Translated material
Jeanne d'Arc Khimkinsky Forest
Jeanne d'Arc from the Khimkinsky forest. Evgenia Chirikova will go down in history as a person who led the most loud environmental protest in the history of the new Russia. She became a symbol of civil society, as the Khimki forest became a symbol of protest of citizens against the authorities. As the authorities creates disagreements from law-abiding inhabitants and pushes them into a political opposition-the Deputy Prime Minister Sergei Ivanov watched The New Times at the end of 2010 about the decision of the interdepartmental government commission: the Moscow-St. Petersburg highway will pass through the Khimkinsky forest. Such a decision was made despite the fact that in August this year, President Medvedev suspended the construction of a motorway. The leader of the movement “In the Defense of the Khimkinsky Forest” Evgenia Chirikova waited for the president to say about this. And he was silent. Having appreciated this silence as the weakness and betrayal of the interests of citizens, Chirikova said that it was pointless to fight only for the ecology under the current system of power. We'll have to start a political struggle for a change of regime.
The habitat has thought the owner of three higher formations
* * Chirikova graduated from two faculties of the MAI - engineering and economic, as well as the Academy of the National Economy, the master of the degree of MBA., That she will have to move away from surveillance, to lie down under the police UAZ to force the law enforcement officers to stop football hooligans who attacked the ecological camp, meet the board of directors of the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, convincing the Europeans to abandon the money of money in the assignment of money in The ill-fated project of the Moscow-St. Petersburg high-speed highway, almost every week to perform at rallies? I didn't think.
“My husband and I were engaged in business, actively traveling abroad,” recalls Eugene. - We had an apartment in Moscow in the area of the Timiryazevsky Park by Voikovskaya. The most powerful development began there. And at some point I began to miss the forest. Then my husband and I moved to Khimki - to a small kopeck piece in Khrushchev. 12 years ago it was a unique place. ”
The attitude of Chirikova to the surrounding reality changed when once, walking with two daughters in the Khimki forest, she saw red marks on centuries -old oaks. On the Internet, she read that on April 28, 2006, the Governor of the Moscow Region Boris Gromov signed a decree according to which the high-speed paid highway Moscow-St. Petersburg should go through the Khimkinsky forest. And this means that the trees will be cut and the forest is destroyed.
It was then that Eugene decided to fight. For their habitat. She put on the city of announcements, notifying the residents of the destruction of the forest, reported by the Decree of Gromov and the relevant resolution of the mayor of Khimki Vladimir Strelchenko. Then Chirikova met with the editor -in -chief of Khimkinskaya Pravda Mikhail Beketov, who in each issue of the newspaper wrote about corruption in the city administration and passionately opposed the construction of the motorway.
The testing of the election on November 13, 2008, three weeks before the start of the election campaign (at Kon - the post of mayor of Khimki), Mikhail Beketov was brutally beaten by unknown in the courtyard of his own house. As a result, he remained disabled: despite several serious operations, he still can neither walk nor speak.
* December 10, 2010, the Khimkinsky court acquitted Mikhail Beketov. Earlier, according to the lawsuit of the mayor of Strelchenko, the journalist was found guilty of slander. Mayor Khimki Vladimir Strelchenko went for a second term. Evgenia Chirikova registered a candidate for mayor with an ecological program. “I went to the polls solely to change the route of the track,” says Evgenia. - I proposed a folk referendum on the cancellation of Strelchenko’s decision on the passage of the highway through our forest. Feeling a threat, he quickly abolished this decree himself. ”
The elections, of course, won Strelchenko, but Chirikova won the third place and acquired a lot of sympathetic.
After the defeat in Chirikov’s election , the business project began to rebuild the environmental movement. The organization is purely volunteer. She has neither her accountant, nor her bank account. But Eugene builds it as a kind of business project.
“In order for everything to work efficiently, you need to know exactly what is going on, who is responsible for what, how we plan to work,” says Chirikova. - Everything is very simple, you just need to understand who is interested in doing. No one can be offended: people work for free, they cannot be crushed, they are tired. We are one team, and there is no internal disagreement. Patience needs to be gained. We had such cases when people were tired and left, and then returned. ”
There are now about 300 people in the movement of the defenders of the Khimkinsky forest. The backbone of the team is thirty people. The full member of the team is Zhenya Mikhail Matveev's husband.
They met in the MAI. “I was a graduate student, and Zhenya was my pedagogical load,” Mikhail recalls with a laugh. He is seven years older than his wife. The spouses together created a small company Aesop LLC, which is engaged in engineering recommendations for power engineers.
* In July 2010, when Mikhail began to especially actively defend the Khimkinsky forest, in the bank serving their company, requests from the Moscow Civil Procedure and National Security and Enterprise of the Moscow Region and UBEP began to receive. The security forces explained that the owners of the company are suspected of extremism. Why the regional police department does not explain to the company registered in Moscow by law enforcement agencies of the Moscow Region. “People who support us are mainly middle -class representatives,” says Chirikova. - They know very well how many taxes are paid, they understand that the police exists at the expense of these taxes and it brutally disperses them. These people once said to themselves: how much can you! This is the destruction of our habitat. Guys, you pump oil, produce diamonds, you tear us out with privatization, but you have already come to take the air from us. Enough! The natural desire of a normal living creature to protect their habitat. Little people decided to defend their big rights. They chose a piece of land that they love and will protect until the last. ”
Eugene said that she did not expect that one day she would be accused of inciting a fire in the forest, which she guarded, dragged into a police funnel and she would sit for 14 hours in a stuffy chamber, where she would knock on the door, demanding that she transferred validol detained with her to her friend.
The politician involuntarily “I am not a revolutionary. But all this struggle enriched my life, gave her meaning, ”she says. - The experience that I received over the past three years gave me much more than three of my higher education and ten years of work in business. Even if we fail to change the route axis, we will do everything so that there are no more such road projects that pass through the forests in Russia. We will fight using the Aikido methods: we will turn everything against us in our favor. And our rulers will soon understand that with their actions they buried their image of federal politicians in the eyes of people. ”
About how the authorities create opponents for themselves, Anna Akhmatova once very accurately said, referring to the poet Joseph Brodsky: “What biography is made to our Red!” Since then, it seems that nothing has changed ... “I am now reading the“ Gulag Archipelago ”Solzhenitsyn and Shalamov’s“ Kolyma Stories ”,” Yevgeny Chirikova told The New Times. - Everything is repeated. I was not going to go into politics. These officials make me an opposition leader. And I just became a citizen very late. At thirty years old. "
Chronology of the struggle for the Khimki forest
Spring 2007.
Residents of Khimki learn about the resolution of Governor Gromov (dated April 28, 2006) about the construction of the road through the forest.June - November 2007.
A series of rallies in Khimki and Moscow.2008
November 13th.
In the Khimkinsky district near the village of Starbeevo on Beketov, an attack was made. Bottom line: closed head injury, multiple hematomas, fracture of the lower leg.December 18.
Mayor Khimki Vladimir Strelchenko canceled the order he signed on the cutting of the forest. But the plans for the construction of the road have not changed.2009
September 25th.
Yuri Trutnev, the head of the Ministry of Natural Resources, petitions for the Ministry of Transport and the Ministry of Agriculture about the transfer of the highway and the preservation of the forest.2010
March 1.
By a decision of the Supreme Court of the Russian Federation, 150 hectares of the Khimkinsky forest are transferred from the forest fund to the Fund of Transport. Ecologists will appeal the decision in Strasbourg.July 15.
Environmentalists organize round -the -clock duty to prevent deforestation.July 23.
The environmental camp is defeated.August 22.
On Pushkinskaya Square, a mass action takes place in defense of the Khimkinsky forest with the participation of Yuri Shevchuk.August 26.
President Medvedev issues an order to suspend all work on the construction of the Moscow-St. Petersburg motorway.December 14th.
The press secretary of President Medvedev told the media opinion that "the project of the Moscow-St. Petersburg highway reached the stage when it is almost impossible to stop him." The Minister of Transport Igor Levitin said that the section of the highway through the Khimkinsky forest will be completed by 2013.