First Deputy Prime Minister Shuvalov
Wednesday First Deputy Prime Minister Igor Shuvalov criticized a Primorskiy Kray deputy governor for the low quality of new housing for military men in Vladivostok’s Snegovaya Pad microrayon. Shuvalov said the housing is cold, damp, and moldy. According to RIA Novosti, Shuvalov heard complaints from a worker at Dalpribor, and rerouted his visit to inspect his building.
Shuvalov said:
“The builders have performed badly — cold air blows from the window frames and receptacles, from the registers of the radiator mountings. The plastic windows throughout the apartment constantly “cry,” the wall in one of the rooms was quickly covered with mold. The temperature in the apartment didn’t rise above 9ºC degrees (48ºF).”
The press agency added that the walls of the apartment block’s service floor are cracked.
Shuvalov said the worker’s complaints are fully justified. The kray’s deputy governor promised, of course, to sort out the situation. But Shuvalov concluded the quality of completed construction needs a serious look, and added it’s impermissible that residents of new housing should have to make repairs.
Unusually frank comments from an unexpected source. But it’s interesting Shuvalov didn’t hear other serious complaints about “Snegpa” . . . the files are full of 34 press articles about the microrayon’s problems in the past three years, though there hasn’t been time to write on them. Most articles describe how this military housing was erected on Defense Ministry property, a former naval arms depot which exploded in 1992, without properly clearing and cleaning up old munitions and hazardous substances.
Newsru.com pointed this out. Snegpa, it says, is a densely populated area of 50,000 retired and active servicemen and family members that has only one daycare (детсад) facility and one secondary school. NVO (Sergey Konovalov) has written that Snegpa is one place where servicemen are refusing proferred apartments.
NVO doesn’t think anyone will be held responsible for the military housing mess. Interesting that Shuvalov was willing to blame a regional official, but not fellow Team Putin member Defense Minister Serdyukov and his deputies.
NVO also cited General Staff Chief Makarov at the OP on housing numbers. He said, by the end of 2011, the military will have obtained 134,700 apartments for the military since 2009, but there were still 63,800 in line on October 1.
Colonel Sergey Zavarzin, writing for KP, counted a Defense Ministry claim of 175,600 obtained, or due to be, between 2009 and the end of 2012. That number would be enough to close out the permanent apartment problem, if the military’s other numbers are accurate. And only if ex-military men are actually willing to move their families into them.
According to ITAR-TASS, President Medvedev and Prime Minister Putin addressed military apartments at last weekend’s United Russia conclave. The former reiterated his refusal to put servicemen out of the army without presenting them with permanent housing, if they are entitled to it (an easy call since it remains illegal to do so, and the military can also just warehouse them outside the org-shtadt).
Putin said the military housing program has to be seen through to the end:
“But, to this time, there are still many violations and much callousness, and these problems have to be brought to zero, to be fully eradicated.”
Pardon if these words have appeared previously, but the Russian approach toward military housing has been and is still a Soviet one — numerical targets, “storming,” poor quality, no life cycle or support planning, etc.
Russian Defense Policy 