The Living and the Dead

The Story Local Media Didn't Want to Cover, And Then It Was Too Late

Originally published, in Russian, in The New Tab
Text by Marfa Khvostova
Images by The New Tab

One frigid January night, 82-year-old Svetlana Mitina froze to death in a dilapidated house in Kurgan, a city at the southern end of Russia’s Ural Federal District. The city administration had long resisted condemning the building, even though the roof had fallen in, the stove intended as a heat source no longer worked, and there was no glass in the windows. In the lead-up to Russia’s 2024 gubernatorial elections, Mitina’s relatives had gone to the local government radio and television broadcasting company for help. At the time, the station wasn’t able to run any “negative stories.” Marfa Khvostova, a freelance journalist working for the independent online publication The New Tab, went to Kurgan to report on the story state-run media didn’t want to touch.

The night of January 21, temperatures in Kurgan dropped to their lowest point so far that winter: minus 24° Celsius (minus 11° Fahrenheit). In the ramshackle house at 45 Ordzhonikidze Street, 82-year-old Svetlana Mitina, who had long since retired from a career at the local weather station, was freezing. The cold was seeping in through the boarded-up windows, the crooked door, the ice-cold floor, and the leaky roof. The woolen blankets covering the doors and the tent of plastic sheeting the pensioner had constructed over her bed to protect against the wind were not enough to keep her warm.

The house was just a bit younger than Svetlana. “The first floor is brick and has turned into a hangout for squatters. The second floor is wood. The entire structure is falling apart. The plaster in the apartment has crumbled, the floors are slanted, there is mold growing on the walls, which are warped, there is no heating system, and the stove is inoperable: the chimney has collapsed, and the ceiling near the chimney has fallen in. There is no insulation, the floors are wooden planks, and teenagers have smashed the windows.” This is how Vladimir, 76, Svetlana Mitina’s younger brother, described the house in his appeals to officials. Beginning in the spring of 2024, he wrote dozens of letters to various government offices asking that the building be condemned and that his sister be given a new place to live.

“An 82-year-old woman just won’t be able to survive the winter in housing like this; she’ll freeze,” Vladimir wrote in letters to the prosecutor’s office, the Kurgan city government, and the oblast Duma, among other government offices.

He was right: Svetlana Mitina didn’t survive the winter.

The House

The house at 45 Ordzhonikidze Street sits amid a thicket of overgrown nettles and crowfoot on the corner of a street lined with private houses, three-story apartment complexes, a service station, a bathhouse, a post office, and grocery stores. Cars rumble through the busy intersection. From here, it takes 20 minutes to reach the city center in a rattling minibus and ten to get to the airport, from where planes fly off to Moscow, St. Petersburg, and Sochi. The wooden barracks that dot the neighborhood used to belong to the airport, as did the house on Ordzhonikidze. They too are in a state of collapse.

Vladimir Mitin and his wife Valentina moved more than a thousand miles away, to Tambov, eight years ago and only returned to Kurgan to visit Svetlana and their parents’ graves.

Vladimir is eager to enter the house. His wife is afraid: what if the ceiling suddenly caves in? A light rain starts to fall, and we head for the steep wooden staircase leading up to the Mitin apartment. Vladimir explains that the first floor used to belong to a leather processor. The Mitin family had moved into the single-room apartment on the second floor in the early 1950s.

In her youth, Svetlana Mitina wore her hair long and complained to her girlfriends that it was too thick and hard to manage.

Svetlana and Vladimir’s parents met in Russia’s Far East in 1941. Their father, Semyon, was a pilot and fought in the Battles of Khalkhin Gol their mother, Raisa, worked as an armorer, installing guns onto fighter planes. Svetlana was born in November 1942, and after the war Semyon moved the family to Kurgan, where two sons were born: Valery and Vladimir. The parents continued working in aviation, Semyon as an airplane technician at the airport and Raisa at a flying club.

The Mitin apartment is dark: the windows are mostly boarded up with plywood. The lightbulbs have been removed. There are Soviet-era plates in a light-blue pattern and a television remote control. The round stove is all that prevents the sagging shingled roof from totally collapsing. A wardrobe holds several colorful crocheted belts; there are jars with apricot pits in the kitchen cabinet. Bunches of dried herbs are hanging on the kitchen wall. Rain drops fall from the kitchen ceiling.

“There was a refrigerator here, a cabinet, a stovetop. There was a gas tank in the corner. A Singer sewing machine. Everything was swiped for scrap metal,” Vladimir said as he surveyed the ravaged apartment.

There are blankets of various sizes and colors hanging in each doorway: Svetlana hung them to protect from the cold. She stopped using the stove several years ago, after the ceiling started caving in. “If a cat ran through the attic, all sorts of stuff would come raining down from there,” Vladimir said. He bought his sister a heater, but it blew the fuses.

Vladimir said that, after his sister graduated a teacher’s college, she left for Vorkuta to work in a kindergarten, apparently drawn by the higher salaries paid in the North. Together with her mother, she saved up to buy an apartment, but in the 1990s, the bank holding their savings went under and “they lost everything.”

It was too cold in Vorkuta, and Svetlana stayed there just one year. Vladimir takes out a photograph of his sister at 23 with the caption: “Vorkuta, 1965.” The photograph was used for the medallion on Svetlana’s tombstone.

After returning to Kurgan, Svetlana got a job as at the airport weather station so she could register as a resident at her parents’ apartment. Later, she moved to the city weather station, a ten-minute walk from her home. She worked there for about twenty years, until her retirement in 1997.

Vladimir fishes a sheet of thick white paper with a decorative yellow border out of a heap of junk: the Certificate of Appreciation that Svetlana Mitina received from the weather station’s management in the early 2010s.

Esteemed Svetlana Semyonovna! We congratulate you with the 50th Anniversary of the founding of the Kurgan Hydrometeorological Center. Your hard work and expertise have helped to create an enterprise capable of solving important problems involved in ensuring Kurgan Oblast’s climate security.  You have devoted a significant portion of your life in the weather service.

“She was a lively one”

At the weather station, Svetlana Mitina was very literally in charge of the wind: she monitored its direction with the help of a weather balloon. Her former colleague, 75-year-old Vera Sinitsyna, explained how a probe – a gigantic hydrogen-filled balloon – was released into the atmosphere four times a day. It would rise 40 kilometers and send back information about the wind direction, atmospheric pressure, humidity, and temperature. The balloon quickly disappeared from sight. It sent back data via a radio signal.

“Sveta was very good at it. She managed to operate the controls with both hands while writing down the probe coordinates, with ink, with a pen,” Sinitsyna said.

She added that, at holiday parties, Svetlana was “cheerful, would sing and dance.” She would always bring homemade kozinaki (a caramelized confection using nuts or sesame seeds and honey) and chocolate truffles, which were hard to find in stores. Her signature dish was marinated honey mushrooms.

“She loved to go into the forest and gather berries and mushrooms, then she would bring them to work to share. She knew every bush in the forest,” Sinitsyna said.

Vladimir also spoke of his sister’s love for the forest and how diligently she would scatter spawn to ensure that more mushrooms would appear in a few days. She would go into the woods on foot or on a bicycle, but sometimes she would take trains or even planes to more distant woods. Her brother said that she might buy a train ticket to go to the village of Shatrovo, 120 kilometers from Kurgan, and from there catch an An-2 to some forest where she could gather whortleberry: “She was full of energy – going everywhere, never afraid. She was a lively one.”

Her colleagues loved the way Mitina dressed: she had a real sense of style and always “tried to sew something from the magazines.” She never married, and lived with her parents. When Svetlana was 39, her father died of cancer. The middle sibling, Valery, moved away to Nizhnevartovsk, and Vladimir was working as an airplane technician and had to travel a lot for work.

Svetlana and her mother kept a cow, later adding a piglet, chickens, and rabbits. Svetlana made hats and collars out of rabbit fur, but she couldn’t bring herself to slaughter the animals: she had to ask an acquaintance to do that for her.

Since 1995, when her mother died, Svetlana Mitina had been living alone. In the 2010s, by which time the house was already decrepit and very cold, she would sometimes spend the night at work.

“So many times we said to her ‘Svetka, buy yourself an apartment.’ But she was stubborn and had a complicated personality. She would reply ‘I’ll get through the winter, and in the summer it’s paradise here.’ She was really attached to that house: it was the only thing she really needed,” said Vera Sinitsyna.

In recent years, Sinitsyna would occasionally run into Svetlana on the street when the latter was heading to the market. “Her pension was small, and she was looking for places she could get things for the lowest price. She really loved fruits, especially persimmon,” Sinitsyna recalled. Svetlana would prepare large quantities of pelmeni for the winter. “She’d freeze them and then eat them all winter.” After she retired, she continued to cultivate two small vegetable gardens near the weather station: she grew potatoes and tomatoes and canned various preserves.

“If I leave, I’ll never be able to return”

Although the house belonged to the city (in the 1990s, the airport had transferred ownership), Svetlana Mitina considered it her property. She even once asked her brother to disassemble the second floor and transport it to Osinovka, a village about 70 kilometers from Kurgan where the siblings had spent school holidays with their grandparents.

After Svetlana died, her relatives found money in her nightstand that would have sufficed to buy a small apartment.

“She saved all her life but couldn’t bring herself to spend the money. But she was not planning to die, and to the end believed that she could manage,” Vladimir’s wife Valentina said.

In 2017, when Vladimir and Valentina decided to move to Tambov, they urged her to come along. She categorically refused: “That’s a crazy idea!” And when Vladimir began writing to local officials to ask that she be moved out of the deteriorating house, his sister thought it was pointless, and worried that her brother’s efforts would just get her thrown out onto the street.

In April of 2024, Vladimir and his wife petitioned the city government to declare Svetlana's house unsafe. Back in the 2010s, when he had asked the management company to repair it, the company declared it to be 75 percent deteriorated: “They brought a few bricks, but who was going to make the repairs? Svetka?”

In late April, an inter-departmental commission tasked with evaluating residential housing decided to examine the house. In May, the deputy head of Kurgan, Roman Medvedev, promised that they would find money to prepare an expert finding and an appropriate company to implement it.

There are just “one or two” such companies in Kurgan, according to the city’s Economic Development Department. The city did not have the money to pay for an examination, we were told by a member of the department’s Administrative-Technical Inspectorate reached by telephone:

“We’ve got more than twenty houses for which petitions have been filed to have them pronounced unsafe. But the city government isn’t allocating the money for an outside company to issue a finding. And until that procedure has been completed, nobody will declare a house to be unsafe.”

But, at the same time, Kurgan Oblast has found funds for, for example, the needs of the so-called Lugansk and Donetsk Peoples Republics. Since 2022, the region has been sending freight-car loads of building materials to Donbas, and in 2024 the oblast government allocated more than 50 million rubles (about $621,000) to fix up several apartment buildings in Luhansk (the Ukrainian spelling of the occupied territory) Oblast.

No Negative Stories

In August 2024, Svetlana called Vladimir: “Vovka, please come – the kids have smashed my windows again.”

“When we got there, it was obvious that she had gone downhill a bit. I told her: ‘Svetka, you’re not going to make it through the winter. Come live with us,’” Vladimir said. His sister refused, and when he proposed renting her a place in Kurgan, she was afraid to leave the house. “If I leave, I’ll never be able to return. They’ll take everything. If I go to the store, I come back and find the lock broken, and the kids are already rummaging through my stuff,” her brother recalled her saying.

On three occasions, Svetlana called the police, but teenagers just scattered on their bicycles before the police could catch them. When Vladimir and his wife next returned to Kurgan, they started going from office to office to plead for help. They were always given the same answer: before she could be provided with temporary housing, a commission had to declare her house unsafe. Valentina had a thick blue folder filled with all their correspondence with officials.

Everyone knew that the house on Ordzhonikidze was in a state of collapse: the oblast’s governor, Vadim Shumkov; the city administrators; the members of the Kurgan City Duma; the welfare officials; the building inspectors; the regional office of the United Russia party; and the prosecutor’s office. The Mitins had written to them all about the house’s decrepit state. They had also turned to the media – to the Kurgan broadcasting company and Oblast 45, Kurgan Oblast’s cable TV channel and internet news and information service.

“All month long we went from office to office. We wanted to make appointments to meet with officials, but nobody would meet with us: ‘Write us.’ Wherever we went they’d say: ‘45 Ordzhonikidze Street? Yeah, we know,’” Valentina said.

In August 2024, the Mitins received a response from the city: the resettlement program for unsafe housing had been closed ahead of schedule, and the new one would start up January 1, 2025. However, since Svetlana’s house hadn’t been declared unsafe, “She can’t be resettled within the framework of the future program.”

Meanwhile, in early 2025, Kurgan Oblast entered the ranks of the top 18 Russian regions in terms of its volume of construction. It became the only administrative entity within the Ural Federal District to achieve an increase in multi-unit housing for the first half of that year. Kurgan is currently expecting to relocate 785 people whose homes were declared unsafe back in 2017.

When they went to the Investigative Committee (a federal anti-corruption agency), there was a local policeman on duty who summoned “some air-headed woman” to take care of them. Her advice was: “Have her move in with you.”

“What is she – a suitcase you can just pick up and take with you? She’s lived here her entire life. Everyone knew about her, and nobody wanted to do anything. They couldn’t allocate a room for a war child?” Valentina lamented. (Svetlana was born in 1942, the height of Russia’s intense fight to expel Nazi invaders; some Russian regions provide special benefits to people born under such circumstances, but Kurgan Oblast is not among them.)

Desperate, Valentina and Vladimir sought help from Kurgan’s local TV and radio broadcasting company. While they were there, a woman came out into the corridor to quietly fill them in: “We’ve been given a directive: until the elections we can’t cover any negative stories.” In September 2024, elections for city council and the governorship were held and the region’s current head, Vadim Shumkov, the United Russia candidate, was reelected for a second term.

A year later, in September 2025, posters promoting candidates for the Kurgan Oblast Duma began appearing along city streets. One of them touted the United Russia’s “People’s Program,” proclaiming “people should live in decent housing with amenities,” and including a quote by (former Russian president) Dmitry Medvedev describing Russia as a country where “the older generation can live a full life.”

On January 15, 2025, nine months after their first appeal to city officials, the Mitins received a response: city officials wrote that Svetlana’s home had been declared unfit for habitation and that she could apply to the appropriate office for citizens in need of housing any Tuesday. Apparently, this decision had been made back on December 20.

When Valentina called Svetlana to share the news, Svetlana sounded skeptical: “We’ll have to see,” adding, “Don’t call me for now, my phone is about to die: it’s cold. I’ll call you back when it’s warmer.”

A few days later, Svetlana’s neighbor Yekaterina called and told the Mitins to buy tickets to Kurgan.

“Just a bit late”

“During my first encounter with Svetlana, she started swearing at me,” said Yekaterina Vorotnikova, Mitina’s 32-year-old neighbor. “One day we’d have a normal conversation, the next she’d send me you-know-where – that’s the kind of old lady she was. But I think she was that way because everyone was driving her crazy. She didn’t have the best of lives, especially recently.”

In 2019, when Vorotnikova and her husband built a house next to 45 Ordzhonikidze Street, there had been a cantankerous woman by the name of Olesya living on the floor below Mitina’s apartment. All the neighbors were “praying that she would move out.”

“But it would have been better if she’d stayed: while she was there, heat would come up from the first floor and at least there was some degree of order. But about three years ago, after Olesya left, children started coming in and ransacking the first floor. I tried to get them out of there and called children’s services. But how could they do anything? There weren’t any cameras – nothing. How could they possibly find them?”

In an effort to draw the attention of local government to Svetlana Mitina’s situation, in July 2024, Yekaterina posted a message on VKontakte (a popular Russian social media platform). She wrote about the broken windows and the homeless people using the first floor as a place to drink and sleep. She also summoned the police several times.

“It was scary for the old woman to have some guys drinking downstairs. I was anxious and worried: anything could happen, someone could fall asleep with a lighted cigarette.”

“How awful! We thought it had been long since abandoned”; “How will she be able to live in the cold; she might just fall asleep and not wake up and nobody would even know – that’s the scariest of all…” local residents wrote in the comments. Yekaterina replied that Svetlana was expecting help from the local government. Local officials also posted a comment promising to inspect the building in the coming week. That did not happen.

Yekaterina couldn’t believe the lack of action: “In August, her brother came. Emergency Services inspections got underway. Couldn’t they see that nobody could realistically live there – how could everything have been dragging on for half a year?”

In September 2024, the local prospector’s office issued a finding that local officials were violating the law: nobody had inspected the house and the commission hadn’t even discussed coming up with a new place for Mitina to live. Now they were promising an inspection before November 1, but once again, their promise proved empty.

In December, the Mitins wrote to President Putin, but their appeal was forwarded to the government of Kurgan Oblast.

“They kept dragging it out, as if they didn’t understand that she couldn’t survive the winter,” Vladimir commented.

“She froze to death, just like that”

In December 2024, Yekaterina Vorotnikova wrote an appeal to Vladimir Putin’s “Direct Line” (an annual televised event at which Russian citizens have the opportunity to submit questions to the president). She didn’t receive a response.

On January 24, a policemen called Yekaterina and asked when she had last seen the old woman. A post office worker was concerned that Svetlana had not come to pick up her pension.

“We aren’t obligated to call the police, but we just wanted to, out of basic humanity," said Yelena, a postal worker at the office where Mitina came to get her monthly pension. “We know that she’s all alone and that the house isn’t heated and dark [due to the boarded-up windows and unreliable electricity].” Even in summer, Mitina would be wearing a warm jacket when she came for the money, because she always felt cold. “Why was she left to the whims of fate? She was a woman of the old mold; she didn’t want to leave her lordly manor. It’s a shame, of course, that she froze to death, just like that.”

When the policeman came to check on Mitina, he and Yekaterina spent a long time knocking on the door, but no one came to answer. The door was fastened shut with a wire, so they needed an ax to break through it. The apartment was dark, and the wind was “worse than outside,” according to Yekaterina. There was a five-liter can of sea-buckthorn juice in the kitchen that was frozen solid. In the corridor stood a bucket that Svetlana used as her toilet, dumping the contents out over the fence, since there was no plumbing in the house and the outhouse had fallen apart.

“We went inside, and she, poor thing, was lying on the floor next to the bed curled up like a kitten, totally stiff. There was a tent set up on the bed, some sort of black plastic. She must have been using it to protect against the wind. I burst out crying and left.”

Fifteen minutes later, an ambulance and the morgue workers arrived. Two people picked Svetlana Mitina up and dragged her down the steep wooden staircase.

As they were carrying the old woman out, some people were walking past: “Oh, we thought she’d died a long time ago.”

According to the death certificate, Svetlana Mitina died on January 22. When Yekaterina Vorotnikova wrote about her death on VKontakte, a city official added a comment that “Specialists will sort out the situation and prepare a response.” Further comments expressed outrage: “You’re going to forward the response to the other side?”; “You should have figured it out earlier; nobody gives a s**t about your response now.”

“If only she had been living under normal conditions, I think she would have lived much longer,” Yekaterina said. A moment later she added: “I think she’s better off where she is now.”

In late January, Yekaterina received a call from a city official in response to her appeal to Putin’s Direct Line that had been forwarded back to local government: “Young lady, why are you spreading lies, saying that someone is still living there? We went to check and there’s no one there.”

“I told them ‘She died two days ago.’ There was silence at the other end. Apparently, they didn’t expect that response. They were just a bit late.”

“No basis for prosecutorial measures”

Svetlana Mitina was buried in Kurgan’s Ryabkovo Cemetery next to her father and mother. The death certificate listed “coronary insufficiency” as the cause of death. Her relatives don’t buy it.

“If it hadn’t been for these winters, she would have lived to 90. It was the winter that got her,” Vladimir said.

Two weeks after his sister was buried, he again called the Kurgan prosecutor’s office. “I really want to know why it took the commission from August to the middle of January, by which time it would be freezing, to make their decision. And why didn’t the local government do anything to take care of an 82-year-old woman, leaving her to the whims of fate? I really hope that the prosecutor’s office will get to the bottom of this question and give me an answer. It won’t change anything in our case, but I wouldn’t want this to happen to anyone else.”

A month later, he received a response from acting prosecutor Sergei Snezhkov, that “the party at fault has been held accountable.” Just who the party in question was and what sort of “accountability” they were held to was not specified.

The office had ruled that there was “no basis for prosecutorial measures.”

Before leaving Kurgan, Vladimir and Valentina visited Svetlana’s grave. It was a warm, sunny day. Vladimir used a sanitary wipe to clean his sister’s tombstone from the debris left by a nighttime thunderstorm. At the edge of the grave, the sturdy cap of a small russula mushroom grows, its strong cap piercing through the blanket of fir needles.

“Even here, mushrooms grow for her,” Vladimir said.

Valentina nodded in agreement. “Scattering spawn and cultivating mushrooms. She loved that.”