Moscow's city council shows little respect for private property rights in land. The authorities cater to interests of real estate developers by displacing villagers and destroying their private property without compensation. How do the government officials get away with this? They claim that since land titles were given by the Soviet government, hereby, they could not be acknowledged by the Russian law. I guess it's just another "rock thrown in a harbor" of the Russian system of private property rights.
Here are some quotes from today's NYT article by Michael Schwirtz:
"They gave us this land and told us to develop it," Ms. Gurlynina, now 78, said. "They said we could stay here forever." Then, early one morning last year, the bulldozers arrived. The municipal government had declared that the Soviet-era permits giving Ms. Gurlynina and her neighbors use of the land were invalid, and it had ruled that the 200 or so homes in Ms. Gurlynina's community, called Rechnik, as well as dozens of others in a neighboring community, had to be removed. Moreover, the city said, the residents would have to pay for the demolition themselves.
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