On December 8, the Oktyabrsky district court of Arkhangelsk proclaimed in a closed(!) hearing session the introductory clauses and the resolutive parts of the convicting sentence against Alexander Dudarev and of the statement for termination of the criminal case against Prof. Mikhail Suprun. The criminal case against the historian is terminated because the statute of limitation has expired.

Alexander Dudarev is found guilty within Article 286, Part 2 of the Criminal Code (power abuse), and charged with a one-year sentence suspended for one year.

Such a court decision is a specific “warning” for all historians working with Russian archives: since plenty of historical documents contain information on citizens, a researcher should “measure” much more than seven times before “cutting”, i.e. publishing any data that may by accident disclose “personal or family secrets” of anyone. In Russia, only law-enforcement or judicial authorities separate “personal” from “public” due to criteria not formulated within these court proceedings.

We should point one more that only the introductory clauses and the resolutive parts of both decisive documents were proclaimed in court. The court itself announced in addition that it would take about five days to develop the declarations of intent.

Meanwhile, a large news story, on “the Arkhangelsk case” is already published at the official website of the Arkhangelsk Oblast Prosecutor’s Office, citing the court declarations of intent not proclaimed in court. Among other, it states that “Suprun and his assistants, actively helped by Dudarev, collected data that are personal and family secrets of citizens of German ethnicity”.

In the opinion of Ivan Pavlov, Mikhail Suprun’s defending attorney in this complicated case, the situation is rather ambiguous: “Such a news publication makes believe that, while intending the decision, the prosecutor’s office and the court work in team today. It is rather surprising that their officials feel quite comfortable demonstrating this in public”.

The court decision, when obtained, will be appealed in cassation court instance. After that, we plan to bring the issue of “personal and family secret” definition and interpretation to the Constitutional Court of the Russian Federation.

The case history is here.

The case materials (in Russian) are available in the IIFD litigation register.