Hrodna: house sold together with dwellers

This spring the authorities of Hrodna sold at an auction the house in Kaliuchynskaya Street, 23. Soon it will be ruined, but its dwellers still don’t have even a slightest idea when and where they will be relocated.

Hrodna authorities have been trying to sell the house for many years already. The press wrote that the house was in a very bad condition and it did not correspond to the outlook of the ‘restored’ Savetskaya Square. However, instead of holding capital repairs the authorities tried to prepare ground for destroying the house.

The only institution by which the house could be bought is the ‘people’s’ pension fund, which has been fruitlessly struggling with Muravyov House in Savetskaya Square (which it allegedly intends to turn into a posh hotel) for two years already.

Of course, the pension fund does not need the house in Kaliuchynskaya Street, 23. It needs only the ground for parking near the future hotel. Hrodna city executive committee organized several auctions for the pension fund before, but the latter refused to buy the house because of a huge cost (the relocation of people will cost about 2 billion rubles or $1 million).

In order to solve this ‘trifle’, this spring the house was sold together with dwellers. The time passes. The authorities promised that the people would be relocated to anew house which is allegedly being built by Minsk enterprise ‘Spetspradmash’. However, they don’t even know how much of the house has been built and whether there is such a house at all. However, even if such a house really exists, the administration of the pension fund does not lose anything on this bargain.

The matter is that the head of the supervisory board of the pension fund Ihar Kavaliou is also the director of ‘Spetspradmash’, so the money only migrates from one pocket to the other. Imagine: the house is bought at the expense of pension fees, then a new house is built (also for the pension fees) and the people are moved to it. Everyone is satisfied: the hotel gets the parking and the dwellers get new apartments. The fact that some 2-3 billion rubles of state money will disappear in someone’s pocket seems to disturb no one.

There is also another aspect of the problem: the house in question is a monument of history. It was built after the fire of 1885 and used to be one of the largest houses in Hrodna, where different educational establishments were situated. This house was one of the main houses from which Kaliuchynskaya Street began starting from Savetskaya Square. The central part of the street was overlapped by the Hrodna cinema in 1960-ies. The part of the street adjacent to Savetskaya Square was being ruing throughout the 1960-ies. The ruins of a house could be seen on the turn from Kirau Street, near the city prison. Recently they have been demolished as well. Now, instead of restoring the remaining house in Kaliuchynskaya Street, the authorities plan to turn one of them in a shallow ground and then turn it into a car parking.