands of Muscovites live in dormitories. They gave the capital their youth, health and strength. What did you get in return? Millions of Russians still find shelter in hostels. And given the current state of affairs, they have practically no chance of owning an apartment.

To Moscow! To Moscow!

Rimma Karinskova came to the capital from the Tver region more than 20 years ago. When I was still a girl, I came across an advertisement in the newspaper: “Women wanted.” And she arrived. She trained as a weaver in Moscow and got a job at a special ribbon factory on Paveletskaya. They produced galloons for military uniforms and lines for parachutes here.

Labor was very much needed at that time. Sometimes a girl needed to go to the village to visit her relatives. And the master tells her: “Work for three days first. Or find a replacement."

So the village girls worked from dawn to dusk. When necessary, we went out on “black” free Saturdays. They carried heavy spools of thread 20 times a shift. The salary came from production, so they didn’t feel sorry for themselves. So Rimma earned a disability at the factory - over time, her spine gave out.

But there was something to try for. When she left her native village, there were no kindergartens, no clubs, no roads in the Tver region. And in Moscow at that time there was a living conveyor belt. When a person came to work in production, he was given a bed in a dormitory. Three months later, a temporary registration was issued for two years. Then two more. After five years of conscientious work, they were permanently registered in the capital. And if by that time you had started a family and children, you were given the key to your dorm room. Ten years later it was possible to qualify for a “communal apartment” (each enterprise had its own housing stock). And after 20 years of continuous service, factory families were resettled in separate housing.

This is how the system operated, interested in a continuous influx of workers. Thanks to these hands, Moscow was built and flourished. Its roads were repaired, bread was baked, newspapers, fabrics, and equipment were made.

But at the end of the 80s of the last century the system collapsed. Hundreds of enterprises across Moscow have collapsed, were corporatized, or exist only on paper. The housing stock of research institutes, factories, factories was given over to the ownership of the city or sold into private hands. But the fate of the hostels and their inhabitants turned out to be much sadder.

Without the right to an apartment

The law does not allow the privatization of hostels. They needed to be transferred to municipal ownership and “ordered.” That is, to officially equate these areas with the other housing stock of the city. In this case, a social rental agreement is concluded with the tenant. And the person becomes the owner of those meters on which he lived half his life. He can privatize them for free, sell them, and pass them on to his children. He gets his license. But the main thing is that he receives a guarantee that he will not be thrown out onto the street.

In fact, hostels - and, according to unofficial statistics, millions of Russians live in them - were privatized contrary to the law. They became the private property of former owners of enterprises or people completely distant from them. Moreover, often in transactions of this kind there is a note: “Building without encumbrance.” But the thing is that all the sold hostels are “burdened” with people. Everyone has children and even grandchildren. Everyone has a very difficult fate. And they are all now someone’s “private property.”

...So the owners of the capital's special tape factory in 1992 privatized two of their hostels on Kozhevnichesky Lane. One is not so bad. It is adjacent to the factory entrance. Of course, the security guys go to the toilets and use the shower, which is inconvenient. But the building has an address and is visible. An ambulance or (not even an hour) firefighters can arrive there. And the second hostel, where Rimma Karinskova lives, is located inside, behind the fence of the former factory (now it is a business center, and there is nothing there except offices). Women tried to register their husbands. And they are told: your house is not on the list of city addresses. It doesn’t exist in nature - and that’s all!

19th century dormitory

In fact, there is a house at 6 Kozhevnichesky Lane. And it has existed there since 1885. Perhaps this is the oldest hostel in Moscow. And that’s why it’s interesting. The press and authorities do not favor him with attention. It's a shame, there's a lot to see here.

One shower on two floors - a concrete floor with fungus, all the children bathe here. Rotten pipes, washbasins where women wash in rubber boots (water up to their knees). And kitchens where people go to cook only in turns. You can't do it together - the building could collapse. Its outer wall has been wanting to fall out for a long time. For this reason, one of the rooms is considered non-residential. From it you can see the street. There are cracks running through the rest of the rooms.

There has never been a telephone in the building. When a doctor is called to your home, they go out to meet him almost to the Paveletsky station, otherwise he will get lost. Children play on the asphalt patch in front of the dormitory, next to the trash cans. There is no other place - all around are factory fences and CCTV cameras. The husbands of former weavers are not registered; they are like homeless people. Yes, most don’t have husbands. As they say, we left the race, unable to withstand the difficulties. Almost all 16 families who while away their lives in this “emergency situation” are single mothers. And they live in these ruins, whitewash them, paint them. Seal up the cracks in the walls. They are masked with rugs and icons. Because this is their only place in the sun

What is a bath?

Rimma Karinskova was laid off long ago. Now she is a watchman at a former factory. The salary is tiny. Rimma is already a grandmother. The family of the former village girl now has six people: her mother (great-grandmother), two daughters, son-in-law and little granddaughter Dasha. Everyone has two rooms on different floors. One is very tiny, the other is 20 squares. “Now,” says Rimma, “soon the youngest daughter will be 18, today or tomorrow she will bring a second son-in-law. I can’t imagine how we’ll be accommodated.”

Now Rimma would be glad to return to her native village. Moreover, roads and kindergartens have been built in the Tver region. But there is still no work to be found there.

“To me,” echoes Rimma’s hostel friend Nadya Pantyushina, “my mother says: “Daughter, don’t tell anyone how you live in Moscow. Because we have chickens - and they live better.”

“Believe me,” Nadya admits, “neither I nor my children have seen a bath in their entire lives! There wasn’t one in the village. But here, in Moscow, you can’t go to strangers to wash. I don’t let my son visit friends birthdays, I say: “Where will you invite them?” After all, you know what kids are like now. They’ll come and see how you’re living, and no one will be friends with you. So he’s sitting alone on his birthday, I’m sleeping with my son, my daughter is above us, and my husband is in the next room. trestle beds. One needs to go - we all get up. Otherwise, we won’t turn around. My daughter is changing, we ask our son - go out into the corridor, close your eyes.”

Nadezhda Pantyushina is one of the few women in the hostel who has a complete family. 24 years ago, she came from Ukraine to work at a special tape factory. And her husband Eduard is from the Moscow region, from the village of Serebryanye Prudy. All he had left in his homeland was a ruined house. Nadya has a 74-year-old mother, whom she cannot help in any way. Two children need to be raised and taught. The son is a schoolboy, the daughter entered law school. Now you have to pay for everything. Here is a former weaver who works part-time as a cleaner in a nearby office. The husband is also trying his best to get a penny. And she also fights for the rights of all women in the hostel. This fight has been going on for ten years now.

...The last apartments from the state at the special tape factory were received in 1987. Since then there has been silence. Only in 2000, the authorities of the Danilovsky district of the Southern District offered families 14 thousand dollars for an apartment in a house under construction in Domodedovo near Moscow. But the factory management did not pay the people the missing amount. Where can single mothers get funds for a mortgage or loan? In general, only three families built apartments for themselves at that time. The rest were stuck tightly in the hostel.

“I think the former management of the factory is just waiting for our shack to collapse and bury everyone under the rubble.” Relatives will be paid 100 thousand rubles. And those who don’t have them don’t need to pay, says Nadya Pantyushina. She is already tired of fighting with the authorities and when she begins to speak, she cries.

Fight and search, find and not give up

Irina Bergalieva, perhaps, would also have meekly awaited her fate, if not for chance. Her daughter Yulia was returning home from school to the dormitory on Yasny Proezd, 19. During the shift, the guards ordered to show a pass from the Ministry of Justice (a year before, the dormitory of the former Smena garment factory was handed over as “empty” to the prison department - the Main Directorate of Execution of Punishments, now the Federal Penitentiary Service of the Ministry of Justice of the Russian Federation). The girl said that she was not going to the ministry, but to her home. But the guard grabbed her hand and pushed her away from the door. So Irina Bergalieva took the path of struggle.

For a year and a half she has been heading the Dormitory Movement of Moscow and the Moscow Region “DOM”. More than a hundred dorms in the capital keep in touch with each other and act together. As soon as a rumor spreads: “A person is being evicted!”, forces are concentrated at the desired address, and a living wall is formed. Rallies, pickets, attracting the attention of the media, deputies, authorities - here they realized that they cannot sit idly by. It will only get worse.

“We need to fight, but competently, legally,” Irina is convinced.

According to her, the situation with hostels has become much more complicated after the adoption of the new Housing Code. The fact is that the new document does not mention such a category as “dormitory residents” at all. It’s as if such people don’t exist at all. When the authors of the law were asked why this happened, they replied that they sincerely believed that hostels no longer exist in our country (at least in the capital). They thought that all the hostels had long been settled and “ordered.”

Rooming houses and apartment buildings

Meanwhile, let us repeat, in Moscow alone, more than a million people were left virtually outside the legal framework thanks to the new Housing Code. And they felt the metamorphosis for the worse very soon. There is no protection, oppression has begun. The hostel owners didn’t try to poison the residents with dust. Let's say, at the entrance to the hostel on Bulatnikovskaya Street, building. 3, bldg. 4, the Krasnokholmsky worsted factory made such a prison vestibule. A man opens an iron door and finds himself, as if in a trap, in front of another iron door. Until he presents the necessary documents (and they can be changed without warning), he will stand there like a condemned man. And people stood.

Or they force residents to come to the hostel strictly before 11 p.m. Relatives are not registered - not only husbands and wives, but also children who, having been born in Moscow, are legally Muscovites. And they cannot get passports. They do not provide a certificate on the basis of which the child can be placed in kindergarten or school. Or they inflate housing fees exorbitantly (for a one-room dormitory on Zhigulevskaya Street, 16 square meters, they once asked 12 thousand rubles).

“The rent can be raised several times a year,” confirms former ZIL employee Viktor Tkachenko (he pays 4 thousand rubles for his 23 sq.m. on Dnepropetrovskaya Street). - And they themselves have huge debts to city utilities. Current accounts are also constantly changing. If you send it to the old address, the money will fly somewhere. But you will still end up in debt.

The goal of all these manipulations is to win as much space as possible in the dormitories. Turn them into apartment buildings, rooming houses (at the prices in the capital, a good business!). Advertisements “dormitory rooms for rent for any period of time” will not surprise anyone for a long time. A bed in such “apartments” costs up to $140 per day. In addition, for a place in a hostel, the owners of enterprises actually save money on guest workers. You give them a roof over their heads, and for pennies they will do whatever they are told to do.

Outlaw

“The capital is in no hurry to take over hostels,” says “DOM” coordinator Mikhail Doronenko. - This is a neglected fund. It requires serious investments and major repairs. In general, additional troubles. However, this summer Mayor Yuri Luzhkov confirmed that there will be no hostels in the capital. And their residents will begin to be issued warrants. But for now the situation in Moscow is developing like this: in order to prepare the dormitories for transfer to the city, intermediate structures - state unitary enterprises - have been brought in. The largest one, State Unitary Enterprise Zhilishchnik-1, has several dozen residential buildings on its balance sheet.

Officially, this institution is called upon to carry out major repairs, install a meter in each apartment - in a word, to carry out the necessary preparatory work. In fact, Zhilishchnik-1 has unlimited rights to manipulate residents. Maybe a family that has lived in an apartment for a long time can be “densified” to a bed space (6 sq.m.). Or move them to a corridor-type dormitory, for example, to a former kitchen. Although people with permanent registration do not have the right to apply such measures (their social norm is 18 sq.m.).

Maybe make three out of four dormitories, pack more people into them, and supposedly begin renovations in the empty premises. One of the hostels at Yaroslavskoye Highway, 114, bldg. 1, thus they have been “preparing” for transfer to the municipality for the eleventh year.

This endless struggle takes away people’s nerves, time, and strength. “We exist, but it’s as if we don’t exist,” say the residents. “We are dead souls.”

“When limiters were needed,” says Irina Bergalieva, “Moscow squeezed all the juice out of them.” And then, at the age of 40-45, she threw us into the trash heap as unnecessary. But we are talking about citizens who raise children, pay taxes, go to elections...

Many give up and live according to the principle “The day is lived - and thank God!” Others, out of fear or ignorance, submit to the most absurd demands of the commandant. It gets to the point that the residents themselves leave them the keys to their rooms. And they can do whatever they want in their absence. In the end, if it comes to mind, throw their things out onto the street. And such cases have happened more than once before. Now, with the growing activity of the “HOME” movement, such cases occur less frequently.

Resistance movement

As the hostel residents realize that they have nothing to lose, resistance grows. Sometimes it ends tragically, as happened in St. Petersburg, where the leader of the initiative group, electrical engineer of the regional sanitary and epidemiological station, Alexander Troshin, was killed - he fought for the rights of his family and neighbors in misfortune. But there are also reasons for cautious optimism. Several times the capital’s “HOUSE” managed to defend people whom hostel owners wanted to turn into homeless people.

In the town of Elektrostal near Moscow, a whole cluster of hostels is already preparing for privatization. The hostel at Yasny Proezd, 19 also won the preliminary battle. A year and a half ago, their new owners (UFSIN) began clearing out the building for their future employees (the same limits, if you look at it, attracted from the regions). We started with refugees whom the Moscow authorities gave shelter to more than ten years ago. And then they threatened to attack the rest. Today the moloch of this machine has been stopped. But final victory is still far away.

Nevertheless, the army of hostel residents increasingly understands: there is strength only in unity. Thanks to this, representatives from more than 20 regions across the country have united.

“I am sure that indifference to our situation, which is legally enshrined in the new Housing Code, is the official position of the state,” says Irina Bergalieva. - First, they will work out the tactics of taking away real estate in the hostels. And then they will spread to the regular residential sector. According to this logic, rent arrears, low-income people and simply socially vulnerable people may well become homeless with the blessing of the law. Therefore, you need to learn to know your rights and be able to protect them right now. To everyone and together.

Anna MIRGORODSKAYA