Electric chair for Tkachev

This call was the culmination of a rally of Kuban farmers left without land.

On August 21, a protest meeting of farmers from several districts of the Krasnodar Territory and representatives of other regions was held at a private farmstead in the village of Kazanskaya (Caucasus region).

They declared the ineffectiveness of the working group created on the initiative of Putin’s ONF and the Kuban Ministry of Agriculture to resolve land disputes. Farmers continue to insist that the two largest agricultural holdings in the region - CJSC Agrocomplex named after N.I. Tkachev, affiliated with the family of the former governor and current federal minister, and the Kuban agricultural holding, part of the group of companies of the oligarch Oleg Deripaska, raiderly took away land shares from thousands of former collective farmers, ruining small and medium-sized farms.

Unlike the rally that took place at the same farmstead of farmer Oleg Petrov in May, this time the area was not cordoned off by police.

Everyone, and farmers from not only Dinsky, Pavlovsky, Novopokrovsky, Uspensky, Kushchevsky, Leningradsky and other districts of the Krasnodar Territory, but also the Rostov and Volgograd regions, who opposed the “Platon” system of the Association of Carriers of Russia, came to the protest action, could freely speak out.

The special services, trying to appear inconspicuous, were present only in the person of three plainclothes officers from the Caucasus regional departments of the Ministry of Internal Affairs and the FSB.

Opening the rally, the presenters read out an appeal to Vladimir Putin and the Presidential Council for Human Rights, in which they listed numerous violations with land shares. Here are specific examples:

“SPK Kavkaz captured the Razgulay agricultural holding, then moved to the Vyselkovsky agricultural complex. At this time, all livestock farming has been liquidated, 400 people are left without work... SEC “Shkurinskoye” (Kushchevsky district) - after the director of the farm was accused for far-fetched reasons, 10 thousand hectares of land became the property of the Tkachev family. Pavlovsky district - entrepreneur Koval A.A., despite the installation of a cafe by the river, Tkachev took ownership of the entire coastal strip."

The appeal signed by the rally participants addressed to the head of state also states: this April, when after the announced first “tractor march” the ONF promised to get involved in a real solution to the problems of farmers, the independent working group received more than 180 appeals from citizens regarding similar violations. “These appeals have also not been given a legal assessment, since persons... connected by friendly ties with the Minister of Agriculture are involved in the seizure of land,” the document says.

One of the speakers even proposed transferring ex-governor Alexander Tkachev from the ministerial chair to the “electric chair.” Despite the invitation from government officials, none of them came to the meeting. But journalists - the German channel ARD, the Russian Dozhd and NTV - became interested in the protest action.

Why the rally was filmed by Kuban 24 - after all, the truth has not been shown on the TV channel controlled by the regional administration for a long time - remains a mystery.

This was talked about by many speakers who initially trusted the promises of the ONF and the candidate personally nominated by United Russia for the State Duma elections, Natalya Kostenko: Putin’s ONF only fooled people’s heads, the problems are not really being solved.

At the end of the rally, more than 20 tractors, provided by farms in different regions of Kuban, were supposed to go on a “march to Moscow,” but literally a couple of kilometers away they were waiting for traffic police patrols, who had received clear instructions from the regional administration to prevent tractors from leaving the village of Kazanskaya.

One of the protesters, Vasily Melnichenko, reported on his Facebook page that the column of farmers had already been stopped 7 times.

“Each time they took a long time to rewrite the participants’ data, hinting in every possible way that it was better for them to go back. A Range Rover was also spotted nearby, driven by Vice-Governor Korobka and possibly instructing traffic police officers. The border with the Rostov region is about 60 km away, farmers understand that the local authorities will make more than one attempt to prevent them from leaving one of the most corrupt regions of Russia - the Krasnodar Territory,” writes Melnichenko.

Read also: