History: Under Examination Forever?

A rather Kafkian “Process” is held in the Russian North-West against a historian that worked with archive documents: no access either to the case materials, or to the documents, or to information on investigative measures performed…

One should learn history – at least in order to learn from mistakes. Experts spend years to restore lost history and to search for lost documents. Unfortunately, in Russia today, historical research can lead to criminal prosecution.

Mikhail Suprun, Professor, Heard of National History Department of the Pomorsky State University (Arkhangelsk), took part in 2009 in a joint Russian-German research project “Russian Ethnical Germans Repressed in 1940s”. Within the project, he needed access to archive documents in order to enter people’s data into “Memory Books” similar to a number of books already published.

Soon, Prof. Suprun was accused of two crimes: violating personal and family secrets (Art. 137 of the Criminal Code) and encouraging an official to power abuse (Art. 286). This “official” is Alexander Dudarev, information center head in the Arkhangelsk department for internal affairs who assisted the scientist in his work and has also been accused of power abuse.

In order to prove or to disprove an accusation, access to information on the case is needed. In the Suprun case, access to all data was closed for a long time.

In September 2009, Ivan Pavlov, IIFD Board Chair and a defending attorney in the case, requested from the investigator written information: what investigative actions had been performed and what documents can an attorney get familiar with. His request was rejected flatly. In December 2009, Pavlov filed a claim to court.

After a long trifle with transferring to various courts, on July 26, 2010, the Primorsky district court of St.-Petersburg at last obliged the investigator to provide all necessary information on the case together with the full list of included documents, and to enable document copying or photographing.

Within the case logic, any historian working with archive documents can be accused of violating someone’s privacy or other secret, and so can any archeologist digging anywhere (we can remember Mr. Frankland from Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Hound of the Baskervilles).

Ivan Pavlov comments: “The court declared the case as a precedent one, having no previous similes… The court has defended procedural possibilities for defending lawyers to access information and to have copies of documents, as well as full lists (signed by an investigator) of documents they have right to get familiar with… As for the Suprun case itself, we will claim to the Constitutional court since Art. 137 of the Criminal Code cites “personal and family secret” not defined clearly by the Russian laws; this can violate the very principle of equalty of everybody for the law and the justice”.