Rehabilitation without signatures and seals – Newspaper Kommersant No. 212 (7413) dated 11/16/2022

The court of the Krasnodar Territory declared illegal the refusal of officials to put four victims of Soviet repressions on a preferential line for housing. We are talking about the Panaetidi family, which for two years has been seeking the right to return to their native places in the Kuban, from where their parents were expelled during the deportation of the Greeks in 1942. The district administration confirmed to Kommersant that the “children of the Gulag” had already been put on a preferential line. However, lawyer Ivan Kalgin, who represents the interests of the family, is not entirely satisfied with the decisions of the municipality and the court. In his opinion, the queuing should have happened back in 2021 – and every year of delay is very important for older people.

Earlier, Kommersant spoke in detail about the lawsuit of the Panaetidi family. A resident of the Kuban, Ivan Panaetidi, was a teenager when he and his parents were repressed on an ethnic basis – in 1942 they were deported to the Pavlodar region of Kazakhstan. In exile, Ivan Panaetidi married his compatriot Sofya Tilkeridi, they had four children. After Stalin’s death, restrictions on special settlers began to be lifted, but the family was able to return to Russia only in the 1990s. At the same time, the “children of the Gulag” Anna, Olga, Nadezhda and Vasily Panaetidi were recognized as victims of political repressions, who have the right to rehabilitation. The law guaranteed them compensation for lost property – the right to receive free housing in the area from which their parents were expelled. However, as Kommersant wrote, it is practically impossible to exercise this right.

The administration of the Seversky district of the Krasnodar Territory several times refused to register elderly people for housing registration. Officials demanded from Panaetidi a certificate of absence of residential premises and a document of registration in the municipality from where their parents were expelled. At the same time, back in 2019, the Constitutional Court recognized such requests as illegal. Lawyer Ivan Kalgin, representing the interests of the Panaetidi family, referred to the position of the Constitutional Court in court – and the requirements were withdrawn. But then the officials again refused to register, since Panaetidi had no evidence of the loss of his parents’ home – the archive of the Seversky district from the time of the Great Patriotic War has not been preserved to date.

In February 2022, the Krasnodar Regional Court sided with the “gulag children” and declared the new demand illegal. In June, the Fourth Court of Cassation agreed with this position – it returned the case back to the first instance.

The judge of the Seversky District Court of the Krasnodar Territory, Lyudmila Surmenidi, postponed the hearing of the claim five times. “I got the feeling that the district administration, which acted as the defendant, was deliberately playing for time, the courts were postponed and postponed,” lawyer Ivan Kalgin told Kommersant. During one of the preliminary hearings, the administration informed the court that the demands of the applicants were in fact fulfilled – on July 28 of this year, members of the Panaetidi family were put on the waiting list. The same messages came in the mail to the applicants. True, instead of the signature of the head of the Seversky district, Andrei Doroshevsky, there was an empty space in the documents. And then copies of the decision appeared in court with a signature – but without a seal.

Deputy head of the Seversky district Dmitry Malov, in response to a request from Kommersant, said that by a decree of the district administration dated July 28 of this year, members of the Panaetidi family were registered as those in need of housing under the category of rehabilitated persons.

At the meeting on November 14, Judge Lyudmila Surmenidi suggested that the Panaetidi family withdraw the lawsuit. But they refused to take into account the documents without signatures and seals. According to Ivan Kalgin, the trial “was difficult” – Judge Surmenidi reacted very emotionally to the plaintiffs’ statements. “The general meaning of the judge’s remarks boiled down to one thing: why go to court if everything has already been decided? I even suggested that the judge with a Greek surname has some personal reasons to react emotionally to the story of the deportation of the Greeks. However, Lyudmila Surmenidi did not agree with my proposal to recuse herself,” Ivan Kalgin said.

The final decision of Judge Surmenidi to recognize the administration’s refusal as illegal did not satisfy the plaintiffs. The Panaetidi family intends to appeal against it. “Firstly, the court did not issue a decision obliging the administration to do anything. Secondly, we insist that Anna, Olga, Nadezhda and Vasily Panaetidi should not be registered from July 2022, but at least a year earlier – from the moment they applied to the municipality and were refused. Members of the Panaetidi family are elderly people, for them the waiting time even in the preferential queue is very significant, ”Ivan Kalgin explained to Kommersant.

“Back in 2019, the Constitutional Court decided that the “children of the Gulag” should be registered in the housing register at the former place of residence of their families without any conditions. But in practice, local officials continue to ignore this order,” lawyer Grigory Vaypan told Kommersant. “The repressed have to seek their rights in the courts: this year, in addition to the Krasnodar Territory, a similar lawsuit was won in the Stavropol Territory. But at this rate, many victims will not have time to receive compensation. To correct the situation, it is necessary to adopt a federal law, but its consideration has been blocked by the State Duma for more than a year and a half.”

It should be reminded that at the beginning of November 19 people, who were born in the families of the repressed, complained to the Constitutional Court about the non-execution of its own decision. They recalled that since 2019 the State Duma has not been able to develop a suitable law on housing compensation – all proposed projects have been frozen. Now the plaintiffs, including members of the Panaetidi family, are asking the Constitutional Court to create legal guarantees for the correction of unconstitutional laws.

Anna Perova, Krasnodar