Relatives of the heroes of the NMD from the Vladimir region suffer in the barracks

The village of Urshelsky is lost in the Vladimir forests and Meshchera swamps. From Moscow by train to Cherusti station, then with a transfer to Tasin. And from there to the final destination.

You can also go through Vladimir to Gus-Khrustalny, and catch a taxi there. One for 1200 rubles, with fellow travelers to the eyeballs – for 300.

There are no direct buses or trains to Urshelsky. There is no transport at all. Therefore, no enemy will ever reach this village, I am sure. I’m driving myself to turn around one day. When I almost reached Urshelsky, I saw that there was only 30 kilometers of gasoline left. And no gas station.

I’ll get there, but how will I get back?

I rushed across the first car that came across. “Yes, we have never had gas stations here,” a random driver shrugged his shoulders when he saw my dumbfounded eyes. – Why do we need them? Everyone in the city refuels. What do we have…”

– How do you live here?

“That’s how we live, we don’t complain. We don’t need anything. We have enough.

I must have looked completely shocked. “So a white Lada with a torn off bumper drives around the village, you slow it down – it will help.”

Lord, where am I going to look for something like that … I didn’t have time to think how the Lada stopped in front of me.

Here they are, real Russian people. Simple as the truth. Who will never leave their neighbor in trouble.

Filled the car through the watering can. Showed the way.

Actually, it’s impossible to get lost. The whole village – several streets, a house of culture, a shop, a school, a new bath and sports complex, the most beautiful building here.

And – dilapidated barracks. Monument of former industrial times. They were built about ninety years ago for the workers of the glass factory. Over the past decades, production has declined, and the foundations of the buildings themselves have gone deep into the ground. Everything faded. It is clear that the houses are “walking”, the walls are skewed. When the barracks were last repaired, the old-timers will not even remember. Maybe never. But people somehow live in them – where should they go?!

Barrack for the hero’s mother

The barracks on the street with the poetic name Teatralnaya, where the family of the deceased Murad Kurtliev, born in 1994, lives, I recognized right away.

The last bald patches of snow near the entrance, under which are rubbish and scraps of old things left by the departed tenants.

Almost all the people left this barracks last December. Only Elena Alexandrovna Kuryakova, the mother of the deceased Corporal Kurtliev, continues to live in it. Murad was supposed to turn 29 in March. He passed away on January 14th.

The guy played the wedding last spring – a year has not passed. The child was born in October. The young father managed to see him when he arrived before the New Year on a visit. And on February 6 he was buried.

Murad Kurtliev is the only one who died in the NVO in Urshelsky to date. The whole village gathered for his funeral.

On the fortieth day after the death of her son, the mother had a second stroke – the first was a couple of years ago. Elena Alexandrovna now moves only with a stick. And she is 59 years old.

My eldest daughter Lyudmila meets me. She came to her mother from the Moscow region. And her husband Leonid, who works in Moscow on a rotational basis and also visits at home.

The entrance smells of rotten old logs. Of the amenities – a plastic toilet-bucket in the corner and running water.

The apartment is clean and tidy, hiding forced dilapidation. An endless TV is heard in the background. It is impossible to get out of here, as from the wheel of Samsara, and this makes it even more dreary.

The family has many children. Moved once from Turkmenistan. Murad was a boy, the youngest. There are five children in total. Everyone has already grown up, scattered in all directions.

“At first I thought: where did I go? How would you escape from here? Then they got used to it, of course, settled down, ”the hostess smiles sadly.

It is hard for them to talk about their brother and son. Lyudmila periodically runs away to cry. Mother sits taut as a string. I give Elena Alexandrovna a formal portrait of Murad from the wall in order to photograph them both. Mother and son. The way he was immediately after demobilization – at the age of twenty. “Beloved mother” – a flying inscription on the top left.

“Murad was a sympathetic, kind, good boy. After the army did not know where to go to work, and decided to serve again. And he signed a contract for CBO last July. His wife was already pregnant.

He often came to visit us on weekends, but, again, you can’t run into Vladimir from Vladimir. You know, but I don’t remember how he left here for the last time … I remember my childhood, how small I was, and the recent one flew out of my memory.

No, he says, there were no forebodings on the eve of death. A day is like a day, no worse and no better in a series of the same. Only a few weeks later came the news of death.

The mother was the last to be informed. They feared for her health. “But it seems to me that it’s not like he is,” she says, clutching the portrait to her chest.

No millions have yet been paid to relatives. And there is no order yet.

What are officials thinking?

Everyone in this room with a low ceiling and crushing walls takes turns telling their version of further events. Mother, father, sister Lyudmila, representative of the All-Russian Popular Front Galina Sokolova, who made this case public.

And what about the apartment?

Yes, with an apartment. Their barracks were recognized as emergency and subject to demolition back in 2017. In December 2022, the neighbors were relocated almost in one day. And so quietly, silently, they left. Nobody was told anything. But Kuryakova remained.

Elena Alexandrovna got up in the morning – there was no water in the tap. Frozen in the pipes. Nobody used it, so it froze. Leonid came from Moscow, warmed up with a bucket of boiling water.

Then – like a gap in memory: a message about the death of a son, a funeral …

After already went to find out what and how. How did you come to. And they are told that they do not fall under the resettlement. Because their apartment is privatized. And they moved only those neighbors who have a municipal one. And no one owes anyone anything. They can only temporarily, due to extraordinary circumstances, provide an apartment on the fourth floor of a high-rise building or another one with partial amenities, in someone else’s property, from the mobile fund.

“I explain that I can’t go up to the fourth floor, that my legs can’t walk. But it’s somehow scary to move into someone else’s apartment, suddenly the owner asks, and then what? – Elena Alexandrovna argues.

In general, it is not clear why, when demolishing dilapidated housing, the owners of privatized apartments should purchase a new one in return – otherwise they would go out into the street? There are some strange rules in the village.

“I went to a meeting with the head of the village administration in order to understand what we should do now, and she answers me: “They gave you money for your son – you buy housing for yourself with them.” I thought, maybe I somehow heard it wrong or didn’t understand, but she had the grave in mind, ”Leonid throws up his hands.

“The official must understand what he says and when. When I first heard this, I was just shocked. I also thought that Leonid had messed up something. And then our head repeated the same thing on camera. It made me feel ashamed. But she’s fine, it turns out that she didn’t say anything strange, ”Galina Sokolova, the former head of the Urshelsky village, is worried.

“The family of the deceased received all the relevant payments that could be used to buy a house,” the recording, which got into the media, hears the firm voice of Tatyana Ivlieva, the head of the village administration, by the way, recently appointed. Previously, there were elections in their village, but now they are not. And, probably, therefore, the head, in principle, does not care about the opinion of the inhabitants and what they think about her. The main thing is that the district authorities like her work. But the authorities are not happy either.

Because the hype about what Kuryakova was told reached the governor and Moscow. At first, the locals tried to refute that, they say, all this is fake, at least in the part that “it is advised to buy housing at the expense of payments received for the deceased son,” but then they resigned themselves to the fact that the word is not a sparrow.

Recently, against the backdrop of a scandal, Elena Alexandrovna and her husband were nevertheless allocated housing from the mobile fund: in their village, as it turned out, a new house was recently built. They said that it was temporary, but then they promised that, most likely, they would leave the apartment. Large and with municipal repairs, that is, you can immediately enter and enjoy.

How many such barracks in Russia are in need of resettlement? How many people live in them all their lives, hoping for nothing?

And if Murad Kurtliev had not died or the official had been a little more careful in her words, who would be interested in this story?

Threat from the stove

“Do you want to reach one more wife of the mobilized? She generally lives under the threat of an explosion at home,” the activists suggested to me.

The barrack, where Anna Savelyeva, the wife of the mobilized Dmitry Morozov, lives, is no different from the barrack of Elena Kuryakova. Like twin clones. And even the street is the same – Teatralnaya. Anna is also alone in the whole house. Husband in the NWO, son in the army. The house was declared emergency in 2022 and they wanted to put it in the resettlement program. But there is no money. Residents have moved out.

Only the cat and the gas stove remained with Anna. True, the stove did not survive the winter.

Since the house does not have a foundation, the walls warped, and a huge crack went from the second floor to the first. The concentration of gas in the apartment has increased. You can fall asleep and not wake up.

“When my husband left for mobilization, he was very worried about how I would be left alone with such a stove,” Anna tells in detail. — The stove-maker said that it was impossible to live here. For repairs put up 300 thousand rubles. And the house is also not mine – I live for social employment. The government doesn’t have that kind of money. That’s why they cut off my gas two days ago, no one took responsibility for safety; thank God, I overwintered warmly in the winter.

Anna rushed with her misfortune to local officials: they say, she heard Putin on TV saying that special attention should be paid to the problems of the families of the mobilized, to help them in any way possible. She was told that they were waiting officially for such a decree from the president in order to start helping, but so far there was no decree. But no, as they say, there is no trial.

“I was asked to bring my marriage certificate. Whether I am a wife or not, how should I be treated, whether to give gifts, like the rest of the mobilized, or maybe just a cohabitant, – the woman says. – The fact is that we lived for 20 years and signed only when Dima left for mobilization. Of course, I brought them the document and showed it.”

In the 2000s, Dmitry Morozov fought as a conscript in Chechnya. Then he received a disability due to a civil injury: his fingers did not move and there were problems with his hand. Two doctors on the draft board were rejected with a hand, and the last one said that it was okay, he could serve. “The husband also decided that he would not excuse himself. In general, he was the first to leave the village with us, ”Anna is proud.

Anna pays for the maintenance of dilapidated housing. For overhaul they take from her too. It turns out somewhere a thousand rubles. But you have to do everything yourself: the floors, and the walls, and the mound.

“It’s useless to shift the stove, you can’t live here, I was temporarily offered a four-room apartment from the mobile fund, but there are also partially no floors and repairs are needed, and why do I need one four-room apartment,” Anna Savelyeva shrugs. – And if nothing is decided with this now, I will write to my husband, I will complain, he will seek justice through the front. To make the officials feel ashamed.”

The situation with the house of Elena Kuryakova was taken up by the Investigative Committee. I quote the press release: “Chairman of the Investigative Committee of the Russian Federation Alexander Bastrykin instructed the head of the Investigative Committee of the Investigative Committee of Russia for the Vladimir Region Kulakov A.A. initiate a criminal case and submit a report on the violation of the housing rights of the deceased serviceman. The course of the investigation will be put under control in the central office of the department. But about the collapsed stove in the house of Anna Savelyeva, the authorities still do not know anything, and so far they are sleeping peacefully …

There are days in early April when the air is fresh and clear. The world is full of children who have taken to the streets after the winter cold. And dogs warming old bones in the sun. It seems that a little more, and from somewhere on earth, on us, happiness will more than pour. There will be so much that there will be enough for everyone. And this expectation happens every year. Then it passes.

And the village of Urshelsky lives its ordinary life, filled with heroic meaning. Grandmothers knit socks for the front. Younger women weave camouflage nets in the House of Culture every day in the evenings. The pharmacy put a box, and buyers, buying drugs for themselves, put something in it for the fighters, whom everyone here is very proud of. After all, they are defending their homeland.