Landscape after battle

Here stood the house.

Ilya Varlamov, author of the photos after the arson in January has published again the photos of the Muromtsev dacha one day after its demolition, on 8 March, Women’s Day, seven in the morning.


Women’s Day is public holiday in Russia, thus the press came to senses only two days after the destruction. After the first English language summary by Lena Lebedeva-Hooft it was the Moscow Time to publish the first English article on the dacha. The inhabitants of the house also wrote an open letter in English addressed to Amnesty International. A lot more articles have been published in Russian, of course, whose links are being collected on the site of the friends of the Muromtsev dacha. One has to particularly mention the article by Natalya Samover in the journal of the city-protecting association Arkhnadzor. Russia’s most popular TV channel Rossiya-1 has also broadcasted a good program on the house in the newscast Vesti.


A separate Wikipedia article on the Muromtsev dacha has been also published by the dacha’s friends, translated to English by us (with deep gratitude to Language Hat for the revision and for his valuable advices). The article will be soon expanded and illustrated, so you are invited to check back. The detailed chronology evinces that the plot and the house had been without a legal owner since 1991, and that the City of Moscow began to claim it – by producing suspicious documents not known even by the Moscow Land Registry – when the inhabitants demanded the court to recognize their rights of property after the fifteen years prescribed by the law on acquisitive prescription. Legal proceedings have not been finished yet, and the bulldozer brigade arriving on Sunday early morning only had written permission to “clear away building debris” on the plot. Well, in the end, this is what happened.

Soviet Women’s Day poster: Life is merrier with every day!

Update, 18 March 2010:

British architect AJP Crown has just published the hitherto most detailed English language summary on the history of the Muromtsev Dacha, composed with extreme care and thoroughness.

Some hours ago Ivan Mitin published on the community site of the Muromtsev Dacha his video with English subtitles on the demolition of the dacha: