Time to read: 16 minutes(s)

"Aikhal-michil! Tuskul! Tuskul! Tuskul!" the man in white says with expression and waves his hand (ponytail fan) toward a pile sprinkled with kumiss. A shaman is performing a blessing ceremony at the site of a future 12-story building in Yakutsk's 17th block, notorious for its barracks, outdoor toilets, and garbage dumps in the middle of courtyards. Observing the ceremony are the deputy prime minister of the regional government, the mayor of Yakutsk, developers, a candidate for parliament, local bloggers, a crowd of young people, and two residents of the neighborhood, previously seen in photographs with the mayor. 

There are no other residents of the 17th district here. There are no organizers or participants of the rally planned this summer, which was cancelled due to the authorities' efforts. Pensioners, who made her way into the apartment using a stepladder. Moms of girls, which floated in a basin in an apartment flooded by meltwater. City residents who have lived for decades waiting to leave these slums. 

How they are living now, what they were promised on the eve of the autumn elections, how they were exploited during the election campaign, and whether they will attempt to rally again – in this NeMoskva article.   

"As Seneca said, 'If a ship doesn't know where it's going, no wind will be favorable.' We know our goal: Yakutsk must be completely free of dilapidated and unsafe housing by 2032. This is enshrined in the decree of the head of Yakutia, Aisen Nikolayev. Our sails will always be filled with a fair wind," said Yevgeny Grigoryev, mayor of the capital of Yakutia, speaking at an event celebrating the establishment of first pile. 

Grigoryev is the third mayor to promise to relocate residents of the 17th block, demolish the barracks, and build new homes. When this happens, the neighborhood will no longer be called a ghetto and a disgrace to the diamond republic. 

The 17th block was first developed in the 1960s; new houses were allocated to young professionals and construction workers at the Yakutsk State District Power Plant. “Nobody had anything, but everyone lived very harmoniously. We always celebrated holidays together. We held concerts, sang songs, recited poetry,” says Elena Chernena, who moved to the area at the age of three. “Now there’s a swamp behind our houses, but before, you’d look out the window and see hawthorn, rose hips, and irises growing. Trees were planted twice a year; everything was green. As children, we’d run through the fields, picking rose hips and hawthorn. You could lie on the ground, look at the sky, and enjoy the birds singing. That’s all that’s left now.” only in my memories.

Bloggers were invited to the ceremony to lay the first pile, which took place ten days before the start of voting in the Yakutia republican election for the head of state. The influencers recorded stories on a social network recognized as extremist in Russia, explaining what was happening here. will appear new microdistrict "Sportivny".

They weren't the only ones campaigning for the head of the republic. A piece of paper was taped to the pile blessed by the shaman, declaring that the 17th district would be transformed thanks to the active support of Aisen Nikolaev.  

Nothing happens here now. A lonely pile stands there, surrounded by a corrugated metal fence. Nearby are two new toilets, on which, for some reason, the Apple logo has been carved out. 

Wooden toilets are found in all the courtyards of the 17th block. They are often old, so worn out that they are beyond all hope of being used, and are located in the middle of the courtyards. Next to them are trash bins, and in the winter, "washers." These are devices for collecting liquid household waste. There are no other common areas in the courtyards. 

The courtyard of the two-story wooden house where seven-year-old Eva Zryakina lives with her mother and sister is no different in this regard. This spring, Eva became a heroine on the Russian internet. A video of her floating in a basin through a flooded apartment gained such popularity that the Chairman of the Investigative Committee of the Russian Federation, Alexander Bastrykin, took an interest in the situation and ordered an investigation. 

After this, various commissions visited the Zryakins' apartment. Eva's mother, Kira, was investigated by inspectors from the Ministry of Internal Affairs' juvenile affairs department. And the mayor of Yakutsk promised to provide housing for rent until September 1st. Autumn arrived, and nothing changed in the Zryakins' lives, except that Eva started first grade. 

Kira Zryakina received an apartment in this building in 2007 as an orphan. Kira, 42, is a mother of many children, works as a nurse, and drives a Toyota Passo. Kira doesn't know her biological mother. She was adopted at six months old by a resident of the Vilyuysky district. When Kira was 10, her adoptive mother became ill with cancer. Before her death, the woman asked her younger sister to take her daughter into her family. 

"My mom and dad raised me, and then I had to settle down on my own. I managed to apply for housing before I was 25," Kira says.  

While she was waiting for an apartment, Kira went to the mayor's office every month for five years. One day, the head of the housing department waved thick folders in her face and said, "Do you know how many orphans I have like you? A one-bedroom apartment costs as much as a jeep." After a while, Kira gave him a dressing down. "I told them, 'I'll come to you with the kids and sit here until you give me housing,'" she recalls.

With three children, Kira didn't want to settle into either a dorm room or the temporary housing unit offered by the mayor's office. A one-bedroom apartment, foul-smelling from the previous owner's drinking and horrific after a fire, wasn't ideal, but it suited Kira at the time. 

"I had absolutely nowhere to go," she says. Kira's adoptive parents are alive and keep in touch, but after coming of age, she chose to live a completely independent life.

After renovating the apartment, Kira and her daughters began settling in. When Eva was born, Kira fenced in the porch and built a small courtyard so Eva could play outside. 

Until this spring, the Zryakins' main problem was the cold in their apartment. Now, dampness has increased after the meltwater flooding. This spring, the entire 17th block was flooded. The management company couldn't keep up with pumping water out of the apartments and entryways, so rented motor pumps were circulated from family to family.

"We somehow found a pump on the condition that we return it by midnight. They also removed the snow; otherwise, I don't even know how many days we would have had standing water in our apartments," Kira says. "Our older daughters had tuberculosis. Now I can't risk the youngest developing asthma because of this dampness."

People pumped out water They filmed their flooded apartments themselves, asked for help from the city administration, sent angry messages on Telegram and WhatsApp, and waited for the mayor. 

Yevgeny Grigoryev never arrived in the 17th district. Meanwhile, the mayor's office press service reported on Yakutsk's snowiest winter in meteorological history and the amount of equipment used to pump water throughout the city. 

Once the spring flooding turmoil had subsided, Mayor Grigoryev began touring the city's districts, presenting the Yakutsk master plan. This period coincided with the election campaigns for the head of Yakutia and the City Duma, for which city officials were running. At one of the meetings, Kira Zryakina asked the mayor when her family's housing issue would be resolved. 

 "I told him, 'Do you understand that a crime has been committed against me? How could the authorities give such an apartment to an orphan?' He replied that he would come and sort it out," Kira recounts. 

Kira recorded her speech and the mayor's response on video and, before the mayor arrived, sent the video to a Telegram chat for residents of the 17th block. The next day, the head of the district administration called her and informed her of the arrival of a commission headed by Yevgeny Grigoryev. 

"Why do they move when they're on social media? Why can't we be human, like people? You promised, you're a servant of the people, not us," Kira scolds the authorities in absentia.  

Kira Zryakina's meeting with the mayor took place in mid-July. Grigoriev promised to provide the Zryakinas with alternative housing by September 1. Since then, no one from the mayor's office has contacted Kira. 

"Our upstairs neighbor, Kunnay, hasn't lived here for a long time, and the apartment to the left is also empty—a man was killed seven years ago. This also affects whether the neighboring apartments have heat or not, which is why it's cold here," Kira says. "And this winter, the chimney in the building next door completely collapsed. It was such a loud roar. The stoves aren't working, but no one bothers to take them apart. Now I'm afraid ours will fall and we'll end up under a pile of bricks. Especially since the building is sinking more and more every year, and my apartment is in the middle."  

Kira's neighbor, Yulia, also can't dismantle the chimney, a relic of the Soviet design. Kira recalls how her neighbor tried to dissuade her from moving into the apartment offered by the mayor's office. "Yulia told me, 'You'd be a fool to agree to this,'" Kira recounts. 

Yulia, 46, has lived in the 17th block since she was five. She's worked at a grocery store near her home for 11 years and rarely visits downtown Yakutsk, where she lived with her mother and grandmother. Their stove-heated house was vacated in the 80s, and the family was given a letter of guarantee. 

"They lied to us. They said you'd live here temporarily, and then you'd get another place with a letter of guarantee. But the letter got lost. My grandmother and mother wrote to Moscow, back and forth. But they never got anywhere," Yulia says. 

Yulia once tried to remind the authorities of the promise she made 40 years ago. After her mother's death in 2011, as the eldest child, she began re-registering her municipal apartment. At the Department of Housing, Yulia explained that she had temporarily moved from her building on Lenin Avenue to the 17th block. 

"They told me, 'What are you talking about? Everything's been privately owned for a long time.' Of course, I should have run and asked. But I gave up, and my sister didn't offer to help me with the housing issue. Where would I go on my own?" Yulia explains.  

Yulia's sister and brother started their own families and moved out of their parents' apartment. Yulia lives with her adult son and goes to her brother's house for baths, just as the whole family used to visit their grandmother, who lived in a comfortable apartment. 

Yulia was recently promoted to deputy director, and her salary increased from 40 to 45 rubles. "I have more responsibility," she says, sounding less than thrilled about the promotion. 

Yulia had never been to the seaside or to Moscow. She had never been to any other city either. After high school, she decided not to go to university and instead found work as a nanny in a kindergarten.  

"What are they talking about us like that?" she asks, good-naturedly surprised by the popular YakNet comments about residents of the 17th block complaining and waiting for free housing instead of applying for a mortgage. 

"Not everyone can afford to pay their mortgage. You work, you don't drink, you don't go out, but the money still disappears. I pay 7 rubles a month for this hovel," Yulia says of the rent for her three-bedroom apartment. 

During the entire time that Yulia has lived in this 16-apartment building, only Kira and her children have moved in.  

"The mayor came this summer, there was a meeting. They said we shouldn't expect resettlement until 2029. I won't believe we're going to be resettled until they put a notice on the front door," Yulia says. 

This spring, a gathering of residents of Block 17 took place for the first time near Yulia's workplace. About 40 of the most active people gathered, outraged by the authorities' indifference when their homes were flooded. They decided to organize a protest. Some of them joined an initiative group, active since 2016, calling for the demolition of the barracks in Block 17 and the prompt relocation of the residents.  

Word quickly spread online that residents of the 17th block were planning a mass protest. "We were summoned to the Ministry of Internal Affairs and forced to sign papers on camera declaring we had been warned of the consequences of organizing an unauthorized public event," says a member of the initiative group. She requests anonymity because she fears harassment from the mayor's office and the police. 

Nevertheless, the activists received permission from the city administration to hold a rally on the outskirts of Yakutsk. At midday on June 10, more than 100 people gathered in Yuri Gagarin Square. "We noticed buses, a lot of National Guard officers. It's funny, but they even had a water cannon ready," the activist recounts. 

But the events didn't progress at all. A young man approached the rally participants, identified himself as an authorized representative of the Yakutsk mayor's office, and announced the cancellation of the event. He cited emergency repair work being carried out in the park as the reason. A short circuit and damage to the electrical panel were discovered early in the morning. 

"We were deceived like children. We were devastated after that. Now there's no interest in continuing our activism. On top of that, people are angry with us. In the neighborhood's WhatsApp groups, we've been bombarded with accusations that we didn't follow through with what we started. And these are people writing this from their couches who didn't lift a finger to make this rally happen. I left the chats and vowed to only ask the mayor's office for my own building. I won't be fighting for everyone else anymore. I don't need that; why should I ruin my health," the activist concludes. 

According to some reports, Galina Dyakonova, one of the organizers of the 17th Block residents' initiative group, was being swayed by city authorities. They were asked to advocate for residents to move into the temporary housing stock space the mayor's office plans to build in the neighborhood. Residents disapproved of this idea, and the activist declined the government's offer. A post denouncing the activist appeared on pro-government Yakut Telegram channels shortly afterward. Galina Dyakonova declined to comment. 

The city's mayor's office will build temporary housing on a site it had previously developed for its own office. The move to the disadvantaged neighborhood was announced in November 2020 by former Yakutsk Mayor Sardana Avksentieva. 

"I believe city officials don't need to sit in an expensive building in the city center. We're ready to build an affordable building and move there," the mayor said. Avksentieva's statement had an impact, and was widely reported.  

Evgeny Grigoryev, Avksentyeva's replacement, explained to journalists that the mayor's office hasn't abandoned the idea of ​​moving to the 17th block. In February 2023, the city administration even announced a tender for the development of design and estimate documentation for the office. In addition to offices, it will also house planned to accommodate a winter garden, a smart library, a gym and parking.

In August, it became clear that the mayor's office would not be moving to the slums, but to the site of an office with a winter garden will be built temporary accommodation for residents awaiting demolition of their barracks.

In the 17th block, 160 buildings have been declared unsafe. By the end of 2023, authorities plan to relocate residents of buildings declared unsafe before January 1, 2017. There are not many such buildings in the neighborhood. 

Kira Zryakina's building on Kosmonavtov Street was declared unsafe in 2019. Prior to this, residents had been trying to get this procedure done for four years, to no avail. 

"Apparently, the authorities didn't want to skew the statistics. We were told the deterioration level wasn't high enough, like 60% was still normal. We also had trouble raising the necessary 45 rubles for the paperwork. But thanks to Avksentieva, our house was included on the demolition list," says Kira Zryakina. 

 — Upon my assumption of office [in September 2018] in the 17th quarter Nine buildings were declared unsafe. In 2019 and 2020, we declared 110 buildings unsafe, confirms Sardana Avksentieva.   

The former mayor spoke about this work at a press conference dedicated to the large-scale election campaign, which resulted in representatives of the New People party being elected to the city council and regional parliament. 

Other parties also tried to exploit the 17th quarter theme in their campaigns. For example, the SRZP. State Duma deputy from Yakutia, Fedot Tumusov, invited his parliamentary colleague, Mikhail Delyagin, on a tour of the neighborhood. Moscow Guest asked The barracks residents continued to "shake the authorities" and promised to create a media scandal.

The State Duma deputy kept his word and appeared on the television program "Conversation with Solovyov." Delyagin expressed his impressions of his visit to the 17th quarter as follows: "The conditions in the camps are significantly better" and “in the conditions in which the children live there, even rats cannot survive.”

The head of Yakutia responded to this by asking representatives of political parties to limit their "shirt-ripping campaign marches." 

 "We've never been there, in the 17th block, but now, after the government and the city administration actually started resettling people, everyone's started showing up there and loudly beating the drums. So let's not indulge in populism here," said Aisen Nikolaev  during the Il Tumen session.

Nikolaev himself was reminded in the comments under the news about the installation of a new pile in the 17th quarter failed project During his mayoralty in Yakutsk, the city administration announced the Chinese company Zhouda's intention to invest in the integrated development of the 17th block. The pile was driven in the spring of 2016. That was the end of the Chinese partners' activities. 

During the 2017 mayoral elections, the mayor's office announced that a local developer would handle the construction. While the election campaign was underway, some work was carried out on the construction site. This work was completed after the vote.   

On September 10, the elections in Yakutia ended, and both city council members and representatives of the Moscow mayor's office stopped visiting the 17th district. It's unclear when the preliminary investigation into the living conditions of first-grader Eva—the girl in the basin—will be completed, when the mayor's office will call her mother, and when the relocation of residents from 160 barracks will begin.  

"Everyone thinks that the 17th block is full of homeless people," says a resident of a building on Yakutskaya Street, who asked not to be named. "We've lived here since 1984, when my husband got an apartment through work. In 2009, we wanted to sell it. But they told us, 'No need, guys. You'll be resettled soon.' So we just had to wait." 

Residents are skeptical about the mayor's office's new plans to build the "Sportivny" microdistrict. "A second Chzhoda," they write in the group chat, recalling the failed project. 

They don't expect the prosecutor's office to successfully resolve their problem. However, residents of the flooded houses are still pinning their hopes on Russia's latest argument. 

"Until you get to Putin, everyone just writes replies," Evgeniya Andreeva wrote in the general chat for residents of the microdistrict.

After the spring flood, the mayor's office ordered the floors in her building to be removed to pump out the water and install drainage pipes. The repairs dragged on until the end of October, and it's unclear when they will be completed. 

In Yakutsk recognized 1178 apartment buildings are considered unsafe. They are home to 42 people, or 11% of the capital's population. A total of 4300 buildings in the republic have been declared unfit for habitation, but 82 Yakuts continue to live there. 

This is a record for Russia. In the Perm Krai and Arkhangelsk Oblast, there are 11 and 10 fewer people living in such conditions and awaiting resettlement.    

Since 2019, a federal program has been in effect in the country for the resettlement of residents from dilapidated housing designated as such before January 1, 2017. Yakutia is participating in this program, along with the Khanty-Mansi Autonomous Okrug, Perm Krai, Yamalo-Nenets Autonomous Okrug, and Kemerovo Oblast. is on the list regions that are successfully dealing with the elimination of dilapidated housing.

However, this summer It revealedThe republic has only fulfilled its plan for relocating residents from dilapidated housing by 42,6%. During the program, under which the federal center transferred approximately 90 billion rubles to the region, 26 people received new housing.

A total of 342,64 billion rubles were spent under the program, and 531,15 Russians were resettled. to be resettled 1,4 million people. That's three times the total population of Yakutsk. It's hard to say what grade Eva Zryakina will be in when her mother gets a new home. So she should keep a basin ready for the next flood.