Confiscation of Digital Archive
On 4 November 2008, Memorial's St Petersburg office which houses archives on the Gulag was raided by the authorities and 12 computer hard disks containing the entire digital archive of the atrocities committed under Stalin, representing 20 years of work, were confiscated. The information was being used to develop "a universally accessible database with hundreds of thousands of names." Office director Irina Flinge believes that they were targeted because their organization is on the wrong side of Putinism, specifically the idea "that Stalin and the Soviet regime were successful in creating a great country".
Officially, the raid was in relation to an article published in the Novy Peterburg newspaper in June 2007. Memorial denies any link to the article. Some human rights lawyers in Russia have speculated that the raid is retaliation for Memorial screening a banned film Rebellion: the Litvinenko Case, about the murder of Russian ex-spy Alexander Litvinenko. According to writer Orlando Figes, the raid "was clearly intended to intimidate Memorial". Allison Gill, director of Human Rights Watch in Moscow, has said "This outrageous police raid shows the poisonous climate for non-governmental organisations in Russia This is an overt attempt by the Russian government to silence critical voices." The raid also prompted an open letter to Dmitry Medvedev from academics from all over the world, condemning the seizure. The United States has declared that it is "deeply concerned" about the raid: State Department spokesman Sean McCormack said: "Unfortunately, this action against Memorial is not an isolated instance of pressure against freedom of association and expression in Russia."
On March 20, 2009, the court of Dzerzhinsky District decided that the search on December 4, 2008, in Memorial with confiscation of 12 HDDs with information about victims of political repressions was carried out with procedural violations, and actions of law enforcement bodies were illegal, and eventually the 12 hard drives, as well as optical discs and some papers, were returned to Memorial.
Read more about this topic: Memorial (society)
Famous quotes containing the words confiscation of, confiscation and/or archive:
“We have our difficulties, true; but we are a wiser and a tougher nation than we were in 1932. Never have there been six years of such far flung internal preparedness in all of history. And this has been done without any dictator’s power to command, without conscription of labor or confiscation of capital, without concentration camps and without a scratch on freedom of speech, freedom of the press or the rest of the Bill of Rights.”
—Franklin D. Roosevelt (1882–1945)
“We have our difficulties, true; but we are a wiser and a tougher nation than we were in 1932. Never have there been six years of such far flung internal preparedness in all of history. And this has been done without any dictator’s power to command, without conscription of labor or confiscation of capital, without concentration camps and without a scratch on freedom of speech, freedom of the press or the rest of the Bill of Rights.”
—Franklin D. Roosevelt (1882–1945)
“To a historian libraries are food, shelter, and even muse. They are of two kinds: the library of published material, books, pamphlets, periodicals, and the archive of unpublished papers and documents.”
—Barbara Tuchman (1912–1989)