Catriona Bass: Memory Incompatible: The Archangelsk Affair Continues
[Catriona Bass is a writer specialising in Russia and Tibet.]
In September last year, the FSB brought criminal charges against historian Professor Mikhail Suprun and police colonel Aleksandr Dudarev for publishing a ‘Book of Memory’ to victims of Soviet repression. The case, which came to be known as the “Arkhangelsk Affair”, caused considerable outcry at the time. A year on, it has yet to be brought to court. Strangely, this has not prevented the being used as “legal precedent” in denying activists access to archived material.
Suprun and Dudarev’s book catalogued the names of Poles and Germans deported to the Arkhangelsk Region in the 1930s-1940s. It was not the first publication of its kind: numerous such memorial books have been published in the last twenty years, including even by departments of the FSB. Regardless, the two men have been accused of exposing ‘the personal or family secrets’ of victims without their consent, Article 137 of the Criminal Code.
Ivan Pavlov, Suprun’s lawyer, claims that this article of the Criminal Code remains completely undefined and has never been used in this context before. More to the point, the publication of names to commemorate political victims is actually enshrined in the 1991 ‘Law on the Rehabilitation of Victims of Political Repression.’ President Medvedev himself has emphasised the importance of pursuing this commemorative process: ‘We must continue the work of finding the places of mass burials and publishing the names of those who died,' he said last October....
Read entire article at openDemocracy
In September last year, the FSB brought criminal charges against historian Professor Mikhail Suprun and police colonel Aleksandr Dudarev for publishing a ‘Book of Memory’ to victims of Soviet repression. The case, which came to be known as the “Arkhangelsk Affair”, caused considerable outcry at the time. A year on, it has yet to be brought to court. Strangely, this has not prevented the being used as “legal precedent” in denying activists access to archived material.
Suprun and Dudarev’s book catalogued the names of Poles and Germans deported to the Arkhangelsk Region in the 1930s-1940s. It was not the first publication of its kind: numerous such memorial books have been published in the last twenty years, including even by departments of the FSB. Regardless, the two men have been accused of exposing ‘the personal or family secrets’ of victims without their consent, Article 137 of the Criminal Code.
Ivan Pavlov, Suprun’s lawyer, claims that this article of the Criminal Code remains completely undefined and has never been used in this context before. More to the point, the publication of names to commemorate political victims is actually enshrined in the 1991 ‘Law on the Rehabilitation of Victims of Political Repression.’ President Medvedev himself has emphasised the importance of pursuing this commemorative process: ‘We must continue the work of finding the places of mass burials and publishing the names of those who died,' he said last October....