Single pickets of the VDVZ participants near the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.Dmitry Yurin, a member of the National Movement of Foreign Currency Mortgage Holders from St Petersburg, does his best to survive on 200 roubles (£2.50) a day. Officially, Dmitry is unemployed and has no means to cover his monthly mortgage payment for the studio apartment he purchased: his wife left and now wants him to pay child support. But Dmitry, one of thousands of Russians in peril due to having taken out a foreign currency mortgage, has big plans for the future.
“By the beginning of March next year, I intend to either win back my apartment or go to jail,” Dmitry tells me. “It’ll be the election, and Putin most probably will be running. Right at that very moment I plan to go into a bank with an anti-Putin poster, in order to draw attention to my problem. I’ll become a political prisoner like Ildar Dadin. And then I’ll leave Russia. Why would I want to live in this country?”
Dmitry bought his 290 square-foot bedsit in 2007. The apartment was meant to be a starter home and Dmitry planned to pay off the mortgage in seven years. He was employed by a regional Panasonic office as a marketing expert, and was paid in U.S. dollars, which is why he decided to take out a mortgage in U.S. currency.
