Disc or suit

St. Petersburg Memorial did not wait for the return of the storage media seized by investigators

The leaders of the St. Petersburg scientific, information and educational center "Memorial", which survived a search exactly a week ago , intend to sue the investigation. This was announced by the chairman of the board of St. Petersburg Memorial, Vladimir Schnittke.

True, the text of the claim is not yet ready - its content will depend on the results of today's conversation with the investigator of the Investigative Committee at the St. Petersburg Prosecutor's Office, Mikhail Kalganov, who led the search. Mr. Schnittke and the director of the Memorial Research Center Irina Fliege were invited for questioning at the Investigative Committee for the Central District of the city in the afternoon.

Let us recall that on December 4, 2008, a search took place in the premises of the St. Petersburg Memorial, which was accompanied by numerous procedural violations. During the visit of law enforcement officers, neither the head of the organization nor the lawyer were allowed into the premises. The formal reason for the visit of investigators from Memorial employees and volunteers was simply shocking - the center allegedly financed the newspaper New Petersburg, some of whose articles were recognized as extremist, and which itself had already been closed by court decision.

“By definition, we had nothing to do with the New Petersburg newspaper; on the contrary, we always talked about closing this newspaper as openly fascist,” said Vladimir Schnittke. “Therefore, talking about its financing is simply ridiculous, although the investigator and his assistants were primarily looking for financial documents.”

Apparently, in the hope of still finding some kind of clue, the investigators removed almost all electronic media, which jeopardized the work of not only the center itself, but also, for example, the co-chairman of the All-Russian Society for the Protection of Historical and Cultural Monuments, Alexander Margolis, who was working on a book about Leningrad in the 60s, using the Memorial archive. His manuscript was also taken away. According to Mr. Schnittke, the UPC has already recognized the error of Mr. Kalganov’s actions and even promised to return all the selected documents. True, the admission of the mistake was made on December 5, but so far neither the documents nor the hard drives have been returned to Memorial.

Vladimir Schnittke himself is inclined to consider the actions of the investigators “pure provocation.” Yuri Vdovin, a well-known St. Petersburg human rights activist and deputy chairman of the Civil Control organization, also agrees with him. “Of course, we need to contact the prosecutor’s office so that it takes some measures against investigators who allow such arbitrariness,” he believes. “But I am sure that they acted not only on their own initiative.”

The Memorial Human Rights Center has already sent a statement to the Prosecutor of St. Petersburg Sergei Zaitsev, and a copy to the Prosecutor General of Russia Yuri Chaika. According to Irina Fliege, two complaints were also sent to the Investigative Committee - about the illegality of the search and about the denial of access to a lawyer. After the interrogation on Friday, human rights activists will decide to which authority they will complain next.

Natalya SHKURENOK