Sochi activist complains about law enforcers’ actions

In her complaint lodged with the chair of the Investigating Committee of the Russian Federation (ICRF), activist Tatiana Polivanova asked to check the legality of the law enforcers’ actions in connection with her criminal prosecution and the seizure of more than 11,000 plots of land in Sochi from owners.

The “Caucasian Knot” has reported that searches were conducted at a place of residence in Taganrog of Tatiana Polivanova, the head of the public organization ROD (Russian Association of Households and Land Users), in connection with a case on fraud with the lands of the Sochi National Park. The public organization led by Tatiana Polivanova provided legal assistance to dozens of gardeners whose land plots were seized by court because of the above-mentioned case.

In her complaint, Tatiana Polivanova stated that, in her opinion, the seizure of Sochi lands from private land users in favour of the state was the result of unlawful actions of investigators who instituted a criminal case on the theft of more than 11,000 land plots without taking into account the existing documents. Basing on the fabricated documents, public prosecutors seized half of the above-mentioned land plots through trials held at courts of the Krasnodar Territory in the period from 2022 to 2024, thus leaving people without money and land.

Tatiana Polivanova noted that she never stated that all the land plots were registered correctly and seized incorrectly. However, no official is able to explain on what basis those land plots that people owned since the Soviet era were seized. And, according to the Tatiana Polivanova’s version, such a way of highlighting the problem by the public organization led by her and by her herself, as well as by other activists and lawyers, provoked investigators to conduct searches at their houses as an act of their intimidation and removal from the defence of land users in the Supreme Court (SC), which took a fair position in relation to the mass seizure of land plots in Sochi and began to return cases for reconsideration.

“They want to remove us, activists, from the case on land plots, since we interfere with the continuation of arbitrariness,” Tatiana Polivanova believes. The activist reported that searches were carried out, in particular, at the house of Sochi advocate Nadezhda Stupak.