"I remembered him as best I could": St. Petersburg residents bring flowers and candles in memory of the devastated park.

In the park "Thickets", which was located on the bank of the Malaya Neva, grew More than eight thousand trees. The fight for them began back in 2019, when authorities decided to build a four-lane highway here. Residents of Vasilievsky Island and volunteers landscaped the area themselves, and the park was given public park status.

This fall, the "Thickets" were given temporary protection status, which was supposed to protect the trees from being cut down. However, on November 2nd, the park still destroyed (however, the mayor’s office claims that it has issued permission to cut down only a few hundred trees).

For the second day now, residents carry Memorial candles and plaques at the construction fence that was erected around the former people's park.

"I remembered it as best I could"- He explained one of the volunteers.

Protecting trees from being cut down is one of the few civic initiatives that still exist in Russia and are held at the public level. People are uniting to save the last patches of greenery that are being given over to the construction of shopping centers, apartment buildings, churches, or highways. Pockets of protest exist in virtually every region, and sometimes the standoff with the authorities ends in victory for residents: this fall, such news came from Voronezh region (there are summer residents there were able to cancel cutting down 25 hectares of forest for the construction of a logistics center) and Penza (residents there defended 16 thousand hectares of forest at once, which the authorities wanted to give over to logging).

In recent months, the loudest protests against the deforestation of parks have been recorded in Saratov (there cut down trees for the construction of a school, which could be built on a vacant lot), Krasnodar (where are the authorities have given away green area of ​​the embankment for the construction of the temple) and Moscow (there sawing Losiny Ostrov National Park for the construction of a highway).

Photo: Telegram channel "Zarosli - Park on the Malaya Neva"