Press Release, 26.04.2021

Photo: Wooden architecture in the Kizhi Island/Photo by Kannap.depositphotos

Deputies of the Yabloko faction in the Legislative Assembly of Karelia Emilia Slabunova and Ivan Gusev turned to Russian Prime Minister Mikhail Mishustin with a proposal to make the necessary decisions to revise the coefficients for changing the costs of repair and restoration works performed at cultural heritage sites (historical and cultural monuments) from the 2012 price level to the 2021 price level, as well as introduce the method of annual price indexation when determining the costs of such works.

The Yabloko deputies note that the government recommends to estimate the costs of works for preserving cultural heritage sites, with funding from the federal budget, and calculate the initial prices of state contracts proceeding from the legislative acts adopted in the USSR in 1984.

As a result of the present estimation of prices based on the prices of 1980s, professional art conservators and restoration artists stopped participating in the tenders for the repair of wooden architecture monuments, since, according to experts, it is virtually impossible to carry out high-quality restoration works for money allocated on the basis of outdated estimates.

“A distinctive feature of Karelia, a kind of its “visiting card” is the predominance of wooden architecture monuments among its cultural heritage sites. There are 1,229 monuments of wooden architecture in the total number of cultural heritage sites,” the appeal runs.

“Unfortunately, in recent years, there has been a loss of both individual objects of cultural heritage and, in general, their historical and cultural environment. Wooden architecture is the most vulnerable part of the cultural heritage. Today, many monuments are in hard-to-reach places, in abandoned villages and continue to collapse, there is a loss of not only material heritage, but also construction traditions, carpentry skills, and ethnographic heritage – huge and irreplaceable,” Emilia Slabunova and Ivan Gusev write in their address to the Chairman government.

In the summer of 2019, on the initiative of the Yabloko faction, the Legislative Assembly of Karelia sent an appeal to Vladimir Medinsky, then Russian Minister of Culture, on the issue of calculating the costs of restoration works. The Ministry of Culture of the Russian Federation replied that they were working on changing the standards for the restoration and repair of monuments, but nothing has changed so far. Deputies Emilia Slabunova and Ivan Gusev prepared a new appeal to the Minister of Culture Olga Lyubimova, but the parliamentary majority blocked its adoption (11 deputies voted for the appeal, three were against, and the rest 30 deputies did not vote). After that, the Yabloko deputies sent an appeal from the faction, but this time to Prime Minister Mikhail Mishustin.

EMILIA SLABUNOVA

is member of the Federal Political Committee of the Yabloko party, Chair of Yabloko in 2015-2019.

Deputy of the Legislative Assembly of the Republic of Karelia.

Candidate of Pedagogical Sciences, Honored Teacher of Russia