"There are no gypsies anywhere, how they sunk into the water"

What happens in a suitcase after a mass fight of residents with gypsies. Report "Medusa"

On June 13, in the village of Scheudanovka near Penza, mass riots occurred. Up to 150 local residents participated in a fight, which began after representatives of the gypsy community were accused of attempt to rape. One person died, five more were hospitalized with stab wounds, one of them is in intensive care. The next evening, hundreds of suitcases went to the M5 Ural highway to attract the attention of the authorities to the situation. The Governor of the Penza Region Ivan Belozertsev came to the participants in the folk gathering. After evening events, 170 people were taken to the police, 15 were detained. The Medusa correspondent Ekaterina Drankina went to a suitcase to understand what happened there.

On Sunday morning, June 16, all ten kilometers of the Ural highway between Penza and the suitcase are tightly forced by the police, especially a lot of patrols next to the rural administration and on the road to the church where the funeral service is going on.

In the suitcase of the funeral. Buried 34-year-old Vladimir Grushin, a driver of a local transport company. He was killed on June 13 in the evening, during a fight, in which the gypsies and local residents participated - there were much more the first. Grushin, obviously, did not even fight, but simply stood at the fence, and he got it by chance. Just like the victim in the same fight Sergei Pugachev, who is now in intensive care.

Around the church is a dense crowd, 300-500 people. There are many men in the crowd, large and strong, in sweatpants and shirts, some in vests. The gypsy in the crowd is not visible.

“Are you here so as not to let the gypsies?” - I check with a young police officer who is sitting on the hood of one of the cars.

- But they are not here, do not be afraid! - the girl started. - We were looking for them all over the district, up to the Shemysheyki! There are no gypsies anywhere, how they sunk into the water.

- They will come. They promised, - the healthy man standing at a distance is unkindly. - On Friday, my wife went to the store, there the grandfather was gypsy. He says - wait, the column is traveling from Samara, from Astrakhan. We will cut you, kill.

- Why do you come up with, scare people, they will say again! - the woman pulls him nearby. - Where will they stick? There are how many police.

- They go through the fields, bypass! - the man objects convincingly. An approving rumble rises around: "They go along the fields ... with a column ... with axes, knives ..."

* * *

The suitcase is a large and relatively rich village, in fact, the suburb of Penza. Once there were valenks (in Penza there is a museum dedicated to the Samodanovsky Valenks), now many residents are working on a local poultry farm and a nearby chemical enterprise. There is work in the village, so the population grew from six thousand people according to the 2010 census to 13 thousand in 2019. Of these, about a thousand are gypsies (the village administration claims that there are 700 gypsies in the village, “but maybe more - they are many without registration”). Most gypsies live compactly in the administratively subordinate suitcase to the village of Lapel.

The village on the morning of June 16 was really empty. In the shoulder blades there are two streets - light, on which only gypsy families lived, and Pesochnaya, where they lived mixed. There are few people on the sand, but there is, on the bright - nobody, empty.

The closest to the Scheodanovsky Church is a group of border guards (in the form and with the flags of Brownvoysk). In these troops, Vladimir Grushin was serving military service, served in the North Caucasus, and participated in hostilities in Kabardino-Balkaria . Men calling their main one - a colonel, who is called Viktor Vasilich. The military man refuses to inform the surname.

- Here you say! Here, for example, the child - Viktor Vasilich begins menacingly. - And these nonhumans to the child ... sexually harass. Also minors. What, you will not stand up? We are told that this is a children's conflict, that the children quarreled. And how are these children when Vovka was killed! And if the second dies, God forbid ... He is generally a paratrooper, if the paratroopers come here ...

At the request to tell everything in order, one of the border guards, with a sigh, begins to retell clearly not the first time a story in which he personally did not participate, but knows exactly what was so.

- Two girls bathed, 13 years old, to the pond. These began to halve sexually. Also minors. Even, as they say, underwear ... Panties are something pulled away. A pregnant woman stood up for girls. And they tell her: we will cut into pieces and here we scatter! Is it normal? Gypsies do not work, they trade in drugs. I pay taxes for them, they receive a pension more than mine ...

Nobody knows the names of those girls and women in the crowd, although everyone has the same story.

“Well, then the parents of these girls, and a few more people ... went to the gypsies ...” says an elderly woman in a scarf when the procession begins to move from the church to the cemetery. - And they seemed to be ready! They immediately called ... And this began! Cars drove up: Gazelle alone and a bunch of cars. There were twenty -five people.

- Twenty - strictly corrects her man, who carefully listens, walking nearby. - There were twenty of ours. And there are more than a hundred of them, for sure. Almost two hundred.

- Yes, for sure! - the woman is recovering. - On the street where the church, they flew. Like a hurricane! Sticks, pieces of iron, chains of them! Cars, which were on the way, are circling everything. People beat. This, Sergei, he came to his mother, it is worth smoking near the entrance. And they broke a stick from the fence and how they ran into it! And this, Vovka, was also not far. Such a good guy, Vovka. I did not drink, did not smoke. Wife with a second child is pregnant. How are they now?

The procession occupies the entire width of the route. The cars drove off the highway to the side of the road and patiently waited, do not buzz. On the evening of June 13, after a fight, half a sequel was already going on the highway to block it. The police arrived, took 170 people from among the protesters. Then they announced that the guilty people were also arrested, but they did not believe in this in a suitcase.

- Who was praised? Ours and grabbed! - a large man in a vest boil. - And the gypsies in two hours already women, children in cars - and run. They say that three gypsies arrested and that they are guilty. And where are we confident in this? That is, you can kill us, they are planted for it! And these means do not touch. They have a pension, you know which one? Drugs ... I went to the ATM to remove my 30 thousand shitty. In front of me, gypsies: Trrrr, Trrrr, Trrrr - you will be tired of waiting for them to fly there. They sickered all the cash. I run through the village to the second ATM, until they cleaned up there.

The theme of high pensions and drugs, on which the gypsies allegedly earn their millions, arises in conversations every now and then.

“They have a tributary in the shoulder blades there,” Tatyana Medvedeva assures pensioner, while we are walking along the hot asphalt towards the cemetery. The orchestra, consisting of four elderly fellow villagers Medvedeva, is a different blowing off long minor sounds. - The friend died of a friend - in the shoulder blades, found in the ditch. From an overdose. She in her hearts, in grief, went there, shouts to them: “What are you doing, Herodes ...” They are on her with knives, axes. And the pension itself, you know what? And benefits for children. Everyone has five to ten, hundreds of thousands receive!

On June 14, the governor of the Penza region Ivan Belozertsev came to the suitcase. Again there was a big gathering, people chanted the “evict”. The governor made a question of agents from the United States and fake information, forbade to “sell alcohol to special orders” in the village, said that the Investigative Committee and the FSB will work in the suitcase, and his own police station will open.

Locals, however, are skeptical in relation to power.

- These? What are you! What can they? - exclaims Tatyana Medvedeva. -The head of the administration was alone-he fell asleep and left, the second-the same, went back right before the murder. The governor is in general. Arrived: Be, me - cannot tie two words. I would read which book. Illiterate! Shame.

* * *

“Since the 1990s, society has been set against gypsies since the 1990s,” says Nadezhda Demeter, president of the Federal National-Cultural Autonomy of Russian Gypsies, a professor from the Institute of Ethnology and Anthropology of the Russian Academy of Sciences. Nadezhda Demeter defended the diploma, candidate and doctoral work, of course, in gypsies. - The events in Tula were savored in details, illuminated incorrectly. Sobolev’s film “The Ben of the Gypsies” was very harmful. Traditional classes [gypsies living in the Penza region] - trade, plus artisans they. Metal products, fishing hooks made ...

The incident in the suitcase Nadezhda Demeter was very upset. For several days, instead of scientific reports, she was forced to explain that the gypsies were not killers and drug dealers, but "an ancient people, including about eighty groups, with their crafts and culture."

Demeter for a long time tried to find representatives of the federal national-cultural autonomy of Russian gypsies in Penza who would meet with the Medusa correspondent, but never found. On the Internet there was a video message from the “head of the public association of the gypsies of the Penza region” Andrei Ogly, in which he, on behalf of the gypsy diaspora, brings condolences to the relatives of the deceased Vladimir Grushin and expresses the hope that the guilty will be punished.

“This is not a real baron,” a man in a gray jacket expresses doubts about Andrei Ogla when we return to the village after the funeral. - The present died last year. Mihai was like that. After that, they began to be infinition.

Nadezhda Miryaeva, the deputy head of the administration of the Scheodanovsky Village Council, is not sure that Mikhai could be considered a formal leader of the gypsies living in a suitcase, but he certainly was an authority for them.

“Vladimir Petrovich Mikhai was a wise, cunning, intelligent man,” she says. - He was a deputy of the village council. He said to himself: "I am not a gypsy, I am a Bessarabets."

According to Miryaeva, the gypsies lived in shovels since the mid-1970s-since they decided to “transfer” them into a sedentary lifestyle in the USSR. Vladimir Mikhai, says the deputy head of the village council, everyone always respected. But even after his death, she assures, there were no special problems in the village.

- Never happened, 35 years old I have been living here. There were skirmishes, but such ... The package is in the administration for a gypsy alone. The head of the administration brought from the region - it was on dialysis, medicines from the hospital were handed over. And she was taken away, as she was without medicine. They are all on benefits, they get someone for children, some for themselves. They bought at home for maternity capital. And the fact that they lived separately ... This is a common trouble.

The gypsies did not know where they left the shoulder blades, but I’m sure that they will return, and the suitcase will heal as before.

- Yeah, let them return! - the young man near the cafe, where the commemoration is already starting. On the tables, as the governor promised, there is no alcohol. Women are seated, men go out into the street to smoke. Everywhere again, conversations about knives and axes, gypsies columns going from all sides to the village, unrighteous gypsy pensions.

“They didn’t go anywhere,” Tatyana Medvedeva shares with me with an accidental opening. - They went there, in those forests, in tents. In Sosnovka, in Lopukhovka now. Here are our men to get drunk at the wake and go there.

- So there is nothing to drink? I am surprised.

“Well, yes,” the pensioner grins. - At the wake, and nothing.

On June 17, New Gazeta reported that the gypsy population of the suitcase was taken for a compulsory basis. With reference to the head of the village council, Sergei Fadeev, the publication claimed that people were put on buses and sent to the Volgograd region, where they "agreed to shelter the local diaspora." The Medusa suitcase administration denied information about the violent export of gypsies.

Ekaterina Drankina , suitcase