So, a law has come into force under which you will soon be able to get a hectare of land in Russia’s Far East absolutely free of charge. First for use, and after 5 years, as your property.
In a modernized form, the idea copies the well-known Homestead Act in the United States, under which, after paying a $10 fee, anyone could obtain a plot of up to 65 hectares for use and, after 5 years, take ownership of the land.
We think this initiative is simply excellent and strongly support it: Russia is the largest country in the world by area, and the overwhelming majority of its territory is not used at all. If even some of these lands can be put to good use, that would already be a great outcome.
However, when we studied the law that was passed, we saw that corruption could become the main reason the project fails. It contains far too many ambiguities and built-in conflicts that could undermine the whole idea.
For example.
As you can imagine, the Far East is enormous and extremely diverse. What exactly is “a hectare of land in the Far East”?
A hectare of land near Vladivostok is one thing. A hectare of land near Magadan is something else entirely.
A hectare outside Vladivostok, far from a road, is of no use to anyone, while a hectare near a road—even near Magadan—has value.
Nobody wants land in Chukotka, but plenty of people would gladly take a plot near the port in Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky.
The law assumes that land will not be allocated right next to major cities, but it makes exceptions for rural settlements within those areas.
In practice, millions of citizens will most likely want land outside Vladivostok, close to infrastructure—and that is no longer some vague “vast expanse,” but very specific plots worth real money.
I want a hectare right here by the railway station, and you want that same hectare by the railway station. And the mayor wants that exact hectare. And the governor. And the presidential envoy. And the minister.
Who gets it? The person who filed first? The person who filled out the application more correctly? Where can you see the application queue? Who resolves the conflict?
As you will see below, in order to carve out your hectare, you need a certain amount of specialized knowledge. Officials have it; you do not.
There is a serious risk that the first and best thousands of hectares will be snapped up by insider officials, while everyone else will be left with illiquid scraps—plots so remote even bears do not go there. That is exactly why the Anti-Corruption Foundation is launching a project to monitor how this program is implemented. We will try to make sense of what is happening and raise red flags if we uncover any cheating.
Let me say right away: so far, we do not see any deliberate or corrupt actions. It looks more like poor design and unfinished work.
Quite sensibly, the government decided to begin allocating land on a trial basis in one district of Primorsky Krai (a region in Russia’s Far East), and only for residents of Primorsky Krai. So if you try to claim a bit of land for yourself, nothing will come of it—the system will not let in anyone who does not live in Primorye.
But there is also the wonderful Party of Progress, which has members in the Far East as well. Together with them, we went through the land application process, which we will now describe. Spoiler: after several hours of trying to form a plot on the cadastral map, nothing came of it.
Applications for land are submitted on the website: https://надальнийвосток.рф. To start working with the cadastral map, the site requires registration through the Gosuslugi public services portal, so anyone without an account will have to spend about 2 more weeks setting one up. Those who voted for our bill #20 have a nice bonus left over from that vote.
Here is how party members describe the procedure:
Authorization completed, and we arrive at the cadastral map.
We wait about 5 to 10 minutes for it to load—it really does take that long—and get the following picture:
The areas marked in gray are zones that cannot be divided into hectare plots. Naturally, everything outside the Far East is gray. But as the screenshot shows, many territories within Russia’s Far East are also unavailable. Fine, let us take that as a given and move on. On the left, you can see the user interface, which lets you manage the map’s settings. For example, if you already know the cadastral number of the plot you want to reserve, you can easily find it using the search function:
There is also an advanced search:
In this case, we are playing the role of not especially advanced cadastral map users and will search for plots ourselves. So we choose the bright side of the map—say, the Peschany Peninsula:
The peninsula is located on the shore of Amur Bay opposite Vladivostok. Recently, more and more houses in the village have been used by Vladivostok residents as summer homes. Near the village, on the peninsula, there are several sandy beaches and shallow coves that attract large numbers of vacationers in summer. In other words, it is generally a good place for developing tourism or setting up a small hotel near a sandy beach. The largest settlement on the peninsula is the village of Beregovoye:
Its population in 2010 was almost 500 people. The village is connected to Vladivostok by regular boat service, as well as by a road running around Amur Bay. So it is an excellent quiet place that is still close to civilization.
We are describing all this vividly and effortlessly here, but in reality, moving around the map and performing any kind of action on it is hellish work that cost us half an hour of our lives. The map lags badly and takes forever to load.
If you somehow manage to get through all that and pick out a little paradise near Vladivostok’s best fishing spots, the next equally difficult stage is forming the plot itself. To do that, you need to select “Formation of the requested land plot” in the interface:
You will be offered several ways of carving up a plot. “Find ready-made plots” took about 10 minutes to load for us, and in the end we gave up on it and drew the plot on the map using:
We drew the plot. That is also fairly difficult, because you have to estimate 1 hectare by eye yourself, but after a dozen attempts you will eventually manage it:
What to do next is still unclear. We clicked the “check” button and dutifully waited for about 20 minutes… It keeps loading, and nothing happens.
You might assume we are just clueless beginners, but the statistics suggest that very few people have actually managed to submit applications.
Six million people live in the Far East, and land distribution has already begun in these districts:
And yet, over the course of a day, not tens of thousands of applications were submitted, as one might expect, and not even thousands, but just 468.
And it is unclear at this point whether people are waiting for better locations to be released—as I wrote, near Vladivostok—or whether, like us, they simply cannot submit an application.
Frankly, I do not really understand how those 468 people managed to submit applications at all. Several people in different places tried on our side, and none of them succeeded. Perhaps they are relatives of officials and the system’s creators who managed to register the best 500 hectares for themselves. There is no proof, and there is no way to verify it.
When the best plots become available, thousands of people will rush to the site, but—I repeat—the law contains no clear procedure for deciding who gets a plot in a disputed case. The review period for an application is 7 days, and applications are considered in the order they are received.
There is no transparent mechanism for verifying the order in which applications were received. Our attempt to submit a land application failed; nothing happened.
In the near future, we will prepare recommendations for the Ministry for the Development of the Russian Far East on how to improve the service and make it more transparent.
And we will continue the process of obtaining 10 hectares of land for the Anti-Corruption Foundation. We can breed squirrels there, for example.
P.S. If you know anything about possible abuses in the redistribution of land, write to us via Black Box.
P.P.S. If you like what we do, support us.
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