Well, you have jokes!

VKontakte revealed to investigators the personal correspondence of Eduard Nikitin, who is on trial for a political joke.

Novaya Gazeta has obtained documents that show that St. Petersburg investigators, with the consent of the court and the social network, read the correspondence of St. Petersburg resident Eduard Nikitin. A disabled person of the second group is charged with inciting ethnic hatred (Article 282 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation) - against Russians and Russians - and is asked to assign him outpatient treatment at a mental hospital.

Novaya has already talked about the “political” case of Eduard Nikitin. With his posts on the social network VKontakte, the man could allegedly incite ethnic hatred and hatred - towards Russians and Russians, although he himself belongs to both categories. The examination center at the Ministry of Internal Affairs recognized nine materials published by Nikitin on his page as extremist (the quality of the experts and examination raised questions among the defense and the professional community). Courts are held behind closed doors - supposedly during the hearings information about the defendant’s health condition may be revealed. The third hearing on this case will take place today.

“Anyone who laughs at the authorities can be brought [to trial],” says Nikitin’s lawyer Maxim Kamakin: experts recognized an anecdote in which the hero questioned the fairness and legitimacy of the Russian elections as extremist. After the recent scandal with falsification and cancellation of election results in Primorye, after the comically shameful address of the governor of the Vladimir region to the population, Nikitin’s case began to look even more political.

“Novaya” read the case materials and found that just on the basis of “incorrect” posts, investigators received permission from the court to get into his personal correspondence - and the VKontakte security service agreed with this.

Although the Nevsky District Court began considering the case on the merits only last week, the story itself began three years ago. On December 1, 2015, the General Director of VKontakte LLC at 8 Tverskaya Street received the first request from the Center for Combating Extremism (CPE) of the Main Directorate of the Ministry of Internal Affairs of the Russian Federation. The letter was signed by the chief, Sergei Chernozub, and the executor was named Yulia Srodnikova, at that time the senior detective of the 7th department of the Center for Emergency Operations and a police major. It should be noted that Srodnikova was in excellent standing with her superiors; a couple of months before she was assigned the Nikitin case, she was awarded the St. Petersburg government prize “For excellent performance of duties for the protection of law and order in the territory of St. Petersburg” in the amount of 25 thousand rubles.

The request itself lists the information that the Center requires from the social network on the basis of clause 4 of Art. 13 of the Law “On the Police”: “Administration IP addresses, owner registration data, e-mail, telephone numbers and other information about the user.” By the end of December, VKontakte put all the requested data on the table for the eshniki. To be fair, we note that the request from the CPE does not indicate the article of the Criminal Code under which Eduard Nikitin will be prosecuted. However, everyone already knows what kind of business Center “E” is involved in.

Already in 2016, on February 20, the Center made a new request, this time to the provider company that services Eduard Nikitin’s apartment - Perspektiva LLC, or the united company Dom.ru Interzet. From the provider, Center “E” wants to find out “information about the user who was provided with an IP address <...> for accessing the site vk.com on the specified dates and times.” On March 10, the company kindly provided Center E with subscriber data.

Approximately between March and May 2016, the Main Directorate of the Ministry of Internal Affairs for St. Petersburg transferred its findings for verification to the Investigative Committee. On May 15, the head of the department of procedural control and Lieutenant Colonel of Justice Viktor Kozlov (in six months, the head of the Investigative Committee Bastrykin will appoint Kozlov as deputy head of the Investigative Directorate of the Investigative Committee of the Russian Federation for the Leningrad Region) transfers the materials of the pending case to the investigative department for the Nevsky District and asks to conduct a “high-quality pre-investigation check.”

At the district level, the inspection dragged on for a year, and only on December 8, 2017, the investigative department opened a criminal case against Eduard Nikitin under the first part of Article 282 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation. On February 7 of this year, during a pre-investigation check, investigator Denis Pomogaibo petitioned the Nevsky District Court to allow him access to Eduard Nikitin’s personal correspondence, or more precisely, “to seize information contained in postal items (correspondence on the Internet).” As can be seen from the court ruling, Denis Pomogaibo did not have to bother much with justifying his curiosity: “Obtaining the above information is necessary to verify the information obtained during the preliminary investigation, establish the circumstances to be proven, as well as establish other circumstances relevant to the criminal case.” . The prosecutor supported the investigator - the information received will really contribute to establishing the truth. Judge Elena Alekseeva considered Pomogaibo’s arguments “reasonable and legal” - in order to establish the truth in this difficult case of a political joke, “all comprehensive measures must be taken.”

The very next day after Judge Alekseeva’s decision, Pomogaibo sent a request on VKontakte and on February 21 received a comprehensive response from the head of the company’s security service, V. Yu. Russkov. “The correspondence of the user of the VKontakte website page <...> is presented in the available volume for the requested period of time,” writes Russkov. The available volume is basically all of Eduard Nikitin’s correspondence on the social network - it fits on a CD in the amount of 1 million 82 thousand 383 bytes (in other words, a little more than 1 MB), which is quite a lot for text files.

The opening of correspondence by investigators in cases under Article 282 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation is a rather rare case.

Lately, dozens of criminal cases have been filed under this article, and many have rightly reproached the social network for its cooperation with law enforcement agencies: VKontakte disclosed telephone numbers, postal addresses, page visit times, and other information about its users. But there has not yet been a public case when the persons involved in the cases would have declared that investigators had read their correspondence.

Lawyer Maxim Kamakin told Novaya that until now the investigation has not used data from Nikitin’s personal correspondence for its own purposes.

Let us remind you that today the second substantive hearing in the case against Eduard Nikitin will take place in the Nevsky District Court. The court will consider the defense's motion to inadmissible the examination presented by the investigation. Experts recognized Nikitin’s nine posts on the VKontakte social network as extremist, including a meme about the “vatnik” and an anecdote about the uselessness of elections in Russia. One of the experts, Elena Kiryukhina, is famous for the fact that in 2009 she did not see incitement of hatred and enmity in the words “kill the f**k, kill the f**k,” and her colleague Rezeda Salakhutdinova even received an education in the specialty “scientific communism” "

Meanwhile, last week the Plenum of the Supreme Court issued a resolution in which it clarified how courts should consider cases under Article 282 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation. In particular, the Supreme Court urged judges not to blindly trust the opinion of experts, since it “does not have an advantage over other evidence.” Moreover, the apex court has asked to pay attention to the size of the audience and the number of views while hearing such cases.

Comment from the social network’s press service: “VKontakte is obliged to provide correspondence based on a court decision in accordance with Russian law. Separately, we note that the correspondence was provided exclusively for the period specified in the court ruling.”