The court recognized that the resettlement of the victim of Soviet repression was forced. This may allow her to obtain legally required housing.

The Second Court of Cassation of General Jurisdiction ruled in favor of Evgenia Mikhailova, the daughter of Moscow residents who were repressed in Soviet times. This was reported to Novaya Gazeta by lawyer Grigory Vaypan, who accompanied Mikhailova's lawsuit in the Constitutional Court, as well as two other women - victims of repression.

Information about the process is published on the website of the court, which decided to return the case to the court of appeal and reconsider it. “Today's decision was made in the case of establishing the fact of the forced resettlement of her family from Moscow in 1947. Back in 2019, the Constitutional Court, following a complaint by Mikhailova, ruled that moving into exile with a repressed relative in the Soviet years was a forced move. But the decision of the Constitutional Court in favor of Mikhailova has not yet been executed, ”the lawyer said in a conversation with Novaya Gazeta.

According to the law, Mikhailova has the right to receive housing where her family lived before the repressions. As recalls Kommersant , in 2003 the Khoroshevsky Court of Moscow ruled that the relocation of her family was forced, and recognized that the housing was lost due to political repression. Soon the Moscow City Court overturned this decision, and already in 2004 the Khoroshevsky Court issued a directly opposite decision, stating that the family voluntarily went to her husband in exile and herself refused housing.

In 2019, the Constitutional Court acknowledged that such a move could not be considered voluntary and indicated that the Mikhailova case was subject to review.

However, as Vaypan notes, last year the district court and the Moscow City Court again refused Mikhailova, contrary to the decision of the Constitutional Court. “Today the Court of Cassation satisfied our complaint and returned the case to the Moscow City Court for a new trial.

We are satisfied with the decision of the court of cassation, but in general this does not fit into any gates - Elizaveta Mikhailova has been suing the Moscow authorities for the eighteenth year.

We hope that soon the process will finally come to an end and the decision of the Constitutional Court will be implemented,” Vaypan said.

In November last year, the UN Special Rapporteurs sent a letter to the Russian authorities demanding that the "Gulag children" be provided with housing within the next two years.

In 1991, a law was passed that obligated the state to compensate the victims of repression. He ordered to allocate free housing in the city where the families of the repressed lived at the time of arrest. However, in 2005 the State Duma delegated the authority to establish a mechanism for such compensation to the regions.

In 2019, this was challenged in the Constitutional Court by the children of repressed Muscovites Elizaveta Mikhailova, Evgenia Shasheva and Alisa Meissner. In December 2019, the Constitutional Court ruled that such a compensation mechanism violates the rights of victims of repression and demanded that the law be changed immediately.