Slepyanka Residents Moved Out of Homes Against Will :: Charter'97 :: News

Phone calls and women’s tears are an ordinary phenomenon for the “Narodnaya Volya”. Last Monday the call for help came from the Slepyanka residential district (4th Slepyansky street). The callers were the tenants of small houses, which are being brought down upon the state’s order, so that they could build another Belarusian “miracle” in their place.

I paved my way from the “Vostok” tube station along a high fence, which they assembled under pouring rain on the Skarina prospect. The construction works, said Premier Novitsky, would be carried out in three shifts. The tall trees had already been uprooted , more than a half of houses had been demolished and bulldozers took off the upper layer of the ground. I saw excavator removing the debris. By the way, the 1st, 2nd and 3rd Slepyansky streets had disappeared from the city map long ago. And the process is indeed inevitable. But the way they do it is simply inadmissible.
Usually any works on the ground and laying of basement are scheduled for the winter period. Construction of the national library commenced in October, in the very midst of the rainy season. I walked upon a 20-centemer stratum of dirt to get to my destination. Residents of the adjacent houses are daily making their way in such a manner. I noticed a huge fire, burning in the center of the yard, where they threw the remains of what used to be houses. Why such a haste, I thought. Couldn’t they sell it to the dacha owners?
BT announced that today, on November 1, they plan to lay down the first cornerstone in the building. One may assume that it will be sanctified by the church. They declared that by that historic moment there must be no living houses left. And they urgently move people out of their homes into the unprepared new flats.
Formally, they should not complaint for the flats are all allocated in the new blocks. However, for some reason the people are given either the ground or upper floors. In the Filimonova street 2 old people, aged 65 and 75 will now live on the 17th floor! The house is located in close proximity with their previous place of living, but the old people spent whole of their lives in a one-story home and they fear the height to death. As soon as they approach the window, they immediately go dizzy.
One old disabled person received a flat on the forth floor. Unfortunately, the elevator hasn’t been yet put in operation there, whereas the man can’t walk up and down the stairs on his own.
Many move into the houses in the remote suburban areas – “Zapad” and “Sukharevo”, which are located right on the opposite side of the city. The poor things will now have to travel for hours to get to their working place, which are mostly in their native “Vostok”. But nobody really pays any heed to these minor inconveniences, while those, who take too long a time to move out, are threatened with judicial penalties.