“Land cadaver” (“Zemel’niy kadavr”), SmartMoney 22 (112), 23 June 2008. 12 July 2010 http://www.vedomosti.ru/smartmoney/article/2008/06/23/5760.

On the situation of unused state-owned land in the capital.  The Gosduma under the auspices of Medvedev has passed a new law (on the Assistance Fund for Residential Construction Development) aimed at redistributing currently unused federal lands that are the most valuable for residential development (as construction lands or as lands for construction material factories).  Out of the 10,000 most attractive hectares, half are located in settled areas, many of which are in Kaliningrad.  A special commission will assess whether or not suspected lands are being used, but the criteria for such categorization and seizure are not delineated in the law.

In one case with the Russian Academy of the Sciences (RAN), whose lands (under permanent perpetual use, according to Vikiteka at http://ru.wikisource.org/wiki/Устав_Российской_академии_наук) are threatened by the new law, RAN proposed to Putin directly to construct residential buildings for young scientists in order to avoid a supposedly temporary restructuring takeover by the state company “Rostekhnologiya;” nonetheless, in April 2009, operations on these lands were expected to be frozen by a special order of the administration, and then after the passage of the new law, will most likely be given over to the Land Fund or directly to the region.  (An order regarding this freeze of RAN lands from the Kremlin appeared on the Federal State Cadastre website on 30 July 2009 at http://r41.kadastr.ru/news/media/999725/; the first of these lands were to be put up for auction in November, according to http://www.nep08.ru/agroprom/news/2009/10/09/fond_rzhs/).

Difficulties with disagreements over fair compensation and with insufficient monies in the Moscow Department of Land Resources are described, although the new law is expected to inject new momentum and resources into the coffers of available, valuable lands; within the week, first vice-director of the department Oleg Ryzhkov planned to send notices to involved lands.  Some of these Moscow lands will be seized for but small roadway expansions, though seizures for transport were not intended to be enabled by the law.  The fate of a 500-hectare plot in Kaliningrad under military ownership is also discussed.