Everyone’s a squatter now Prosecutors are relitigating decades-old privatizations to void land titles, and Russia’s courts are stripping property from people who bought it in good faith
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Throughout Russia’s Putin era, politicians across the spectrum have floated revisiting the privatizations of the 1990s — the deals that turned well-placed insiders into a class of oligarchs. A report from the independent journalists’ collective Bereg, published in mid-June, shows the state is now acting on that idea, albeit at the opposite end of the scale, stripping small plots of land from ordinary people who bought them in good faith.
Since 2022, the Prosecutor General’s Office has widened its review of 1990s property transfers, moving beyond companies and factories to target private plots. It has filed seizure suits from the Moscow region to Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky, favoring resort areas and land near water. A single criminal case in Sochi has swept up 11,000 plots, roughly 8,000 of them already developed.
The cases Bereg documented reveal a common legal approach across Russia: Prosecutors find a defect somewhere in the chain of ownership (an illegal privatization or transfer, sometimes 30 years back) and argue that it voids the title of every later owner, down to whoever holds the deed today. For example, outside Moscow in 2005, the Pushkinsky district administration rezoned farmland for housing and sold it. Last year, officials moved to demolish roughly 2,000 houses across 13 settlements the administration now places inside the Uchinskoye Reservoir’s protected watershed. Residents say the zone’s boundaries sit in a classified regional order that requires state-secret clearance to read.
Russia’s courts have repeatedly sided with prosecutors even as they move the goalposts. In Starokorsunskaya, in the Krasnodar region, buyers had used mortgages, savings, and even maternity-capital subsidies to purchase their land. Prosecutors narrowed their claim in the case’s second year to target only undeveloped plots, and the court granted the revised version in full, over the objections of the defense, who called the switch a gross procedural violation. In a Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky case over port land, the presiding judge had moved from the prosecutor’s office six months earlier, and the defendants could not get her recused.
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In case after case, property owners are forced to demolish their homes and businesses at their own cost and without compensation. Their mortgages then outlive their houses. One man in Pushkinsky told Bereg that he faces 29 more years of payments on a home the court has ordered destroyed. One defendant told Bereg that a Moscow prosecutor confronted a group of them at a courthouse and taunted them, saying the Supreme Court would side with the state, no matter what. In Anapa, an owner said a prosecutor told her off the record that good land is scarce and her property is needed for veterans of the war in Ukraine and for large families.
Today’s climate has bred a small market for pre-purchase title checks, but even such investments in a “clean paper trail” aren’t always enough to keep your land. Bereg spoke to one man in Sochi who traced his plot’s owners back to 1993 and lost it anyway. In many cases, too, sellers are unwilling to wait the two or three months needed for an exhaustive title check.
Some owners fight. In the Pushkinsky reservoir case, Natalya Krotova won an initial ruling before losing on appeal. A Sochi man whose own plot had been seized founded a group, “Right to Land,” in November 2022 to offer free legal help to defendants in property-seizure cases. The organization is now being dissolved, and its founder ignores media inquiries. The court accepted an independent assessment that the Pushkinsky settlements pose no danger to the reservoir, and then it vanished from the proceedings. In April, the local administration invited residents to discuss “adjusting” the protection-zone lines, but community members told Bereg that they fear the gesture is a public-relations stunt.
Property owners sometimes turn to celebrities, such as the lawyer-blogger Katya Gordon and the media personality Viktoria Bonya, to draw attention to their cases. Many others have given up on seeking publicity, saying they stand to gain nothing from speaking to journalists. They may be right.
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