“The people from Olympstroy laughed, and the excavator operator felt sorry for us.”

In Adler on August 19, bailiffs destroyed the house of Sergei Khlystov. Its site in the Imereti Lowland is located in the center of Olympic construction. Khlystov’s daughter Tatyana Samokhval told PublicPost how a house on Khadyzhenskaya Street, in which five adults and two small children lived, was demolished.

“I remember very well how we sat on the grass in the center of Sochi at night and waited for the results. Then there was still a concert in the city. They announced the decision - at first there was a shock. We couldn’t believe it. We drove back through the fields and realized that soon it would all be built up that the road to the sea would be closed. But then I could not imagine that the Olympics would turn into a war for us.

The youngest child will soon be 4 years old. She saw a lot of how houses were demolished in our village and how people moved out. She was very afraid. Yesterday she covered her ears and asked my mother: “Grandma, do something so that the house is not broken. Grandma, I don’t want our house to be broken.”

Me, my husband, brother and parents spent the night in the house; I only took the children to the city. The house has not been completely demolished; half of it is still standing. All communications have been cut off. Now we are trying to connect at least to water. We will live in the field and fight our government. We did not think that the house would be demolished with such a fight; we thought that everything would be resolved in our favor. Because the law is on our side.

When the house was demolished, Olimpstroy employees stood aside and smiled. It's funny to them, they get bonuses for it. They have millions burning, they need to build. Mom took a stone and ran up to the tractor and began shouting: “Stop what you’re doing!” When the bailiff who supervised the demolition saw the tears of our children, he stopped the whole action. He said: “That’s it, I won’t come here again. I promise you.” And he apologized for a very long time. The next day, his superiors called him and asked him why he didn’t completely break down the house. My dad still can’t come to his senses, he ended up in the hospital. He doesn't understand what's happening in our country. My parents invested their health in this house, they counted every penny, we walked around like ragamuffins. We want justice.

The land and house belong to my father, Sergei Nikolaevich Khlystov. My dad and my grandmother worked on a state farm. Before the Olympics, there were fields here where fruits and vegetables were grown. There was a barracks - a hostel - near the railway. The state farm gave my grandmother a room - 18 square meters. Everyone lived there. In 1994, by decree of the city of Adler, my father was allocated a plot of land for this hostel. The land was given out not for individual housing construction, but for gardening. But then the purpose of the land changed in the cadastre, but the decree remained “vegetable garden”.

My dad has been standing in line since the 60s for an apartment, for land. It was unbearable for a married man with children to live in such conditions in a barracks. And in 1996 he built a house on his plot. In 1998, we received a technical passport, documentation from 2000, signed by the chief architect, and that’s it. But we still couldn’t decorate the house. The problem is this discrepancy between the intended purposes of the land according to the documents; they didn’t know what to do with us.

Then the Olympics came to us. We thought they would help us. People from the Olympic department came and said that we were eligible for resettlement and that they would help us with the documents. We agreed to the relocation. This was in 2010. After some time, they called us from Olympstroy and asked: “Well, have you completed the documents?” - “You promised to complete the registration for us” - “No, we didn’t say that.” We started trying ourselves. We didn’t succeed, and officials also started saying that this was an Olympic zone.

In October 2011, bailiffs brought us a court decision in absentia - an unauthorized construction, subject to demolition. We filed for cassation, then we filed for supervision, then to the Supreme Court. No changes. They went so far as to send a complaint to Strasbourg.

In exchange for the house - 180 square meters including the attic and 14.6 acres of land - we are entitled to a one-room apartment. They gave it to us not even for the land, but for that room in the wooden barracks. Barak fell under the exemption for Olympic purposes. And everyone who was registered in it received one-room apartments. Naturally, people, having lived in such conditions, were happy and moved into apartments, abandoning their plots. Each family had land of 14 acres. Of those six families from the barracks, only we are fighting, because we have a house here. They provided apartments, but no compensation for land plots. The officials look at us and laugh: “Well, you got a one-room apartment in the barracks, so you live there.” But we are not starlings!

By decree of Mayor Anatoly Pakhomov, a new cadastre was imposed on our site, in addition to ours. And then they split it into two cadastres. Part was given to Olympstroy for construction, and part to the municipality. At the same time, they forget about our cadastre, which we have in our hands. This is a scam. That is, our plot was divided into two halves, which, according to the new cadastre, do not belong to us. They pretend that we are not there and that we have never lived there. The prosecutor's office later established a violation of the law and sent a letter to Pakhomov. I have all the documents on hand. My case has now been sent to the Prosecutor General’s Office to sort out these cadastres.

I don’t know what they want to build on our land. A large hotel has been built nearby, maybe they want to build a parking lot for it. But we will stand like a wall until our issue is resolved. We understood that we would leave here, but we wanted to receive equivalent housing and compensation for the plot. If the Olympics had not come, we would still be living on our land in our house, growing fruits and vegetables."