Farce Hits Tower Hearing
By Sergey Chernov
Staff Writer
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Sergey Chernov / The St. Petersburg Times
Police officers confront protesters at the Okhta Center public hearing on Friday.
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A legally required public hearing into the planned 396-meter tall Okhta Center building, otherwise known as the Gazprom Tower, held by the district administration and the company in charge of the project descended into farce on Friday as public ire over the new building reached new heights. The hearing featured hundreds of supporters who were reportedly hired to voice approval for the project, as well as an hour-long protest, demands to cancel the hearing as “illegitimate,” and the arrival of OMON special forces police. A handful of arrests were made. However, the organizers declared the hearing’s aims as having been “accomplished.” At around 3 p.m. on Friday, as people filled the conference room at the Burevestnik Center near the site of the planned tower, it became evident that many who were there to express support for it were acting in teams on the command of several supervisors. But as Krasnogvardeisky District officials and representatives of Gazprom’s Okhta Public Business Center, the company behind the project, took their seats to open the hearing, the stage was taken by dozens of members of the democratic party Yabloko, the banned National Bolshevik Party (NBP) and preservationists from the pressure groups Living City and Okhtinskaya Duga, as well as activists from the Movement of Civil Initiatives (DGI) group. Local Yabloko leader Maxim Reznik, speaking into a megaphone because he was denied the use of a microphone by the organizers, demanded that unless the room was cleared of “provocateurs” the hearing should be canceled as illegitimate. He said he had video evidence that many in the audience had been hired to support the tower and demanded that the video be played on a screen set up for the hearing. The organizers refused. Protests continued for over an hour, with activists giving the megaphone to each other. Many chanted “Provocateurs — Get Out of the Room,” “This Hearing Is a Farce” and “Forty Eight” — a reference to the local law that forbids buildings taller than 48 meters high from being built in St. Petersburg’s historic central districts. The skyscraper’s opponents, who include preservationist pressure groups, oppositional political parties and the United Nations cultural body UNESCO, say the Kremlin-backed tower will destroy the city’s historic skyline, while residents of the area are also cautious about a number of problems that the construction threatens to cause. The proposed tower is one of the issues on the agenda of the UNESCO World Heritage Committee’s 32nd session next month. Intended to house executive offices of the state energy giant Gazprom, the tower would be one of the top-ten tallest buildings in the world. The proposed Okhta Center also includes residential and commercial property and public facilities to be built in the rundown Okhta area to the east of the city center. The tower’s supporters, whom activists said were mostly professional extras recruited from the Lenfilm movie studio — some faces were familiar from crowd scenes in Lenfilm productions — either overacted by booing and shouting at opponents or just sat looking bored. It is estimated this group made up at least half of the estimated 500 to 600 people present at the hearing. Many young people among the tower supporters identified themselves as members of a previously unheard-of movement called Novy Peterburg (New Petersburg) by wearing large white buttons with the movement’s name and web address on them. The website was launched on Thursday, a day before the hearing, and is hosted by a Moscow company. After an hour-long delay Okhta Center’s Pyotr Luchin read from a document without being heard, because Reznik was speaking into the megaphone. Then 16 OMON policemen entered the room and cleared the stage by pushing and kicking activists as tower supporters cheered and laughed. The opponents chanted “Shame.” Eight activists were arrested and charged with petty hooliganism and swearing in public. They were released after appearing in court later that day. “First they had a paid-for audience, a rent-a-crowd — and we had to attract attention to this,” said Reznik, whose party organized the March for the Preservation of St. Petersburg in September and which has taken part in many other protests against the tower. He spoke to The St. Petersburg Times by phone on Monday. “We had the information and the video. We demanded that it be shown on screen before the hearing began. Apart from that, various documents had been changed and switched during the exhibition [held at the district administration offices before the hearing]. We said that the hearing itself had been organized with violations of the law, even without the presence of the rent-a-crowd. “Having a rent-a-crowd shows utter contempt for everything. Especially after Comrade [Governor Valentina] Matviyenko’s statement about how she will struggle, it turns out, to defend St. Petersburg’s historic center, its heritage. The hearing looked so cynical after all this that we couldn’t help but draw attention to it.” Okhta Center’s Luchin, who was the main speaker at the hearing, repeatedly addressed the hired supporters, asking them “Support me,” and, after young supporters gave a pro-tower speech, he exclaimed at least twice, “Let’s support youth.” Moi Rayon newspaper has posted a video testimony on its web site by Lydia Bezzubova, a local resident who was hired as a paid participant, but after finding out what the hearing was about, refused to take part and called journalists. Lenfilm denied it had anything to do with the alleged hiring of the tower supporters for the hearing. “It stems from ignorance about the process,” press officer Olga Agrafenina said by phone on Monday. “Lenfilm doesn’t have a department dealing with extras, therefore it must have been arranged by outside casting companies. There’s a great many of them in St. Petersburg now because filmmaking is on the rise and casting agents are needed by everybody, both films and TV series. They might go by the name ‘Lenfilm,’ but this is for outsiders because they know that there is such a film studio. If it were in Moscow, such a casting agency could easily call itself Mosfilm.” The hired supporters were paid 400 rubles ($17) each, according to tapes made by opponents who disguised themselves as volunteers to be hired for the hearing. Some of the paid-for supporters were seen and photographed queuing near the Burevestnik business center after the hearing to collect their money, but were reportedly told to go to the Lenfilm offices the following day when agents noticed the line was being filmed by a television crew. “We will demand the cancellation of [the hearing’s results],” said Reznik. On Monday, Nikolai Rybakov, a member of Yabloko’s Federal Bureau and the head of Grazhdanka municipality’s administration, wrote letters to Russian President Dmitry Medvedev and General Prosecutor Yury Chaika in which he said the hearing had been “deliberately fabricated” and asked for an investigation and a new public hearing, prepared and held in accordance with the law. “It is seen from all the materials that [the hearing’s] organizers (Krasnogvardeisky District administration and the Okhta Public Business Center) knew about the falsification being prepared and actually guided it throughout the event,” he wrote.
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