A new threat of eviction has alarmed residents of a dormitory in the Elbrus region.

Authorities have once again initiated the eviction of residents from the former departmental dormitory in the village of Neutrino. Residents who acquired this property many years ago and have already won a lawsuit risk ending up homeless.

As reported by the "Caucasian Knot," in January 2020, 18 families in the village of Neutrino received lawsuits for eviction from the Baksan Neutrino Observatory (BNO) dormitory without being provided alternative housing. By that time, the defendants, including pensioners and families with children, had lived in the dormitory for 20-30 years.

The Territorial Administration (TA) of the Federal Property Management Agency (Rosimushchestvo) for Kabardino-Balkaria filed 76 lawsuits with the Elbrus District Court seeking eviction of residents of privatized apartments in the village of Neutrino, arguing that the village's housing stock is federal property and that privatizing it without the owner's consent is illegal.

The court dismissed some of the lawsuits because Rosimushchestvo representatives failed to appear at the hearings and failed to provide reasons for their absence. The remaining lawsuits are scheduled to be heard in January.

Sonya Khadzhieva is one of those facing the eviction lawsuit. She told a "Caucasian Knot" correspondent that she had worked as a nurse's aide in the outpatient clinic of the Baksan Neutrino Observatory since 1989, and in 1994, she was given a 29-square-meter room in a dormitory.

At that time, the Housing and Utilities Department of the INR RAS itself filed lawsuits, but the court refused to evict us.

"In 2021, the Housing and Utilities Department of the INR RAS (Federal State Unitary Enterprise "Housing and Utilities Department of the Institute of Nuclear Research of the Russian Academy of Sciences" - a federal enterprise declared bankrupt - Caucasian Knot note), to which the BNO management transferred some of the village's houses for economic management, initiated bankruptcy proceedings. At the request of the Housing and Utilities Department, the Arbitration Court of the Kabardino-Balkarian Republic excluded 76 apartments from the bankruptcy estate for transfer to private ownership. "BNO didn't object. By this time, the residents had been living in their apartments for 30 years or more. All of us, including me, breathed a sigh of relief: we thought we finally owned our apartments, and no one would evict us. After all, they had already tried to evict us once, in 2019 and 2020. Back then, the lawsuits had been filed by the Housing and Utilities Department of the Institute of Nuclear Research of the Russian Academy of Sciences, but the court had refused to evict us. And now we were facing a new threat of eviction. "I have no other housing. And I am a second-degree disabled person," Khadzhieva said.

Madina Tsakoeva's late husband worked at BNO. The apartment was allocated to him in 2005 by order, and after his death, it passed to her. Tsakoeva told a "Caucasian Knot" correspondent that their 38-square-meter apartment was "windowless, doorless, and in a state of extreme disrepair." The residents renovated it, tidied it up, and maintained it over the years, replacing pipes and painting the walls at their own expense.

"The fact that the court dismissed the eviction lawsuit doesn't guarantee that the Federal Property Management Agency won't file a new lawsuit with the same demand in a certain period of time," the woman shared her concerns.

We installed the windows and doors ourselves. We had to do major renovations twice.

Lyubov Nakani worked as a technician at BNO and received her apartment in 1998. "I don't own any property anywhere. My only property is the apartment in Neutrino. I got the apartment from work, one room. "Then they gave my daughter a room, since the three of us—my husband, my adult daughter, and I—were living in one room. At the time, the apartment was uninhabitable—no heat, no water. We installed the windows and doors ourselves. We did major renovations twice. Five years ago, they tried to evict us, but the court left the apartments to us," she told a "Caucasian Knot" correspondent.

The woman explained that in 2019-2020, they tried to evict her and her daughter, Khatuna Kartidze, from their apartment following a lawsuit filed by the management of the Housing and Utilities Department of the Institute of Nuclear Research of the Russian Academy of Sciences. However, the court then dismissed the claim, stating that Nakani and the other defendants had moved into the dormitory not under lease agreements, but on the basis of warrants issued to them by the State Unitary Enterprise "Housing and Communal Services of the Institute of Nuclear Research of the Russian Academy of Sciences."

Courts typically invalidate the privatization of housing transferred by an enterprise under the right of economic management without the owner's consent, since in such cases privatization is possible only with the owner's consent, lawyer Oleg Sergeev told a "Caucasian Knot" correspondent.

However, there are nuances that could influence the court's decision, the lawyer noted. "Thus, in accordance with Article 18 of the Law of the Russian Federation 'On the Privatization of the Housing Stock in the Russian Federation,' when state or municipal enterprises transfer to another form of ownership or when they are liquidated, the housing stock under the economic management of the enterprise must be transferred to citizens while preserving all their housing rights, including the right to privatization," Sergeev pointed out.