“There’s an awful lot of talk about supporting youth and young families, but nothing has changed in our building…” This was a letter I received from a Mrs.N from Kazan. She asked for help in fixing some construction defects in a new apartment block where her family, together with other young families, pensioners and families of war invalids had bought apartments with mortgage support from the government. The block was built by the Kazan Apartment Management Section of the Russian Ministry of Defence.

The letter said that the building had been handed over with a large number of defects, which spoiled things for the new flat-owners. All the walls were cracked, the ceilings let through water right from the start due to poor-quality roofing, the storm-water drainage system had not been properly buried, they’d forgotten to provide rubbish bins for the building and there were lots of other “trifles”. In addition to all this, they hadn’t received legal permission to connect the building to the city utilities and it hadn’t been entered in the register of construction facilities.

Numerous attempts to get the builders to rectify these defects produced no result, and so Mrs.N decided to write to me. On the basis of the facts set out in her appeal I sent a deputy’s request to the Minister of Defence, Anatoliy Eduardovich Serdyukov, and got quite a quick response from the Ministry.

The Ministry of Defence’s Public Liaison Office, Major-General I.Mashin, wrote to me to say that a Commission headed by the deputy commander of the Volga-Urals Military District responsible for accommodation and amenities had reviewed the issues referred to in Mrs.N’s appeal (they’d even visited the site) and had decided to rectify all the defects.

The reply also stated that project documentation for the apartment block had been duly corrected and approved, and that the problems around connection to the power, gas, heat and water utilities had been fixed. Many other issues had also been resolved and the amenities around the building had been put in order.