Burned

The Germans once burned the village of Lopets. A year ago she was burned by a local resident. But no compensation is supposed to the owners

Lopets - small, only 14 houses, the village of the Volosovsky district of the Leningrad region. Everyone who live here has known each other for many years. Twenty -eight years, to be precise. Plots of land here were bought by people who worked on an atom -road. Then it was almost a wasteland: an abandoned village, which the Germans once burned for a long time.

I walk around the village, and charred stoves stick out through the foliage of trees. The village was burned this year again. Of the fourteen houses, three survived.

May there be light

Natalya Osipova and his sister Tatyana from the very beginning bought plots side by side, were built slowly. “All these years there was neither water nor light. Well, what, all the stoves, somehow they lived,-Natalya Osipova has been working with her husband at the Institute of Nuclear Physics for many years. Children, grandchildren, business trips to America, but for the weekend is always here, to Lopets. - Our house on the hill, visible from the hill far, beautiful place, forest, mushrooms, quietly so. This is not gardening, where everyone is buried in each other. We go here and go from the city to breathe. There are no strangers here. ”

Rather, it was not.

“Four years ago, we decided to ensure that we would conduct electricity. Anna Mikhailovna, our village old man, went to Lenenergo, agreed. It turned out so that the pillars were picked up and the wires were extended, 50 thousand from each. We threw ourselves. And then Oleg appeared in the village already. With his wife. His wife bought this old site. There they had such a house ... tears, not a house. Stone hut, earthen floor, near the water itself, snakes crawled to them. They never paid for electricity. ”

And very soon, after that, all the houses to which electricity was held flashed.

May there be darkness

Fifth April, lights. Although the weekend, there is almost no one in the village, still summer houses. In total, five remained: two old people who no longer go to the city, and two men came to take a steamer in the bath. And Oleg.

Early in the morning, they woke up the frantic barking of dogs. And the smell of Gary. Therefore, they remained alive.

By six in the morning, eleven buildings out of fourteen were burned to the ground, along with sheds and baths. Wooden houses - to the base. Those that were sheathed with plastic were burned out from the inside-because of the set-on rags and a canister with gasoline thrown into the broken windows. Some families were lucky - their houses stood on stilts, and a fire diluted under them went out of the wind.

Who burned? Who doused with gasoline?

The court of first instance answered this so.

Firefire car on the village of Village Photo: Valery Zaitsev for TD

"Gerasimov O.Yu. He went to the house where the flammable liquids brought with him - gasoline and synthetic oil - poured onto the walls of the house, and also, breaking the windows of the windows of the house, poured into the premises of the house, after which, using the source of the fire of an unidentified nature, he took arson of this house. " And so with all eleven houses.

Then he arrived at the narrowest place along the road in the village, waited for firemen cars and began to ram it with his “Volga”. The jumped firefighters sprayed into the eyes of a gas spray, but for now they tried to recover - he cut a thick Christmas tree (he brought him with him a yellow generator), blocking the road with it so that they had no chance to get to the burning village. And then he threw his car broken and went with a gun into the forest.

After a couple of hours, Oleg had already laid out letters in a neighboring village of a conversation that a gang of killers settled in the shirt: “Local, who from the nineties and previously provide them with their dwellings. When the troubles begin, the bandits will beat the population abandoned by the authorities. They have headquarters in the village. ” In the late evening of the same day, he surrendered in the St. Petersburg police department at the Gostiny Dvor. Said: burned everything. Like, he came to give up because he realized his guilt before God.

For more than a year, Oleg Gerasimov has been sitting in a psychiatric hospital. The court recognized him insane.

And where will we go

The village reacts differently.

Someone did not reconcile, goes to court, writes letters to the prosecutor's office. Someone waved his hand. Someone is rebuilt again. Someone left everything and left-to hell with ash. Someone sighs: expensive. We do not have such millions. Someone got into loans and bought what was enough for-a trailer.

“I was lying in the hospital then,” recalls Natalya Osipova. - As they told me ... Oh. I did not know at all how I would survive it. And now it’s scary to build everything again. And of course, no one compensated us for money. And what - according to the documents this is the village of a summer cottage, what payments to us? Yes, no! In court he is insane, bribes are smooth from him. And from the region ... they do not care about us, no one goes. One once came in response to my letters to the administration, asked where is the Osipova pensioner? I thought the grandmother would now go out in a handkerchief. Well, I went out. I just arrived from work again, I was painted. I was surprised. But the sense of this arrival ... themselves, themselves, all themselves. "

Natalya Aleksandrovna Osipova photo: Valery Zaitsev for TD

The official answer is this: “All houses were in private ownership of citizens who have a residence permit in St. Petersburg, registered as those who need residential premises, are not possible, the allocation of the subsidy is not possible.”

Her sister, Tatyana Osipova, is from those who invested in the carriage. It is necessary to live somewhere. We are walking next to her, and she shows: "And here was my house." The site is beautiful. Flowers, well -groomed trees. Only the house seems to be cut out by a black contour from the ground. As if the frame from the photo remained. “I will not leave here. But to rebuild ... I do not master. The husband died for five years, the house was his hands. I am sixty already ... "

Anna Ivanovna, the elder, remained only a bathhouse. And the swans, burned swans at the gate, still a pre -fire decoration. I look at the photo in the album. Only they survived.

“We had beauty in our house. Portrait of Yesenin Treskina, Leningradsky such an artist. In Lomonosov, he painted the ceiling in the museum. My husband was friends with him, and now, a gift, a picture. A large collection of ancient samovars. On our second floor, count, a small museum was: a weaving machine, a gramophone, all kinds of ironing ... And the sorry for me my mother’s work, all its handmade products: embroidered towels, tablecloths, paths woven on a hand machine ... downwear. We thought we would live here in retirement. ”

Valentina Aleksandrovna and her restored house photo: Valery Zaitsev for TD

I walk around the village and knock on the houses. Another house is not a house, so, a trailer next to the burned remnants. The kid is running, mom looks at. The grandmother of the family, Valentina Alexandrovna, says: “He was some kind of strange. No matter how you say hello to him - he is all about sins. What to lure. That the end of the world is not far off, that we all burn in hell. ”

She tells how they lived after the fire, dropping something between the wintering between the winter, and I ask asking, not believing: “So what are you, and did you live here all winter?” He waves his hand: “And where we will go. You can’t drag them into the car, they are afraid. Do not quit. ” They are dogs and cats. The remaining. Many are gone. Eleven corpses were found, but the rest are not. The skinny dog ​​runs after me all over the village, on the red side - a trace from the chain fusion in the wool and skin. They torn off after a fire with meat.

And the other Pogorelets, Viktor Ivanovich Serov, was from tin. “Winter, it’s cold. We called him all to ourselves - well, what, you think, in crowded, but warmly ... I didn’t go, ”says Valentina Aleksandrovna’s neighbor. - It was proud. And he had nowhere to return to the city. Well ... pneumonia. We drove him to the hospital. We buried. And he passed the blockade, he was peppy, last year he went for mushrooms, he led the farm. ”

Temporary of the deceased from inflammation of the lungs of Viktor Ivanovich. His house burned down, and he winted in her photo: Valery Zaitsev for TD

I go around the village, knock on the houses and try to imagine how a man walked, preached about the end of the world, collected cans of gasoline in his car. I can't imagine.

I knock on the next house. Guys drink vodka. They meet me with warily. They say vied. “Sit down, sit down. Will you be a cake? On here. Journalist, you say? Do not drive. Are you from lawyers? And who needs it, except for them. We are here on our own. No one needs. Yes, write what you want. What insurance, do not mix me. Well, I got, yes, insurance, I had insurance. There was enough to get the floor barely, and that’s all. And I rebuild the house from scratch. ”

Come tomorrow

Those who did not surrender and continued to fight for justice - went to the Volosovsky court from last fall, as to work.

“The court was still fooling us like,” says Natalya Osipova. - That agenda will come with a false address: a meeting in St. Petersburg, and it is said that in Volosov, and the people from St. Petersburg went to the region just like that. Then they will send her back to the way, so as not to get out of work already. At the first meeting, the secretary even persuaded us not to come: yes write a statement so that in your absence they are considered, in court it is closely, to go for a long time, what should you do there. Well, we believed, wrote, one Anya, the headman, went from us. As she told us what was happening there - then we went too. The prosecutor was first given - a young boy, the court began, and he is sitting, reading the case, and the judge tells him: “They could read yesterday!” But then I called the prosecutor's office, yes. Where, I say, I will complain? The prosecutor eventually changed us. Send by drinking. "

Fire injured from the fire photo: Valery Zaitsev for TD

Oleg's first commission recognized a little fool, says Natalya, the second considered him more crazy, and the third decided that he was dangerous for herself and for others. From the first meeting, he sits in St. Petersburg in the city psychiatric hospital named after Skvortsov-Stepanov.

They prayed badly

Not far from the village of Lopets, in Yablonev, right by the road stands the Church of the Resurrection of Christ. Small, old, beautiful. Chickens go along the peeling porch. Oleg Gerasimov went here to take communion and confess a year and a half.

The door is closed, but the priest is in a hurry to us across the road, from his house. Hens parted. Father John does not refuse the conversation: “We, with Oleg, did not communicate closely, but he very often communed, went to the temple, ordered the memorial services. To help where to help, to remove in the temple - this is not, it was not like that from it. He was strange, yes. I really wanted everything to be right, by the letter. The Lord taught that love is higher than the law, about which Jesus argued with the Pharisees, about this. And Oleg yes, it was like that. So that according to the rules. If the service is reduced, if anyone who has not read it, he treated it painfully. He made comments to parishioners that they were dressed wrong ... "

The affected area of ​​the arsonist photo: Valery Zaitsev for TD

“And he prayed simultaneously with me,” Anna Mikhailovna suddenly recalls. - He prayed, stood on his knees. And he took kerosene, doused and set fire to fourteen houses. ”

“He prayed incorrectly,” says Father John. “But this does not mean that the church is to blame.” This disease is spiritual with him. Disease. But I am not anything to the fact that nothing happens without God. And if he allowed the sorrow of this, then it is necessary to understand-it means that something was wrong in life. Something is objectionable. “And for the sake of five righteous I will not destroy Sodom,” remember? ”

There was nothing

The wife of the accused Elena also wrote a statement about the damage. Anna Mikhailovna says: “I met her in court with a lawyer. You, I say, do not want to apologize to us? And for what, she tells me. I have suffered just like you. ” Their Halupa with the earthen floor was also set on fire. "

The court of first instance admitted that the arson was and made it Gerasimov, but from liability to be released and directed to compulsory treatment. The lawyer does not agree. “All accusations made by Oleg Gerasimov follow from rumors and hostility,” he wrote in his appeal. They did not see arson in the village, recognition in the police is a self -negotiation. The guilty, they say, Oleg only in the fact that he had a fire engine. Well, maybe he was worried from the fire.

Fire affected at home photo: Valery Zaitsev for TD

A compulsory measure of a medical nature in court cannot be limited by a term. Every six months, doctors should conduct an examination, and then ... That's what the villagers are afraid most of all: “Now they recognized him as insane in court, and then? Well, he will sit in this hospital, and then the same doctor will write a “healthy” piece of paper and release it, and he will return, and again he will burn everything. He will finish the begun. We simply will not survive this, ”says Valentina Aleksandrovna.

They try not to think about it in the village. What is the point, they say. And they grow a new crop.