RIA Novosti
December 6, 2005
Should nationalized property be restituted to former owners in Russia?
MOSCOW. (RIA Novosti political commentator Vladimir Simonov.) There is an old wooden house standing amidst modern high-rise buildings in central Moscow.
The municipal authorities recently handed this historical building over to the well-known actor Nikolai Porokhovshchikov, to whose family it belonged in the past. Perhaps, this is one of the rare cases of the restitution of property nationalized by the Bolsheviks after the 1917 revolution.
Nevertheless, the idea of restitution still arouses public interest in the country, and has both supporters and opponents. This problem sparked a heated discussion the other day at the conference on restitution organized in St. Petersburg by the descendants of the Russian nobility with the support of a local news agency.
The participants in the forum discussed the experience of some European countries, including the former members of the socialist bloc, which have successfully used various forms of reimbursement for the real estate nationalized by the state, ranging from tax exemptions to financial compensation in cash or securities.
The heirs of the St. Petersburg nobility were interested in the latter option. Andrei Sorokin, a lawyer and leader of the St. Petersburg branch of the Russian Imperial Union, which unites the descendants of the nobility, believes the state would be wise to issue special restitution certificates which could be accepted in lieu of tax payments.
Earlier, the Russian Orthodox Church made an attempt to restore historical justice. Many of Moscow's religious communities filed suits demanding the return of the churches confiscated by Lenin's decree on the separation of the church from the state in 1917.
Today, most churches, like the land on which they were built, belong to the state. As a result, the church has found itself in a situation where it must pay over 300 million rubles (over $10 million) in taxes for renting the land under "public buildings used for the exercise of religious rites," something that cannot but irritate it.
The initiators of restitution in the State Duma have many active supporters. Alexander Chuyev, deputy from the Rodina (Homeland) faction, has prepared the draft of the law to restore the historical rights of the church and private owners to the property that belonged to them in the past. He believes that some form of restitution is necessary to strengthen national stability because "otherwise, no property owner in Russia can be certain about the future."
However, Chuyev's opinion is at variance with current official and public opinion. Mikhail Barshchevsky, a well-known lawyer who represents government interests in the Constitutional Court, says that this is just another attempt to stage a universal re-division of property, which is more likely to result in chaos than the present situation.
Let us suppose that the court will side with the church, he says. Then, the heirs of the Romanov dynasty may bring up the question of recovering the Winter Palace. The heirs of the Tretyakov Art Gallery founders may also demand the return of the buildings and the collection of paintings. Barshchevsky believes that nationalized property should not be restituted to former owners, which would result in social upheavals on a scale that no state would survive.
Meanwhile, many historical palaces and estates in Russia and West European countries are becoming dilapidated and falling into ruin because their owners, be it the state as in Russia, or the impoverished nobility as in Britain, cannot finance their maintenance. This lamentable situation recently prompted St. Petersburg Governor Valentina Matviyenko to put forward a proposal to transfer some of the city's historical buildings and museums into private hands. The draft law prepared by Matviyenko is designed to give the green light to the privatization of carefully selected architectural monuments, in some cases on exceptionally favorable terms - at half the price. The governor makes it clear that in this situation the authorities have no choice: unless this is done now, in five to ten years there will only be ruins left.
Matviyenko's initiative has also sparked heated debates. The heirs of the nobility see the sale of the real estate owned by their families in the past as a second attempt to dishonor them. The Russian nouveau riche are happily anticipating the auctioning of historical monuments, certain that no one will be able to compete with them. Meanwhile, scholars and lawmakers are concerned about how to make the new owners fulfill their duties to restore and properly maintain the national heritage that is to fall into their hands.