All Of Our Buildings Together Would Cost The Same As A Few Days Of War

160 billion rubles are needed to resettle residents of condemned housing in Arkhangelsk Oblast – the amount that the Russian Army currently spends in a single week of fighting in Ukraine.

In winter, the temperature inside the two-story wooden building at 123 Gulyaev Street in Arkhangelsk is about 12º Celsius (54º Fahrenheit). And winter at these latitudes can last from October to May. In the bathrooms on the first floor, the pipes will freeze if you turn the water off even for a minute. Not long ago, the floor caved in – it had completely rotted out – and a toilet fell through. It was retrieved from the basement and put back into place using spray foam. By official count, Arkhangelsk Oblast has 6,274 buildings like this, long declared unfit for habitation and destined for demolition. It’s not just a trial to live in them – it’s actually dangerous. They burn down, they flood, and in June, when it warms up and the ground thaws, these buildings can shift off their pile foundations and slip sideways. Rehousing their residents would cost R160 billion. That’s how much Russia spent on five days of war last year; this year, it plans to increase its rate of spending. We went to investigate the lives of some of the Russian citizens who continue to live in these unlivable buildings while their country kills people in Ukraine.

Arkhangelsk has earned the title “the capital of substandard housing.” Wooden buildings known as derevyashki that are crooked, decaying and unfit for habitation (yet still inhabited) exist in other parts of Russia, of course, but nowhere else are there as many as in Arkhangelsk Oblast. The region was once known as “the country’s lumber mill,” and Soviet authorities rushed to build housing for the workers needed to power the timber industry. They built it hastily, with materials that were cheap and easily available – which meant the lumber logging operations sent floating down the Severnaya Dvina River. People were promised that communism was right around the corner, and that the wooden buildings would soon be replaced with durable stone ones.

There are currently 1,763 condemned buildings in Arkhangelsk alone (within the city limits). By law, their residents should have been rehoused at state expense, but people have been waiting 10 to 15 years for this to happen. And there are just as many buildings in similar condition that have simply not been condemned. Governor Alexander Tsybulsky proudly declared in 2024 that, under his thoughtful leadership, the oblast was continuing to “increase the pace of housing construction in order to resettle people from condemned buildings” and had rehoused 5,700 people.

To see what’s actually happening, take, for instance, one building on Zavodskaya Street in Arkhangelsk, where Mariya Tarasova used to live with her son, alongside five other families. That is, take what is left of their building. On paper, this collapsed building is still listed as its former inhabitants’ legal residence.

“My room was here on this side,” Mariya says, gesturing at the ruins. “Officially, we still live here. They condemned some of the apartments around 2011 and the entire building in 2020, when it came off its piles. There was a fire in 2022, but people kept living in some of the apartments – they had nowhere else to go. They told us there was no money for apartments for us. Then they offered me a spot in short-term housing. We were welcomed there by a rat. Now I rent a room on the edge of town. Almost all my salary goes to pay for it, but it’s not like you can move your child into a place with rats. My son starts school next year, and that’s based on our legal address. Am I going to have to take him back and forth across the whole city?”

“It’s not like being hit by a missile”

“There were lumber mills everywhere around this road we’re on.” Lawyer Mikhail Vorobyov is driving, so he keeps his eyes on the snow-covered street as he invites me to examine the buildings on both sides of the road. “This was all lumber mill housing. But that’s the nature of our climate – it’s swampy and there are constant temperature fluctuations, so everything rots. We have entire streets in Arkhangelsk where you could bring in heavy machinery and knock everything down from start to finish. All the buildings are condemned.”

There are wooden buildings everywhere in Arkhangelsk. They’re even right downtown – rotted out, fire-damaged, and in total ruin, but more often than not as inhabited as they were before, with curtains and satellite dishes, even some new double-paned windows. Multistory buildings have been put up alongside them, but no apartments were available there for residents of the old derevyashki next door.

Vorobyov shared some history as part of our tour:

These wooden buildings started going up in the 1930s and kept being built right up to the 1980s. And it’s the Russian North – back in Soviet days, people came here to earn money; my dad arrived that way in the ’80s. They built them temporary barracks because there was a free resource: logs. And they’re not just any wood, but spruce and aspen – they rot fast. These buildings were meant to have a lifespan of 25 years. In Soviet times and the 1990s they were still being looked after somewhat and kept in good repair. But by the 2000s, the authorities stopped fixing them.

Vorobyov has been working on the run-down housing problem for more than 10 years. The first clients that came to him had a five-year-old court decision mandating that they immediately be provided with new housing in exchange for their substandard accommodations. To this day, Vorobyov says, 180 court decisions made in 2011 and 2012 have still not been implemented. The law states that people should at the very least be provided housing from the city’s short-term fund. In reality, they’re at best offered housing in the same sorts of wooden buildings they’d already been living in – just ones that haven’t yet been officially condemned.

On occasion, the authorities do decide out of nowhere that one of these buildings can be restored to livability. Vorobyov slows down on Yunost Street near a wood hydrolysis plant. This is Maymaksa, Arkhangelsk’s largest district. It’s been a long time since anybody lived in building No. 7, but no one is tearing it down. Back in the 2000s, R8 million were spent on major renovations (about $250,000 at the time). Within a year of the renovations, the building slid off its piles. People are still living in the buildings next door.

Houses going off their piles is a common event in Arkhangelsk. It usually begins in June and July, when the ground thaws.

“You’ve got a building that’s standing, standing, and then plop – it’s settled into the ground,” Vorobyov said, explaining what it looks like. “It’s not like being hit by a missile or catching on fire, when a building is destroyed. With residential construction in Arkhangelsk, buildings don’t tip over right away – they just end up resting on their wooden base instead of piles. If you crawl under the old buildings, some of the piles are shaped like Chinese rice paper lanterns – they can’t hold any weight. And the building slumps. It hangs on for a while thanks to the stone stoves, but it’s out of alignment. The building eventually becomes deformed so that it’s not a building anymore but a stack of building materials – it’s dangerous to live in. The rotting beams could collapse at any moment.”

From the outside, a building might look perfectly solid – it might even hang on for two or three more months – but living in it is like being in a war zone: you have to be ready to evacuate at any moment.

Vorobyov continued:

I always advise residents of wooden buildings not to keep anything valuable there, including papers and personal documents. Take things to work, I say, to a safe deposit box or to a friend’s place. And I always recommend having a “go bag” ready so they can get out at any moment. When a building collapses, emergency services come and the police keep watch. As for the residents: those who can, flee. Those who can’t, emergency services gets them out. Or carries them out if they’re hurt. Sometimes, after an inspection, they’ll let people in to grab some things, but often that’s not possible.

Residents of a building on Kotlasskaya Street, across from the Veterok kindergarten, were evacuated six years ago. Irina Cherepanova was rescued at the time, along with her daughter and young son, but to this day their official place of residence is an apartment that doesn’t exist.

“They gave them housing after one son hanged himself”

Cherepanova is in the unluckiest group of condemned building residents: she owned her apartment. She went to great lengths to buy it in 2014; the bank wouldn’t approve a mortgage for anything better, but the wooden building on Kotlasskaya Street looked decent enough. Irina and her children are now in their sixth year of living in a rented apartment, for which she pays rent alongside her mortgage.

“Now they tell me, ‘What did you think would happen? You knew full well where you were going to be living.’” Cherepanova’s eyes don’t reflect the laughter coming from her mouth. “But I took out the mortgage in 2014 and the building was scheduled for major renovations in 2015. The building next door was having its roof and foundation redone and it’s still standing just fine. Ours was next in line. I invested my maternity capital ^[1] and the bank allowed it, children’s services allowed it, because the documents said the building was in good shape. I did upgrades to the apartment, put everything I had into it. A year later they informed us that there wouldn’t be any major renovations, that the building was condemned and due to be demolished. After that we kept living there for four more years.”

In the fifth year, the building on Kotlasskaya “started its journey,” as they say in Arkhangelsk.

“At some point in June 2019 my neighbors and I noticed that our building was no longer sitting firmly on its piles,” Cherepanova continued. “And it wasn’t a bunch of lowlifes living in our building. It was mainly families – we had 12 kids among us – and we’d built a playground nearby. It was terrifying when the building started its journey. I’d been sleeping in the kitchen, by the window, slightly away from the stove, so if something happened I could grab the kids and get us all out through the window. It’s been so many years, and it still gives me the creeps to come here.”

The building continued its journey for four months. Irina and her neighbors wrote to the city government and the governor, asking them to do something. In July they received a response that everything was just fine, in September it was confirmed that the building had indeed slipped off its foundation, and in December they were told that they could live there – the building was solid as a rock. The residents took this like a kick in the teeth, but there was nothing they could do. Then they were evacuated by emergency services.

As Vorobyov explained it:

If a building’s collapse generates a lot of attention, the authorities are usually quick to send over a bus, so people have somewhere to sit for the first few hours. Then the city supervisor will come by with a concerned face and do a survey to find out who has somewhere they can stay. This is a trap: the next morning, anyone who found a place to go will be marked down by the authorities as having solved their housing problem. They end up having to wait longer than anyone. They’ll say to them: you’ve got somewhere to live, so keep living there.

After residents were evacuated, the building on Kotlasskaya was inspected again and those who really wanted to were allowed to return. Cherepanova rented an apartment and joined the ranks of those for whom “the housing problem was solved.” Almost all her salary goes to her rent and mortgage. Those who couldn’t afford to rent remained in the building. They were told: “You have to wait, because there’s no money for new housing.”

“A family lived below us, a woman and her five sons – the youngest was four,” Cherepanova said. “They weren’t given short-term housing when the building went off its piles, and they didn’t have the money for rent. The woman said she was afraid to fall asleep, because everything around her was creaking and groaning. Emergency services warned them not to sleep next to the stove. They only got short-term housing after the oldest son hanged himself in the bathroom. He was 22 and for some reason had decided that he was the reason they weren’t giving the family housing.”

Cherepanova remembered another neighbor by name: Yuri Podnezhny, a senior citizen. He lived alone with his nine cats. They didn’t give him short-term housing either; he was told the government had no money. He had nowhere to go, so he kept living in the building for three more years, until there was a fire. Cherepanova was driving by in 2022 and saw that the derevyashka she had lived in was half burned and surrounded by special forces. She thought they were trying to catch terrorists, but it turned out they were removing her neighbor.

Irina describes what she saw:

While Podnezhny lived there, his cats provided warmth. And it helped that the apartment had a vault door and the fact that the windows were well sealed on the inside. He was legally entitled to quite a large apartment, at least 40 square meters – that’s probably why they hadn’t given him anything. And then I watched special forces marching Podnezhny out with his hands up. They cut his door with an angle grinder, pushed the window in frame and all, surrounded him on all sides and marched him out. I found out later that one of the cats went missing in the middle of it all, but the rest of them were moved with Podnezhny to some kind of dormitory.

Broken-down and fire-damaged, the building stayed on the municipal books until 2023. Cherepanova and her former neighbors kept receiving utility bills that they had to fight to have adjusted. She still receives bills for garbage collection. She supposedly now owes 14,000 rubles.

The building on Kotlasskaya was included in a federal resettlement program that ended on December 31, 2024. People were supposed to receive new apartments before that date. Cherepanova is still paying rent and calls the city once a week to ask about her new apartment – it hasn’t shown up yet, has it?

“I live on a powder keg”

The green two-story building at 46 Rosa Luxemburg Street has two entrances. A poster with a photo of someone running for office has been pasted to the door of the first: “Fellow northerners, how’s life for you under capitalism?” asks a well-built guy next to a Communist Party logo. The apartments on this side are unlivable in winter, while in summer they’re occupied by vagrants, so the neighbors from the other side steer clear.

Four neighbors live on the other side of the building. One of them has a door hammered together from sheets of plywood adorned with an large “I’m Russian” sticker featuring the coat of arms of the Russian Federation, below which the Latin letters Z and V are written in oil paint – all symbols of prowar patriotism. Another two rooms are occupied by Yelena Mikhailovna Kychina and her disabled 80-year-old mother.

“We have a common kitchen here – just don’t go there, it’s dangerous,” Kychina said as walked along a long, dark hallway. “The beams under the floor could give way at any moment. Me, I go in there nice and slow – I need to, I have a washing machine there, got to do the laundry. But I’m scared the whole time that the machine will fall through and me along with it. There’s a bathroom over there too, but I’m scared to go there as well. I try to shower at work. And here I’ve got a little nook next to my room, I paid to put a faucet in. It’s pretty decent in my room, but Mama is in there now, sick.”

Kychina and her mother used to live in another wooden building that was originally built as barracks, on Serafimovich Street. It’s still supposedly their permanent residence, even though the building no longer exists – a single-family brick dwelling was built in its place. Kychina joked that they should go to that house with their passports to show they’re supposed to be living there and just move in.

“Our building came off its piles,” she explained. “We barely made it out.”

After their barracks building went off its piles, Yelena and her mother were allocated two rooms in short-term housing, in the building they live in today.

“They wrote it on the paperwork: ‘Due to the fact that the city currently has no apartments available, we offer you temporary residence in this building,’” she said. “The law says that short-term housing is meant to be for two years maximum.”

That was in 1996. Kychina is now 55, and she has lived more than half her life in a building that was considered short-term housing 30 years ago – it had already been condemned, only then it wasn’t yet a total ruin. Now it’s falling apart, the water barely runs, the heating has little effect, there are holes in the walls, and utility bills come to 10,000 or 12,000 rubles a month, because they have to use electric heaters. Kychina works as a nurse at a large ophthalmology center, which is the only reason her salary covers all these payments, with a little left over for food. She’s been asking for years: if not an apartment then at least give us one and a half million, so we can buy ourselves a dacha. The answer: there’s no money.

“I’m living on top of a powder keg,” she admitted. “And what’s more, my mother is sick. And my work is hard – I’ve got 50 patients counting on me. Plus I still have to look decent.”

The building she and her mother have “temporarily” lived in for 30 years is, to repeat, “short-term,” so when deciding on the housing they’re legally entitled to, in place of what they lost, the government takes into account the measurements of their previous living space. That means the two of them are entitled to no less than 18 square meters. Last year, Kychina received good news: they’d been found permanent housing in a new building.

“It turned out it wasn’t an apartment, just a room in a communal apartment,” she said. “That is, there is a nice new three-room apartment there, but drunks are already living in two of the rooms: they told me themselves, sorry, but we’re drinkers. As if it weren’t obvious. They could barely stay on their feet. The office didn’t even give me keys when I went to look at it. They said, knock, they’ll open up for you.” (Those 18 square meters they are entitled to include common areas, so the kitchen, bathroom, and other spaces they share with their alcoholic neighbors count.)

Technically, Vorobyov explained, Russia’s housing code prohibits the creation of communal apartments in new buildings that were not designed to have more than one family per apartment. But in Arkhangelsk the authorities divide housing up among evacuees from condemned buildings not by apartments, nor by families, but by square meters. It’s as if, for instance, a kindergarten counted not the number of apples per child but the number of grams and then gave children not a whole apple each, but pieces. So if a family in a condemned building has, say, 28 square meters, they’re entitled to at least that much space. They could get more, but that would be more expensive, and, as evacuees hear regularly, there’s no money. If the smallest apartment available in public housing is, for example, 42 square meters, the math works out if you give those extra square meters to another family.

Vorobyov explained:

So what we’ve got is officials taking an apartment designed for a single family, and going against all norms to divide it into two. And they’re doing this in the absence not only of an expert opinion that a space can be split into two, but of any legal designation giving the apartment official communal status. Legally, it’s impossible to place anyone there, but they’re doing it anyway. It’s like they’re telling people: “Here’s some living space for you, just mark out your square meters in the common spaces with colored chalk and partition the toilet.” To justify what they’re doing, officials provide an apartment profile card, and that’s a document that stopped existing long ago – it was abolished back in 2007.

Kychina didn’t want to move into a communal apartment with her ailing mother, and now she might just end up on the street. An enforcement officer visited her recently, showed her an order, and warned that they’d be thrown into a snowbank if they didn’t leave their short-term housing voluntarily.

Again, it’s illegal to create communal apartments, but the practice is rife in Arkhangelsk. Ruslan, Kychina’s second-floor neighbor, is in the same situation. He’s been “temporarily” living in short-term housing for 18 years.

Ruslan grew up in an orphanage and, as an orphan, was entitled to an apartment from the state. He was given one in 1996, when he turned 18 – in a building that was built in 1931 and had already been declared at a 70 to 80 percent state of disrepair. In 2001, Ruslan received a notice that the building had been condemned, and, by the way, there was no money to find him new housing. The building burned down in 2007.

“Quite a lot of derevyashki suddenly started burning down around here in those days,” Ruslan recalled. “Then shopping centers showed up in their place. With ours, they even officially concluded it was arson.”

Ruslan was given a spot in a short-term housing building. Eighteen years went by: he got married, and his daughter grew up in this room. Now officials want to move them into a communal apartment, saying that they aren’t entitled to enough square meters for an apartment of their own.

“Now they want to put us in a kommunalka [communal apartment]. Officials are splitting apartments up into kommunalki on purpose, even though the new law is that all buildings should be designed so there’s one apartment per family. And it would be one thing if they were offering us new accommodation that was legal,” Ruslan said, sighing. “But these kommunalki aren’t even listed in the government database. The law is that common areas have to include the toilet, the bathroom and the kitchen – and all of that for one family. Otherwise it’s illegal. I told them that, and their answer was that there’s no money. They’re going to kick us out of here soon. And where are we going to go? The street?”

“The rats have won. I can’t take it anymore”

A thermometer hangs on the wall in Nadezhda Yevgenyevna’s apartment at 123 Gulyaev Street. It reads 15° Celsius (59° Fahrenheit). The senior citizen has kept her electric heater on since yesterday evening to make it easier to heat water and bathe in the space she calls a bathroom. On other winter days, it’s 12° (54°) degrees in her home.

“This is how I’ve been living for four years already,” she said, shrugging. “I sealed all the cracks I could, and even so it’s cold. The radiator works, but it doesn’t heat anything. I went to the city, they sent some workmen who said everything here needs to be taken apart. And who’s going to put it all together for me again? I’m 70, I live by myself.”

Nadezhda’s room is in an apartment on the first floor. Neighbors used to occupy the other two rooms, but four years ago they reached their limit, found money somehow, and bought themselves a place. When they left, they took all the radiators and windows in their rooms with them, and now those rooms get completely frozen and suck heat from the rest of the apartment. The city boarded up the empty window frames and decided that was enough.

“

It’s even colder in the kitchen,” Nadezhda complains. “Everything leaks and there are rats running around. I’m scared to even go into the kitchen. Not a single door closes – everything is warped. The shelving and racks are all coming off. Do you see how big this crack is? When I want to bathe, I turn on the heater in the bathroom. It’s dangerous, but what can I do? It warms up, I have a quick wash, rinse off, and done. I stuffed an old jacket under the neighbors’ door, but it doesn’t help, there’s still a draft. And the rats have won. I can’t take it anymore. I was walking around crying, trying to chase them away – but there’s nothing for it, they’re like horses. They run around hungry – there’s nothing for them here.”

Last year, the local authorities took pity on Nadezhda and offered her an apartment in short-term housing. When she heard where it was, she realized she couldn’t even go and look at it. It’s on the infamous island of Brevennik, inaccessible by public transit and often even by car.

“In the winter you can only stamp your way across the ice, I don’t even know how many kilometers.” Nadezhda sighed. “I’m 70 years old, look at how much medication I take, and you can’t even get an ambulance out there. And even if I did move, how would I get all my things over there by myself? How would I move it all? A woman from the government came once. She looked at everything and said they’d put windows in. Since then I haven’t heard a peep from her. How long do I have to live in this freezer? Am I going straight from here to the cemetery?”

More retirees live on the second floor, in the apartment above Nadezhda’s: Tatyana Afanasyeva and her husband. Their place is warm. But you can see by the walls how askew everything is: there’s a half-meter difference in height between various parts of the apartment, and everything rolls down the floor.

“Everything is crooked and coming apart,” Afanasyeva said, pointing to one corner of the room. “The building is slowly moving and soon it’s going to start its journey. You can’t close a single door.”

The building was condemned five years ago, but these seniors aren’t even being promised different housing. There is, they’re told, no money.

“But the money was allocated,” Afanasyeva said. “Where did it go? I suppose into somebody’s pockets, where else could it go? And we pay ridiculous amounts of money for this apartment, R13,500 for two rooms [about $162]. That’s half my pension. Heating alone is R7,000 [$85]. And they’ve said it’s going to go up another 25 percent in July. [Russian politician Valentina] Matviyenko came to Arkhangelsk, they showed on TV how we live here. I wanted to live inside that TV screen.”

“Our protector”

Two friends, first-floor Yelena and second-floor Yelena, live one above the other in a building on Admiral Kuznetsov Street. Both asked us not to use their surnames.

“Lots of people in the city know me – there would be talk,” first-floor Yelena said with trepidation. “I work for the municipality.”

Their building, which was constructed in 1950, is not reflected in any official documents. It also doesn’t show up on a map of the city that the two neighbors found in the archives in 2003, after they finally got running water. Nonetheless, they managed to get the building condemned four years ago, but this hasn’t come close to solving their problems.

“It’s beautiful here in the summer,” second-floor Yelena gushed. “It’s easier to breathe in a derevyashka, don’t you think? But in the winter the electric bills come: five or six thousand rubles a month [$60 to $73]. Because the heaters in the kitchen and bathroom are constantly on. If you turn off the one in the bathroom, the pipes freeze. They’ll freeze if you ever turn the water off in cold weather. When it’s cold out, the water is constantly running, so then there’s the water bills. In total, that’s eleven to twelve thousand a month [$134 to $146] out the door just for housing.”

Their heat comes from wood stoves, and the firewood adds another two or three thousand [$24 to $36] a month. A few years ago, second-floor Yelena’s stove crumbled, and she had to pay for it to be completely redone, but keeping it going all the time is dangerous.

“Plus we always end up with damp firewood,” Yelena added. “Our friends help too: they bring us bits of wooden furniture and leftover wood from construction sites, so we do manage to survive. Pallets are the new thing – they burn slowly, but they’re expensive. Our one neighbor had a piece of coal fall from his stove down in-between the floorboards, everything caught on fire, we had to call the fire department.”

In first-floor Yelena’s apartment, the floor caved in the year before last. The toilet fell through, a pipe broke – there was quite the flood.

“We lifted up the floor, put it right back into place and filled the holes with spray foam,” first-floor Yelena said, recounting the ordeal. “And all by ourselves – we’ve got no men around. Our stove fell apart ages ago, but the cost of fixing it is astronomical: R100,000 to 150,000 [$1200 to $1850]. We ended up buying heaters and paying for electricity – you’ve got to live somehow.”

Both Yelenas have been promised new housing some time around 2027, or maybe 2030.

“The time frames are completely theoretical,” lawyer Vorobyov said, shaking his head. “In reality, if a building was condemned in 2021, you’d better count on a 10-year wait or so, maybe even 15.”

In first-floor Yelena’s entryway, a fly swatter hangs next to a little paper flag with a ribbon of St. George in the shape of the Latin letter Z. She got it at an “event supporting the special military operation” and has treasured it ever since. Nearby, on the wall, a beautiful painting hangs on a nail; below it is a small portrait of Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin, framed in gold like an icon.

“It’s not a joke.” Yelena looked at me earnestly. “I wish him a happy birthday every year, and a long life. I write him letters about our situation, I just haven’t gotten an answer yet. I’ve got no hard feelings toward him – after all, he can hardly keep an eye on all the bureaucrats not doing their jobs. I respect that man very much. I think of him as our protector.”

This article originally appeared in Russian in Veter.