Who is the stronghold of our country?

People who are the stronghold of the country live close to us. They are doing their job in a responsible way, without demanding any posts, money, or national recognition. They even hardly understand what burden they are carrying on their shoulders. This is simply their lifestyle — to work selflessly and put their hearts into their favorite business and, if needed, protect their rights, because they believe and, moreover, are realizing the main principle of democracy: after all, everything depends on ourselves and our choice. I will tell a couple of “simple” stories on how our compatriots protect their rights.

Story No. 1. It is set in the city of Brovary, 4a Shevchenko Str. Not waiting for support from “above,” the inhabitants of a house created a website of their house to protect their interests. Now they are discussing on the site the existing housing problems, jointly seek solutions and leverage with the local authorities and the developer, in order to remove the problems. The Brovary example is also an excellent model of the population’s self-organization. If at least half of us follow them, Ukraine will shape the basis for active territorial communities. It will determine whose example the entire country should follow. Den/The Day has studied the experience of the Brovary residents, showing how one should unite for the common purpose and defend one’s rights.

It was very simple to get in touch with the activists of 4a Shevchenko Str.: I simply had to go to their site, write a letter to Serhii Illiukhin, the developer of the portal and its activist, with a proposal to meet. In a matter of some 15 minutes I was already speaking with him on the phone, setting The Day of our meeting. By the way, it was on the same day that the house inhabitants learned that the Den journalists would come, from the same very site.

It seemed that a newly built house commissioned less than two years ago should not have any problems. But when you listen to Serhii and his neighbors, it appears that it is better to live in a Khrushchev-time building than to move in a newly built house. Imagine that you have paid 1,000 dollars per square meter of your apartment area (before the crisis started, people would pay 2,000 dollars or even more) and now have to repair roof from your own pocket, because it is leaking into the apartments on the topmost floors, repair the plumbing in the underground that is constantly leaking, fix electric bulbs on the staircase every week, as they frequently burn out, and resolve a variety of many other problems in order to live in comfort.

“Why are the inhabitants doing everything at own expense? Because neither the housing office, nor the building company Merkurii, which should, according to the agreement, provide the services to the house is not doing this, as they have no money for this,” Illiukhin said. “When the building was commissioned, it did not have either heating or electricity. The company was simply in a hurry to put the building in operation before the crisis started. This hastiness has caused a lot of drawbacks.”

“We are precisely the first generation of dwellers who lived here without any communications,” added another inhabitant of the house, Valerii Shaforostov. “In order to prepare food and wash ourselves, we stretched a cable from the transformer and used 2,700 kilowatt per month.”

“Last winter, when frosts came, and the building stood unheated, people sent applications to the city council, and only after that the heating system was switched on. The problem is that the constructor, the integrated house-building factory Merkurii and the housing office are closely interconnected. Merkurii has to provide services to all the houses it builds, therefore all our claims we send to the housing office immediately reach the constructor as well. The housing office does not react to resolution of certain problems. We have set everything with heating, however the dwellers living on the tenth floor are suffering — they have to bleed their radiators several times, because the pump is not able to bring the water up to the tenth floor,” Serhii complained.

And this is only the tip of the iceberg. Now the house dwellers are drafting a petition to the prosecutor’s office (they are actively discussing it on the site and submit their proposals) with a demand that the constructor remove all the faults and drawbacks.

“We demand that Merkurii repair the roof as well as pay off the debts for litter removal and the operation of lifts,” Serhii went on. “The house has a large debt for litter removal, 42,000 hryvnias, all because the constructor has not paid the organization which provides the services.”

“Several weeks ago there was a real dump in front of the building. “The dwellers themselves went to the organization that provides the services, signed an agreement, and paid the money, 23 hryvnias for removal of a single container, and paid for several trips of the garbage trucks. Merkurii has covered only 2,000 hryvnias of a the entire debt. The same problem exists with the lifts.

“The debt for their maintenance reaches 40,000 hryvnias. When the elevator broke, we called to the Univel-lift company, and it explained to us that because of huge debts they would not repair it. They promise to rescue people once they get stuck, but refused to make any repair works. Some five days ago the Merkurii Company has partially paid the debt, 5,000 hryvnias, but this still has not resolved the problem.”

However, the management of the Merkurii Company offered to the building dwellers creating a union of co-owners of the multistoried building and thus take everything in their hands. Serhii said that the inhabitants are ready to do so, but this would mean that apart from managing the house they will have to undertake to deal with all the debts and faults and agree to liquidate them on their own.

“First, we want to make the company to complete the unfinished work and then take everything in our hands by creating a union of co-owners,” Serhii said. “We will cope with this, no doubt. But now we don’t want to take the burden of those debts.”

The inhabitants recall their first victory with smiles. Immediately after the website appeared in September 2009, they agreed to phone everyday to house offices to make them fix the bulbs in staircases, put the elevator into operation (when the first dwellers moved in, they carried their things in their hands), and also fix the plumbing in the basement. At the same time, they wrote a petition on behalf of the owners of 45 apartments. They brought it to the city council which sent a commission for inspection and managed to make the house office meet the demands of the inhabitants. In their opinion, if the action had not been a mass act, their appeals would have hardly reached their target.

“However, not all the demands have been met. The house project envisages two elevators to operate in the hall, but only one is working, with a capacity of no more than three persons. I call it an elevator for lilliputians,” Shaforostov said.

“We are now standing in a dangerous zone,” added another dweller, Yurii Svystun, pointing at the house roof, where snow was still lying. “The slope of the house roof makes the snow fall in the radius of five meters. Fortunately, nobody has been injured yet, but I have witnessed the snow break a car glass. My wife and I approach the hall with fear, because anything can happen.”

The dwellers say that theirs is not the only such building in Brovary. According to Illiukhin, via the website they have gotten acquainted with their companions in adversity, the inhabitants of another newly built house constructed by the same Merkurii Company approximately at the same time. They are experiencing similar problems as the building on 4a Shevchenko Str. And now they want to follow the path of the dwellers on Shevchenko Street and create their own website.

In addition to external foes, the inhabitants have an internal one — their co-dwellers.

“I have been fighting for preserving young plants in the yard of the house, all in vain,” Valerii said. “In our time we have planted several young birches and bushes near every entrance to make the area green in summer. But now, when the young plants have been covered with snow and they can scarcely be seen, some of the residents park their cars directly in their place. It appears that some residents do not value the work of others, who planted those trees and made an effort not only for themselves but for everybody. We have fought this, using various methods; we have stuck notices, asked, placed information on the site, all this with no effect so far.”

“In fact, it is not so simple to reach the self-consciousness of some dwellers,” Serhii added. “We want them to think about what they are doing. When the removal of litter was still provided, a car kept parking near the garbage cans, so that the garbage truck could not approach them. At the time, we printed notices with a request to stop doing so, and I was placing them on the car glass every evening. Now the problem is not so acute. At the moment, we want to resolve the problem with parking: since there is little place near the house, we should mark the parking lots, but we will do this on our own.”

“We understand that nobody but us will take care of our problems,” Svystun noted. “It is impossible to meet the bosses of the Merkurii company, since they all the time are hiding behind their secretaries’ backs, so it is impossible to have a talk and resolve urgent problems. The management of the company has even switched off the stationary phones, allegedly forgetting to notify the residents about this.”

All this is a matter of active discussions on the site, which has become an inseparable part of life in the building, whereas at the beginning it was created to have neighbors get acquainted with each other. Now it is not merely a means of internal communication, but also a possibility to establish external contacts. So, there have been cases when Illiukhin received appeals from cable companies with proposals to install television and inform other dwellers about this. But the main function of the site is to be a sort of a forum for discussion and problem solving. At the moment, one-third of the dwellers (the house has a total of 108 apartments) are communicating through the site. This is not merely a means of communication for people with similar opinions, but a real forum for activists who are ready to fight for their rights until the end.