Text version
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[music]
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You come to a river, the sea, or maybe a
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beautiful lake, wanting to enjoy the
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wonderful scenery, go for a swim, catch some fish,
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and then—bam—there’s a huge fence standing there.
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Some local official or oligarch has fenced off
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the shore and isn’t letting anyone in. Sound
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familiar? Yes, you see this kind of thing a lot nowadays,
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not only in elite areas of the Moscow region,
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but in many beautiful places all across
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Russia. By law, no one has the right
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to block access to the water, and any fence
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must end at least 20 meters
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from the shoreline, with no exceptions.
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That’s exactly why, at the Anti-Corruption Foundation,
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we have a small special project
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called “Access to Water.”
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We identify cases where people in power
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have seized public land
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and put up a fence around their
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summer house, and then, using entirely
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legal complaint procedures, we force them
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to remove that fence. Quite often, we
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get results, and in the description of this
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video there’s a link to a spreadsheet where you
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can see the current cases. When
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we launched this project, we got
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a lot of comments along the lines of:
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“Fine, maybe you can make some businessman take down a fence,”
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“or maybe a mid-level official,”
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“or even a governor,”
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“like in one case you had—but
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the fence of a real top official, the kind
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from the Kremlin, you’ll never get that one removed.” No
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problem. We went to the place where
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the fence had been put up by genuine
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Kremlin officials. It’s the summer-house
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cooperative Sosny. We’ve talked quite a lot about it.
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This is where leaders of United Russia
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(the ruling political party), the head of the Presidential Administration,
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and among others Vyacheslav
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Volodin, who is now the speaker
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of the State Duma (the lower house of parliament), live. And of course these
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figures also seized the public shoreline
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and also blocked access to the water with their
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huge fence. But, you know, even that
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wasn’t enough for them. When we started studying
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the documents, we discovered something
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completely unprecedented. Look—this is
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an official extract from Rosreestr (Russia’s state real estate registry). It
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sets the boundaries of the plot
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belonging to this Kremlin summer-house
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cooperative, and you can see that they
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didn’t just seize the shore. They also seized
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half of the Istra River, right up to the middle, and officially
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registered it as their property and obtained
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documents for it. That should be completely impossible.
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All of Russian law completely
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rules out the possibility of adding
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a river flowing past your summer house to your property,
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especially one as well known as the Istra
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near Moscow. But if you work in the Kremlin, then
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you probably think that many rules simply
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don’t apply to you. And here
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it’s important to understand that officials of this
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level behave this brazenly
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because they’re sure that no one will
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complain about them. People will think
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it’s pointless, or they won’t want
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to get involved, or they’ll simply be afraid. But
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what do we have to be afraid of? So we went about it in our
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usual way, documented all
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these violations, and took them to
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Rosprirodnadzor (the federal environmental watchdog), and there we proved that, look,
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the shoreline has been seized, and
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Rosprirodnadzor simply has no other
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choice. So they issued an order under which
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the Sosny summer-house cooperative,
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inhabited by all-powerful Kremlin
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residents, has now been held
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liable and is required to tear down its
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fence enclosing the area. In
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addition to that, we are now filing suit
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against both the cooperative and Rosreestr for
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having registered as private property
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a section of the river, simply disregarding all
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the laws of Russia. So this is an instructive
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case showing that you shouldn’t be afraid
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to file complaints against people behind high fences.
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Subscribe to our channel—here
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we tell the truth.