PSKOV/NOVGOROD/KALININGRAD, Russia -- The residential building at 32 ulitsa Truda – Labor Street -- in central Pskov could be a prestigious address, just a 20 minutes' walk along a main thoroughfare from the city's medieval kremlin on the banks of the Velikaya River. It was built in the early 1950s by German prisoners of war as a warehouse. Later, the city turned it into temporary housing.
An elderly man leaning out of a window to smoke was reluctant to answer a reporter's questions about the dilapidated building dripping with icicles and crumbling plaster.
"It seems normal to me," he said. "I'm going to die soon anyhow, so it is fine." Neighbors said the man has lived in the building in Pskov, a regional capital in northwestern Russia, his entire life.
The door handles on the main entrance are wrapped with a dirty rag to muffle the noise when the door slams shut. The entrance corridor smells immediately of damp and mold like an old basement. Two long corridors fan out with doors spaced regularly along them.
At the end of each, several sinks have been installed along the walls, and both corridors end with the entrance to a communal toilet. Residents gathered around the sinks for a smoke say there is a communal shower in the basement.
"I rent a room here," said 47-year-old Frantik Bogdanov, who used a profanity to describe the conditions. Bogdanov said he has lived in the building for four years.
"The administration doesn't give a damn about us," he said. "A few government commissions have come by, and they say the building is 'livable.'"
Despite the mold, the cracks in the walls, the constant drip of leaking pipes, and the complaints of residents, 32 ulitsa Truda has not been officially listed as uninhabitable.
According to the Russian government, 1.6 million Russians live in 112,353 buildings that have been officially deemed uninhabitable slums. It is unknown how many more live in buildings that residents say clearly should be condemned. It is a national problem that local officials seem unwilling or unable to address.
At a virtual meeting with government officials of all levels on November 30, President Vladimir Putin raised the issue.
"We have been constantly talking about this," Putin said. "We must move people out of these slums, as I already told my colleagues."
In fact, Putin has been "constantly talking" about the problem. He has urged officials to resolve the problem at least seven times over the past 15 years.
"A country with such reserves, accumulated from oil and gas profits, cannot resign itself to having millions of its citizens living in slums," Putin said during his annual address to the nation in 2007. During a 2013 visit to Kalmykia, he called the issue "the principal task" of the government. As recently as 2020, he called on officials to "close this shameful chapter" and to make sure that new slums do not appear.
"I'm waiting for the administration to give me an apartment," Bogdanov told RFE/RL's North.Realities. "I'm eligible as someone released from an orphanage. They were supposed to give me one almost 30 years ago."
'Everything Is Rotting'
In Novgorod, another administrative center in the northwest, the apartment building at No. 7 Sennaya ulitsa is notorious for fires and flooding. The older part of the building, erected in 1949, was evacuated three years ago and the residents resettled. The "new" part, built in 1957, has been declared uninhabitable, but the authorities have done nothing to help the people who live there. They have determined the building can remain occupied until 2030.
Drug addicts and homeless people frequently break in to shelter in the building, said local resident Anzhelika Nikitina.
"We board up the doors and windows ourselves, but they still break in," she said, adding that there was a fire in the building in April. "It is pointless."
The authorities have been unable to hire a company to manage the building, and the residents have to clean and maintain everything on their own.
"Everything is rotting," Nikitina said. "There are holes in the building all over…. From our bathroom, you can see the street [through the wall]. The pipes are rusted out. Yesterday, a pipe broke, and boiling water was everywhere."
Electricity and water supplies are regularly cut off without warning, Nikitina added.
Building residents have complained to the regional prosecutor's office. The municipal housing office ignored RFE/RL's request for comment.
Dangerous, dilapidated housing is one of the domestic problems that Kremlin critics say the government should be addressing instead of waging war against Ukraine, pointing out that Moscow is rebuilding some of the cities and towns destroyed in the devastating, unprovoked invasion of Ukraine that Russia launched in February.
In September, the national television network Channel One broadcast a report saying that construction workers from Novgorod had been sent to rebuild the front-line town of Vasylivka in the Russia-occupied part of Ukraine's Zaporizhzhya region.
Vouchers To Nowhere
Sofia Makhova, 23, lives in a one-story house that was built before World War II in rural Kaliningrad Oblast, Russia's far-western exclave on the Baltic Sea. Her parents were killed in an accident seven years ago.
"A lot happened at once then," Makhova said. "My parents died, and I got pregnant. After they died, the authorities listed their collapsing house as uninhabitable. I was placed on a list for resettlement, and I'm still there now."
After two court cases, the authorities were ordered to provide Makhova with an apartment.
"But when I asked, they said they had no apartments and gave me a voucher instead," Makhova said.
The value of the voucher was 2.5 million rubles ($40,000), while a one-room apartment in a new building in Kaliningrad costs about 4 million ($63,000).
"I can't buy an apartment in Kaliningrad or in Gurevsk for that money," Makhova said, mentioning the regional capital city and a provincial town near her parents' house.
Igor Oleinikov has lived in the Kaliningrad city of Baltiisk since 1989, when he was given an apartment for his work responding to the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear-plant disaster. In 2015, his apartment building was listed as uninhabitable.
Nonetheless, residents have not been relocated.
"My neighbors and I paid for an independent expert to take a look," Oleinikov said. "He took one photo in each apartment and said that it is plainly visible that this building is uninhabitable."
In 2018, a government commission found Oleinikov eligible for a housing voucher.
"I submitted all my documents, but nothing happened," he recalled. "Now I have lost my vision, and I can't go around to their offices to fight for my rights. I can only call and talk to them, but that doesn't help. No one will give me a straight answer, and they just kick me from one office to another."
"I'm tired of it all," he added.
