Russian officials pave a road through a homeowner's house while she's away at work

On a day not long ago, when the owners of a small piece of land in the Nizhny Novgorod region returned home from the city, they discovered that a road had been paved straight through half their property. Local officials have promised to “get to the bottom” of what happened, according to the website TJournal and the TV news program Kstati.

Homeowner Valeriya Udalova told journalists from Kstati that her property used to have a detached house with a sauna and kitchen. That building is now mostly wrecked, its ruins looking out on a shiny new paved road that cuts through her property. Udalova presented her property deed to the TV reporters and showed them photos of what her home looked like before the bulldozers came through.

Udalova says her family doesn’t occupy the house all year long: sometimes they leave to work in the city of Nizhny Novgorod. The last time they returned from one of these work trips, the family came home to find half their house destroyed by a new road. Udalova says she was “shocked.”

When Kstati journalists asked local officials about Udalova’s predicament, district construction chief Alexander Pakalyakin said he was unaware of any home demolitions along the road construction’s route, insisting that Udalova’s house didn’t appear on road crews’ estate maps.

An official at the local office of Russia’s State Registration Federal Agency told Kstati, however, that Udalova’s house did appear on estate maps, and it would have been difficult for planning crews to have missed it.

The acting head of Nizhny Novgorod’s Voskresensky district, where Udalova’s home is located, said a full inspection of the property is necessary before he can respond to journalists or the homeowner. Until that happens, Udalova and her family have vowed to block the road built through their home, setting up tents across the road, refusing to let cars pass.