Families Eye Return Of Palaces / The St. Petersburg Times
Two young women conduct a conversation in the Alexandrovsky Park on a sunny day. They are seated on park benches, perhaps drawn together earlier by outdoor chess enthusiasts.
Buildings in the center of St. Petersburg that the Bolsheviks confiscated should be given to descendants of the original owners, a round table was told last week.
Representatives of the Russian Empire Union and the organization Our Heritage and Alexander Chuyev, a State Duma lawmaker, who has drafted a bill on restitution, took part.
The round table, organized by Rosbalt, addressed the concerns of descendants of noble families for the fate of St. Petersburg's Palaces.
"If privatization takes place in Russia without any discussion on restitution, this would be illegal and immoral," Chuyev, a Rodina deputy, said at the round table on Thursday.
"The question of the privatization of cultural memorials should be approached in a way that respects the descendants of those who owned them," he said. "The nationalizations should be condemned and the descendants should be given the right to determine what happens to the properties. Apologies should be made to descendants of those people who were deprived of their property."
While conceding that the time is not right for the buildings to be restored to the families of the former owners, participants at the round table said that in the future the government should revisit the issue and that descendants would lobby for more progress to be made on restitution.
Many of the buildings that were once palaces belonging to noble families are today apartment blocks and some apartments have been privatized. Even those that are not residential and are entirely state-owned have been poorly maintained.
While other former Socialist countries have addressed the issue of returning confiscated real estate, Russia has shown little initiative on the issue and many citizens are opposed to it.
"It would be a significant step if the leadership of the country rehabilitated its relations with compatriots, many of whom live abroad," Chuyev said. His bill, which urged that architectural y significant sites be handed to the descendants of their former owners, has been filed in the State Duma, but was rejected by the Duma's property committee.
Meanwhile, representatives of the former owners admitted that the topic might be too sensitive to raise in the current circumstances."We don't call for restitution, but we want to attract the attention of society to this problem," said Boris Turovsky, head of the Russian Empire Union.
"The architectural sites have two kind of owners, a factual and historical. The historical successors can prove their rights in court," Turovsky said.However, he said that if a law on restitution is passed it could lead to social unrest.
"We don't want a second revolution," he said. Chuyev said almost every building in the center of St. Petersburg could be subject to claims from the descendants of the former owners and could theoretically be returned if it was taken away against the will of the owners, according to the Civil Code.But, considering that the descendants have had little success to get the buildings in the past 12 years, this is a theoretical possibility only, he added.
Since 1993, when talks on restitution started in earnest, almost the only former owner of seized sites to have succeeded in getting back even part of its former real estate is the Russian Orthodox Church. At the same time several groups representing the interests of former owners, such as the Moscow-based Union of Merchants, have failed to prove their ownership rights in court, according to reports in the local media.
Princess Vera Obolenskaya, who grew up in France and has moved to St. Petersburg, said when she came back she found an estate that had belonged to her family in the Tverskaya region was in an awful condition."There are only ruins left, but in the past we exported cheese to Holland from there," she said."This is just a nightmare. There are only poor peasants left everywhere around," Obolenskaya said.
"The question of restitution was not initiated by us, but by the St. Petersburg governor, when she said that if buildings that are considered as architectural monuments are put up for sale, descendants will have the first right to buy them," Interfax quoted Dmitry Shakhovsky, honorary chairman of Our Heritage, as saying Thursday."I am more concerned about the legal and moral aspects of this question, but not the practical one," he said. "I am concerned about protecting the appearance of these buildings and about the future of the city."
But the restitution seems to be far from a priority for Governor Valentina Matviyenko."It is unlikely that there will be any developments on this matter in the near future," Natalya Kutabayeva, the governor's spokeswoman, said Friday in a telephone interview. "There hasn't been any information on it recently."
Matviyenko and LUKoil president Vagit Alekperov in April last year signed an agreement that the oil company will invest up to $100 million in the local fuel market development until 2007, and spend another $30 million renovating the Stieglitz Palace at 68 Angliiskaya Naberezhnaya. But last week LUKoil backed out of its plans to renovate the palace."It was planned to renovate part of the palace to be used for the office of the company, but it was unsuitable.
