Maybe we should get the shoe shiners back on the street?
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Crimea 1900s
***
Come closer to me
Put your foot here,
You have a red boot
Not good for anywhere.
I'll clean it with cream
Black velvet soda
To turn completely yellow,
Like the sun in the morning.
Osip Emilievich Mandelstam. 1926
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Crimea 1900s
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Crimea 1900s
“These archival photographs of Crimea are probably more than a hundred years old. We saved them from total destruction by snatching them out of a dumpster. The photographs were packed in a bag with the inscription“ Crimea 1900s. ”Judging by the stamps with inventory numbers, they were stored in some institution: a publishing house or an archive. ”Then someone took these archival photographs of Crimea into the trash heap.
Sheet film has been badly damaged by time and rough handling. Realizing that a full-fledged restoration is impossible, and these films from Crimea, all the same, die, we digitized what was somehow amenable to scanning and reshooting. And here we have a digital album "Crimea 1900s." We decided to show you selected photos from this album ".
The authors of the text are Igor and Larisa Shiryaevs. http://www.interesmir.ru/arhivnyie-fotografii-kryima
More Archival photographs of Crimea in the 1900s, saved from destruction (33 photos)
4.
Shoe shiner
***
And I will burn all my shares
And I'll give my limousine to the driver.
Employees with the problem of love.
Freeloaders leaving the stupid pack.
I'll buy myself a huge black box
Two pairs of brushes, waxes in reserve
And I'll start cleaning my shoes, in the present
Let her human shine caress the eye.
Let the brushes be prancing in my hands
Let the heavenly light be betrayed to the shoes.
I will be drunk, from wax, like from vodka.
The shine of boots is better ...
Boots shine like the lights of Broadway.
Grants wild chic and aroma
And this happiness is madly hopping
I will be happy, from that rich.
Coins will flow into my pockets
From all the dandies in black shoes.
And undoubtedly local coquettes
Learn that all the shine is in my hands.
Well, that's all I can dream of.
I am blinded by the lights of your boots
And the brushes are circling, dancing wildly,
Giving me my lucky ticket.
Ignatovs http://www.stihi.ru/2014/05/08/11135
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Jules Bastien Lepage (1848-1884) - French painter. In 1879-1882 he traveled to England, where he painted the painting "Shoe Shine in London"
If I'm not mistaken, readers don't have to use the services of a street cleaner. They have disappeared, they are no more. And there was a time when you desperately needed clean shoes and here next to you you saw a booth in which for a small fee (I don't remember how much) you could get what you wanted.
You sat on a chair, put your foot on a special support, a master of his craft inserted protective visors into your shoes or boots from the sides and began to work with brushes. Then velvet was used, which gave your (sometimes well-worn) shoe-shoe a fabulous mirror shine. Then he banged the brush on the stand, which meant: "Change your leg!"
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These memories are reminiscent of Jules Bastien-Lepage's painting The Shoe Shiner in London (1882). A cute boy in uniform is leaning on a post. Near him on the left is a support for the client's leg. He is wearing a red jacket with a dark brown collar and cuffs of the same color.
The most interesting detail is that there is a badge with an inscription and a number on the jacket on the left. The inscription designates the organization for which this boy works - "Black Shoe Home" ("House of the Black Shoe"), and his place of work, Marylebone - a wealthy area of \u200b\u200bLondon.
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The number on the badge indicates that there are several such cleaners. Historians write that since 1851, the London Black Shoe Brigade, founded by John McGregor and Lord Shaftesbury, provided permanent and well-paid jobs for children who made their living by cleaning shoes. In the evening, they attended a school for disadvantaged children - a free school that had existed in England since the 19th century, in which children received food and clothing.
Through these schools in 1844-1881, about 300,000 children, according to rough estimates, went through. There is a museum of such schools in London today. And the brigade was created like this: once three teachers of one of these charitable schools were walking down the street, and one of them said that he had seen shoe shiners in Paris.
"Maybe we should get these boys back on the street?"
The idea was taken, five boys were trained to clean their shoes, and on the last day of March 1851, they first went to work in bright red uniforms (it cost one penny to clean the shoes). It was impossible to call this work easy: the boys were bullied by their poor peers, they gave them offensive nicknames, very likely, sometimes they were beaten for nothing, just like that.
In 1869, the Black Shoe Society numbered 377 cleaners, who in 1869 brought in an income of £ 8,830. In the same year, 50 boys in red uniforms worked in the central brigade, 10 in the Marylebone brigade (uniforms - red and black), 6 in Islington (brown uniforms), 11 in the City of London. Let's return to the painting by Bastien-Lepage.
This is not to say that the boy has a joyful life: in his eyes one can read melancholy, his hands in wax, a spot from wax on his face, under his right eye there is a trace of a bruise. He is not happy that after a working day (how long it lasted at that time - at least eight hours, and now it is only noon), he still has to sit at his desk.
No man could have predicted the future of the shoe shiner. Today it is known that the cleaners were Luis da Silva - President of Brazil, Alejandro Toledo - President of Peru, Rod Blagojevic - Governor of Illinois, USA.
What happened to this sad boy? No answer...
Author: Boris Rokhlenko
http://shkolazhizni.ru/archive/0/n-71351/
Why in Russia, because of the widespread dirt, car washes at every step, and I have never seen shoe shiners?
The answer to this question lies in our show-offs. In our "Orthodox" society, people will prefer to sit on benefits, extort, beg, rob, kill, join the MMM, but to fall so low that to clean someone's shoes is beneath our dignity.
By the way, it is because of these show-offs that the business will be super profitable.
* There is nothing wrong with cleaning another person's shoes. If you perceive the other as an equal, then you will not even have such a thought. But this is precisely what is not in our society. Each of the skin climbs to prove that he is the king, and all the rest are shit. Is that what you call dignity?
(Reply) (Parent) (Thread)
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Monument to a shoe shiner in Baku, Azerbaijan
Modern shoe shiners:
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Photo from the site http://www.sunhome.ru/foto/chistiljshhik-obuvi
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Photo from the site http://ruvesna.ru/obshchestvo/1249253806?page\u003d117
http://www.antisled.ru/clauses/chistka-obuvi/
USSR Constitution 1936
Article 9. Along with the socialist economic system,
which is the dominant form of economy in the USSR, it is allowed
small private farming of individual peasants and handicraftsmen,
based on personal labor and excluding the exploitation of someone else's
labor.
USSR Constitution 1977
Article 17. In the USSR, in accordance with the law,
individual labor activity in the field of handicraft
crafts, agriculture, consumer services for the population,
as well as other activities based solely on
personal labor of citizens and their family members. The state regulates
individual labor activity, providing it
use in the public interest.
16
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Photo of the late 1980s. I. Nagaitseva. The same tent ..
On the basis of these articles of the Soviet constitutions, mainly artels of disabled people and ... Aysors acted. In Moscow, Aisors (aka Assyrians) appeared in the late 1910s - early 1920s. In connection with serious persecution in Turkey, they began to move, including to the territory of Soviet Russia. In Moscow, they started cleaning shoes and over time it became their monopoly. Muscovites, as a rule, called them "Armenians", but there were no Armenians among them.
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Photo of 1947 by R. Capa. Corner of Rozhdestvenka and Cannon Street
The shoe polish was made by ourselves. To do this, oven soot was mixed with egg and beer. In this case, the soot should be as small as possible, otherwise the cleaner risked scratching the boots. Each family had their own shoe polish, a secret. Its color was selected depending on the color of the boot. The secrets of the craft were passed down from generation to generation and were not given out to outsiders. But the cleaning algorithm was the same everywhere: first of all, dust was brushed off with a brush like clothes. Then cartons were inserted into the shoe around the leg so as not to accidentally stain the socks. Cream was applied to the shoes. If necessary, several different creams were mixed to find the desired shade. This composition was rubbed into the shoes with another brush. A few minutes later, the third was polished. The final shine was induced by velvet. The dust did not stick to such boots for several days!
But this is, of course, in the 1920s, 1930s. In the 70s, shoe polish was already factory-made.
Many of them are still standing and working in their places.
One of the central Soviet newspapers wrote about one of these cleaners. He had this framed note hanging in the tent. I saw and talked to him myself, but now I can't remember where his tent was? On Tverskoy Boulevard? Maybe someone remembers?
I didn't have a goal to show all such tents in Moscow, there are too many of them :)
About 25 years ago, there was not a single manager in Moscow, but there were shoe shiners. And, judging by their number, the services of cleaners were in demand. We know what the climate is: nine months - slush, the other three - dust.
With all your desire, you can't walk around Moscow streets for a long time in clean shoes. But here's the paradox. The climate has changed little since then. There is also little progress with the cleanliness of the streets.
And the shoe shiners, meanwhile, disappeared as a class. An MK reporter tried to find traces of them.
Human memory is amazing. From some of its nooks, a childhood memory emerged: a shoe shiner booth next to the exit from the Prospekt Mira metro station. I'm coming. The booth stands in the same place, and even, perhaps, the same: the same laces, insoles, creams, brushes ... Only instead of the inscription “Shoe shine” it now says “Urgent shoe repair”.
- Can I clean my shoes? - I appeal to the owner of the consumer service point.
- I will sell you a sponge, and you will clean it yourself, - the woman of retirement age answers.
History repeats itself on the square of the Belorussky railway station. Exactly in the same place, between the 1st and 2nd Brest, where, according to childhood memories, a shoe shiner sat, there is a shoe repair booth. They haven't cleaned their shoes for a long time either. A young guy, a Dagestani, says that sometimes, out of old memory, a grandmother, who once worked here for many, many years, visits:
- Here she was cleaning, and we have only minor repairs.
The first Soviet business
In Soviet times, this, as they would say now, the business was run by the Assyrians. The assistant to the head of the Moscow Assyrian community, Nina Dillon, retells to me what she once heard from her ancestors:
- In 1914, interethnic slaughter broke out in Iraq and Turkey and the great flight of the Assyrian people began. Some fled to Europe, some to Russia. The way to the north lay through Baku. There, Assyrian children spied on how Armenian and Jewish children clean their shoes on the streets. It often turned out that children were the only breadwinners in the family, and it was only due to these earnings that many families survived.
In Moscow, the Assyrians occupied an empty niche. The builders of communism, engaged in construction sites of the century, had no time for such trifles as cleaning boots. And for refugees from the East, there were not so many employment options - most of them did not even know Russian. However, there was one more circumstance that made this type of activity attractive to the Assyrians.
“The Assyrians are a free people,” says Nina Dillon. - For them, going to work from 9.00 to 18.00 was a torment. And the craft of the cleaner gave independence. If it was necessary to go to another city to visit relatives for a wedding, they closed their points and went.
In fact, in the country of developed socialism and universal socialization, these points were almost the only centers of private entrepreneurship. Although the state and cleaners tried to somehow build and organize. According to the documents, they were all listed in the Trud production association. In addition to them, the company included eight shoe repair shops. But in reality each cleaner simply paid a fixed amount “upstairs” every month, and then was left to himself - a prototype of the current simplified taxation of small businesses.
“The booths in which the cleaners worked were called parking lots,” continues Nina Dillon. “My godmother also had a parking lot. We children loved to go to her. Because she always had money and gave us ice cream. And in general - the parking lots were located in crowded places, and it was always noisy and fun around.
Back in the 70s, a Hero of the Soviet Union worked at one of these sites! His name was Lado Davydov. At the front, he was a scout. He accomplished the feat by extracting maps of the German defense in the Western Dvina area. And after the war he returned to Moscow and for many years shined shoes on the square of three stations.
In the late 50s, the repressed became frequent guests in Assyrian families. People were returning from the camps, sometimes they had nowhere to go, and the first person who happened to talk to at the station was a shoe shiner. It was he who offered to spend the night, to look around. The Assyrians believed that there are no casual guests, God brings every guest. The old cleaning men had one more unwritten rule: do not take money from soldiers on leave.
The very same procedure for cleaning shoes at all parking lots was performed like clockwork. By Nina Dillon:
- First of all, the dust was brushed off with a brush like clothes. Then cardboard or plastic was inserted into the boot around the leg so as not to accidentally stain the socks. Cream was applied to the shoes. Moreover, many cleaners cooked it themselves, according to their own secret recipes. If necessary, several different creams were mixed to find the desired shade. This composition was rubbed into the shoes with another brush. A few minutes later, the third was polished.
The final shine was induced by velvet. The dust did not stick to these boots for several days!
Shoes were cleaned by the first two or three generations of Assyrians who found themselves in Moscow. The children and grandchildren of the cleaners have already entered institutes, assimilated in every possible way and abandoned the family business. Now in the community they could not find a single active cleaner. And the old aksakals, apparently, are gone.
But the keepers of this dying profession were still found in Moscow.
In the footsteps of Rockefeller
For several years a company has been operating in the capital, providing services for manual shoe cleaning. She has a dozen points. Mostly - in large shopping centers and expensive hotels. I also go to one of the hotels to talk with modern cleaners.
Luxurious hotel on Tverskaya. Mahogany and marble, elastic carpets on the floor. Ladies and gentlemen are on cozy sofas. On the sidelines, a pianist is playing the piano. The hotel clerk escorts me to the cleaner's nook on the way to the elevators.
Next to a large leather chair is an elegant young man in black trousers, a matching waistcoat, and a white shirt with a bow tie. I am interested in him, as a job, how many clients.
- Now it is not enough - 2-3 people a day, mostly foreigners.
- Isn't it boring to sit around?
- We can't sit.
Indeed, when I approached, he was standing. The cleaner sat down on his little chair only to demonstrate the contents of the box, which had been pushed into the base of the chair. I must say that the cleaning technology has remained almost the same as that of the Assyrians. Only after brushing off the dust with a brush, another operation appeared - the surface of the shoe is washed with a special shoe shampoo. Well, the cream is now not of its own production, but of the best German brands: black, colorless, six shades of brown.
... In a large shopping center near Red Square, the place for a shoe shiner is more tough. But even here he stands idle. But Mikhail turns out to be more talkative than his colleague at the hotel.
- Why a dying profession? - he disagrees. - Not dying, but, on the contrary, reborn.
However, he had no clients in the first half of the day.
- Nothing, we all wake up in the evening, - Mikhail does not lose heart. Perhaps his optimism is fueled by the fact that the famous Rockefeller also started out as a shoe shiner.
In the shopping center, the ratio of customers between foreigners and ours is 50 to 50.
- Foreigners usually say: “Good job!” - Michael shares. - Our duty topic now is a crisis. But more often people are just talking on the phone.
The vast majority of clients are men. Women, apparently, are embarrassed to sit in skirts in a chair on a dais. But the ladies bring their shoes with them. While Mikhail is cleaning, they go shopping.
Prices at all points of this company are the same: leather shoe cleaning - 290 rubles, suede - 390. Quite a lot. But if you believe the company's website, its craftsmen literally work miracles: a broken old galosh is turned into a princess's shoe.
Purely Russian split
And what, as they say, have “them”?
In eastern countries, street shoe shiners are not uncommon. Somewhere in Cairo, a guy with a cardboard under his arm approaches a cafe table. He doesn't say a word, but the locals know he's a shoe shiner. Someone beckons him with a sign. The boy puts his cardboard in front of the client. The Egyptian, unexpectedly concerned with the appearance of his shoes, takes off his shoes and puts his bare feet on the cardboard. And the cleaner leaves with the shoes and after a few minutes brings them polished to a shine.
Such a picture has never been observed in European capitals. But for some reason there is no dirt on the streets in any weather.
The moral of this fable is as follows. With dirt and dust we have - as in the East. And with shoe shiners - like in the West. By the way, this is a purely Russian split. We have an eagle on our coat of arms with two heads, in fact, for the same reason.
Street shoe shiners offering their services to passers-by have disappeared in the West and in Russia. In the capital, the services of shoe shiners are in great demand. And nothing to prove. Actually, it was in Hacienda 1. Bootlecker is a shoe shiner. A profession whose representatives provide shoe-shine services to passers-by (usually with shoe polish). Candle makers, weavers, shoe shiners - the list goes on.
In the developed countries of the West, this profession has now practically disappeared, meeting mainly as a "attraction" for tourists at fair events. However, in China you can still find representatives of this profession.
Profession: Shoe shine About shining first-person boots
She moved to Guangzhou with her family 10 years ago. Her husband is a carpenter, her son is also employed, so her job as a shoe shine is not a prerequisite for their survival. She uses three different rags and two different brushes in sequence to clean her shoes. Then she rubs the shoes with colorless wax, and then with cream.
In China, almost everyone can afford gold jewelry, but that doesn't mean that a person is rich, ”she says and scrutinizes the next client's shoes. Of course, the law of large numbers works - representatives of this profession have survived somewhere, but their meaning is rather decorative. Now fast forward to Paris 2015. First in line to be eliminated. Because there are radars, there are cameras, there are gyroscopes and there are navigation systems.
Disappeared professions
This profession owes its appearance to an experiment conducted in the 1970s by two American scientists in Guatemala. It may seem strange, but I really really like to clean my shoes, I even talk to her when I work, ”Konstantin smiles.
Yes, and I myself was a cadet, studied at the academy of the Ministry of Internal Affairs, then served in the army. So the "fad" to keep shoes in excellent condition is quite justified. First, dust is removed from the shoes, then they are washed with a special shampoo, impregnated lotion and cream are used. The master works with two brushes at the same time, - says Konstantin. I believe that blue-collar occupations are also important and necessary. The main thing is to try to do your job, and then you will have nothing to be ashamed of.
White-collar workers in Guangzhou trample the wide sidewalks of the central business district with their boots Monday through Friday. Lee is on duty outside every day from 7:30 am to 6 pm. In hot summers and rainy springs, you can find it at your "workplace". In one working day, I usually earn 70 or 80 yuan. On some days I can earn 120 yuan, but this, of course, is very rare.
Li was born in Chongqing. The smooth leather of the boots sparkles in the midday sun as Lee finishes his work. I love my job, she continues. - For what? Well, first of all for a flexible schedule. "
Truth in Tea is a daily online magazine about doing business with China. People study, receive diplomas, work ... And then they find themselves on the street, because the profession they used to earn money ceased to be necessary for business. In this article, we will try to figure out why this happens and how to avoid beating employers' thresholds. The modern world exists in a market economy, when labor is paid for in money.
As you might guess, the latter are very few. Most professions are paid either from the state budget or from the company budget. Business, like the state, does not contain a charitable function - it is an institution based on efficiency, where expenses should not exceed income. In the 1760s, the industrial revolution began in Great Britain - the transition from manual to machine labor. Thousands of people smash cars that are registered with the Uber taxi service. The latter, due to technology, has built a system in which everyone can work as a taxi driver.
The reason for the disappearance of professions
This confirms that over the past 300 years nothing has changed in the minds of people - they are unhappy when they are left without work. If your work can be described by an algorithm or a script, congratulations - you are in the elimination queue. The second powerful engine towards automation is reliability and quality. A surgeon's hand may tremble, a driver who quarreled with his wife - a steering wheel. If the lives of people depend on your work, queue up.
It was all about robots - machine tools of the new millennium. Remember how the computer beat Garry Kasparov in chess? So, it was 1997. In chess, the number of possible unique games is 10 to 118 degrees. The number of atoms in the observable universe is 10 to 80 degrees. And cloud computing has also gained popularity, which means that I can use the services of super-computers of colossal power from my smartphone.
Back to the present
Have you seen what the guys from Russia are doing in California with the Luka.ai project? Have you seen how fast Siri and other assistants get upgrades? Sadly, the profession of an author is also going to hell - today performance marketing is more like computing management than old-school marketing. The first to leave will be those guys who are not on friendly terms with numbers, and do not know how to play new cool instruments.
MEMORY OF BIRTH SHOULD BE PLEASANT
If the judge sympathizes with the defendant, he will try to rule in favor of the latter. But in surgery, which requires perfect movement and complete focus, people have nothing to do. For example, work in the absence of data. But most important and in demand are those who will develop and design all these systems. Today it is worth getting at least basic programming skills. This will help to stay afloat in case of something, it will help to be in the epicenter of progress, and not to drag along the dusty and lifeless road.
The profession of a shoe shiner, or bootlecker, was especially popular in the 19th century, but over time in Europe and Russia it became almost impossible to meet boys with a brush and shoe polish on the streets. Shoe shining activities reached their peak in the late 19th century on the streets of British and American cities.
The Assyrians are one of the most mysterious and ancient peoples on earth. Even after the collapse of the Great Assyrian Empire, which existed for seventeen centuries, the legacy of the ancient state continues to live on in its descendants. Including in Russia.
According to Assyrian organizations, there are about four million people in the world who call themselves Assyrians. The consolidation of the Assyrians was facilitated by their Christian faith and a common language - New Aramaic, successive to the Old Aramaic, the language in which Jesus Christ preached.
However, not all scholars share the opinion that modern Assyrians are genetically descended from the inhabitants of Assyria: some believe that they are the descendants of the Akkadian-speaking population of the empire, while others believe that European missionaries mistakenly called them Assyrians. Another fact is interesting: it was the massive integration of the Aramaic population that dealt a strong blow to the strength of the Assyrian Empire, whose people spoke mainly Akkadian.
How the Assyrians got to Russia
One way or another, after the collapse of the empire, the new Assyrians lived on the territory of the Arab Caliphate from the 7th century, and in the Ottoman Empire and Persia from the 16th century. However, during the Russo-Persian war at the end of the 19th century, from which Russia emerged victorious, the Tukmanchay peace treaty was concluded, according to which the Christian population of Persia had the right to move to Russian Armenia.
Many of the Assyrians took advantage of this opportunity and began to move to Russia. In 1914, the Assyrian diasporas were already in many cities of Russia, including Moscow and St. Petersburg, many Assyrians received education and became Russian citizens.
The second wave of migration of Assyrians to Russia began during the Persian campaign of the First World War: after the uprising of the Assyrians and Armenians in the Turkish rear, Russian troops came to the aid of the rebels. From the Assyrians, the Russian military formed special battalions, which subsequently fought with the Turks.
But the Assyrian population suffered greatly for this - during clashes with Turkish troops and forced deportation, about a quarter of all Assyrians, hundreds of thousands of people died. This event went down in history as the genocide of the Assyrians during the First World War.
National craft
After the First World War, in 1919, at the Paris Peace Conference, it was proposed to create an Assyrian state, just as three decades later Israel would be created in a similar way with the help of the League of Nations.
In the 30s, Assyrians were supposed to settle in Brazil, Niger or Guiana. However, no one supported the proposal, and the Assyrian refugees faced new problems. Those who lived in the USSR were persecuted because of their religious beliefs, and later, after the Second World War, and forced deportation to Siberia along with the Volga Germans and other non-indigenous peoples of Russia.
The Assyrians who returned from Siberia or escaped deportation were not able to live an urban life without speaking Russian or even without a passport, and they had to look for ways to earn extra money. Shoe cleaning and shoe repairs became such a way - Assyrians in Russia have been doing this craft for more than a hundred years.
Street shoemakers and shoe shiners of oriental appearance in Moscow, St. Petersburg and other cities have long become an integral part of the city. In November 1920, Mikhail Kalinin ordered "the Assyrians to provide cleaning and repair of shoes," and in Leningrad after the war there was even a special artel "Trudassiriyets", which promoted the employment of migrants.
Thus, the gradual integration of the Assyrians into Russian society took place. Subsequently, the Assyrians, accustomed to clan traditions, settled so compactly that sometimes entire houses in Moscow were occupied only by them. And unusual Assyrian surnames were quickly replaced by Russian ones - Ben-Yochanans, for example, turned into Ivanovs.
Traditions of modern Assyrians
In the 40s, the first Assyrian football team appeared in the USSR - the Moscow Cleaner. However, the Assyrians in Russia were not only shoe shiners, and the ancient cultural heritage was fully manifested among the representatives of the diaspora. For example, before the First World War, an Assyrian theater society existed in Georgia, where performances were staged in the Assyrian language.
Theater goers and builders, doctors and artists, the Assyrians, regardless of their crafts, have always firmly followed the religious beliefs and traditions of the community. They are proud of the fact that they have preserved their national language after almost three thousand years, and are sensitive to the performance of ceremonies and rituals. Many young Assyrians even prefer going out with their families to the community over trendy discos.
Assyrians like to celebrate Christian holidays and days of memory of Assyrian saints with their families, dance the traditional sheikhani dance, prepare prahat flat cakes - a dish symbolizing the fall of Nineveh. The Moscow Assyrian diaspora maintains religious and national unity: in the capital there is an Assyrian church, the Mat Maryam Temple on Dubrovka, which also has an Assyrian language school and hosts numerous events. Assyrian restaurants and online stores are not funny anachronisms, but the realities of modern Russia.
An ethnic organization of Assyrian entrepreneurs who repair and clean shoes in Moscow is asking Sergei Sobyanin for protection. In the opinion of people, consumer service tents should be disposed of from auctions as socially significant objects. Repair is an area where quality should be assessed, not willingness to pay for a lot, experts say.
The Moscow Assyrian Society "Hayadta" has sent an open letter to the Mayor of Moscow Sergei Sobyanin. "At open auctions for the conclusion of an agreement for the placement of non-stationary objects, a raider seizure of tents of consumer services for repairing shoes, clothes, watches, making keys, metal repairs takes place," its authors write (the document is at the disposal of MN). The grounds for the statements were the auctions held in recent months for the placement of non-stationary trade objects, at which tents of consumer services were played on an equal basis with everyone. “There are about 50 such tents throughout the city,” says Felix Tumasov, deputy chairman of Hayadta. - Shoes, watches, keys are repaired there. Professionals do everything with their own hands. "
The Artel "Moscow Cleaner" was created by the Assyrians in 1928. The craftsmen were given plots for kiosks, in which shoe shine and household repairs began. The artel was disbanded in 1989, and its members became individual entrepreneurs. Many of the cleaners passed the business down.
Bidding for the right to place the stalls is basically completed. However, as noted by those involved in the "repair" business, the new owners are in no hurry to organize household services in the won places. In the opinion of entrepreneurs counting on the help of the mayor's office, this may indicate unfair play. They believe that repair tents as socially significant objects should not be put up for auction or, as a last resort, specialized competitions should be held for them.
“Now people who have worked in one place for more than ten years are on the street,” Tumasov laments. According to him, many who have also suffered from the auctions have already joined the Hayadta ethnic organization.
“The specifics of consumer services are not the specifics of trade,” says Ivan Lebedev, a former owner of six repair tents in the Western Administrative District. “It takes a year to raise a master.” Income from a "promoted" point can reach 100-150 thousand rubles per month. But in the first months it is unlikely to exceed 40 thousand rubles. The right to trade on the site of one Lebedev's tent cost the new owners about 250 thousand rubles. “The new pavilion costs half a million, and it still needs to be electrified, to conclude contracts for garbage disposal, for water,” says Lebedev. "And in three years there will be auctions again."
The prefecture of the Western District, which received the most criticism from the Hayadta Society, believes that nothing terrible is happening. “There are laws that are common to everyone,” said Olga Veldina, the official representative of the prefecture of CJSC. - All our facilities are socially significant. Competitions are held for everything. "
“There are people who have their own clientele in the districts. People know the craftsman and they go to him, ”says Alexander Popov, chairman of the Russian Trade Union of Small and Medium Business Workers. In his opinion, the essence is washed out at the auction - the quality of the service. “The auction gives a rough quantification where everything is measured in money. But this is a matter of service, so the auction does not solve the problem, - Popov is sure. "The services of the one who pays the city more will cost more." If people have been working for 15 years, then their tent is profitable and satisfies the population, the head of the trade union believes. "A system of competitions is needed, but the main role should be played by quality indicators, and for this, officials need to cooperate with entrepreneurs," he believes.
