A small victory for activists: The Constitutional Court ruled in favor of preserving historic buildings.
«The railway station and the station [in Toksovo] <> are mentioned in dozens of works of art, its image was printed on postcards and captured in paintings (one of them is in the collection of the Russian Museum)", the local historian wrote Dmitry Sergeev in a historical essay. But this didn't save the "station with history"—in April 2021, the building, which activists had fought for over a decade, was destroyed.
Officials refused to turn on the station Toksovo on the list of designated cultural heritage sites. This decision was challenged in court. While the dispute was ongoing, Russian Railways demolished the 1916 building under the guise of "reconstruction."
The monument could have been preserved, but due to legislative loopholes, the court refused to impose injunctions. Local historian Sergeyev then decided to challenge the very provisions of the law that do not prevent the destruction of cultural heritage.
«In the Constitutional Court, we insisted that the contested norms <> do not comply with the Constitution of the Russian Federation <> and thus do not ensure the effectiveness of judicial protection of cultural property" the lawyer reported on his social media Alexander Peredruk.
The Constitutional Court sided with the defenders of cultural heritage and “indicated the right of the courts to apply preliminary protective measures in administrative claims in the area of protecting cultural heritage sites.”
In place of the demolished station, which was not in disrepair and could have been restored, a new building, which has no historical value, was ceremoniously opened in the fall of 2022. A year earlier, in August 2021, a court ruled that officials' refusal to include the building in the list of designated cultural heritage sites was unlawful.
In the fall of 2022, four more pre-revolutionary railway stations were recognized as monuments: in the villages Borodinsky, Gvardeysky, Zaitsevo и Oyarvi (Vyborg district of Leningrad region).