Nikolai Rybakov’s Telegram channel, 14.01.2025

Photo: screenshot of the broadcast of the “Mesto Vstrechi” programme on NTV, where Nikolai Rybakov shows photographs of “children of the Gulag”

Good news has arrived – the court has for the first time ordered the Moscow Mayor’s Office to buy an apartment for the daughter of a repressed city resident. We are talking about 76-year-old Elizaveta Mikhailova, whose parents were repressed and expelled from Moscow during Joseph Stalin’s Great Terror.

Now, according to the court’s decision, the Mayor’s Office is obliged to provide Mikhailova with a payment for the purchase of an apartment in Moscow with an area of ​​33 square meters within three months after the decision comes into force.

The lawsuit in defenсe of Mikhailova is one of the three filed in July 2024 by Deputy Publlc Prosecutor of Moscow Yana Starovoitova. The other two concern 74-year-old Alisa Meissner and Yevgenia Shasheva.

In 2021, we sent postcards to each State Duma deputy with photographs and stories of these three women, “Children of the Gulag”. We demanded that justice be restored and that each person whose family was deprived of an apartment by the Soviet authorities through repression be provided with housing.

In early December, I again raised the topic of “Children of the Gulag” on NTV. However, those in the studio suggested simply “forgetting everything and moving on”. Naturally, the loudest speaker was the State Duma deputy from the Communist Party of the Russian Federation.

I hope that the precedent of Elizaveta Mikhailova will not become an exception, but a rule. Therefore, we are really looking forward to the rest of the court’s decisions.