The Petrovsky District Court of the Stavropol Territory declared illegal the refusal to register 71-year-old Nikolai Mitkin, whose mother was exiled to Usollag, on a housing register. Grigory Vaypan, a lawyer for International Memorial, said this.
“Mitkin’s mother, the German Frida Keller, was deported from the German farm Nikolaevka in the Ordzhonikidzevsky (now Stavropol) Territory to Kazakhstan in 1941, and from there they were sent to Usollag. Mitkin was born in 1951 in a special settlement in the village of Ust-Yazva in the Molotov Region (now the Perm Territory) and still lives there. It is 330 kilometers north of Perm,” he said.
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In 2019, the Constitutional Court ordered officials to issue apartments without any conditions to the children of repressed families at their former place of residence, but the Stavropol authorities ignored this decision in the case of Mitkin, Vaypan added .
“This is the first court decision known to me when stubborn local officials are obliged, in pursuance of the decision of the Constitutional Court, to recognize the right of the “children of the Gulag” for housing. In some regions, the «children of the Gulag» since 2020, they have been put on housing records without any courts (for example, in Moscow and St. Petersburg), ”he specified.
In July 2020, after the decision of the Constitutional Court, the government submitted a bill to the State Duma that was supposed to simplify the issuance of housing to the descendants of the repressed and exclude additional conditions, in particular the requirement to return to the region where the family used to live. By February 2022, the bill had not been considered.