FW: Letter re: Police raid on office of MEMORIAL in Petersburg

[Robert Chandler]

Subject: Letter re: Attack on Memorial

If you wish to add your signature to this letter (which will be sent in
English and in Russian), please reply to this email (o.figes at ntlworld.com)
with a 'Yes' and add your preferred academic title, honorary degrees,
honours, etc. (don't be shy - these may actually help).

Also - do please circulate to anybody you think may want to sign: 

Orlando Figes

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Dmitrii Medvedev, President of the Russian Federation
Valentina Matvienko, Governor of St Petersburg
Ella Pamfilova, Chairwoman of the Presidential Human Rights Commission of
the Russian Federation
Vladimir Lukin, Russian Federal Ombudsman for Human Rights           
                                   
Minister of Internal Affairs, Rashid Nurgaliev
Minister of Foreign Affairs, Sergey Lavrov
Yuriy Chaika, General Public Prosecutor of Russian Federation
Sergey Romanyuk, Public Prosecutor of Leningrad region,
 

 

5 December 2008
 

 

 

We, the signatories of this letter, members of the British and American
scholarly community, wish to express our deep concern at the actions of
members of the Public Prosecutor¹s Office of St Petersburg on 4 December
2008 during a raid of the premises of the Research and Information Centre
³Memorial² in St Petersburg, ul. Rubinshteina 23-105, which resulted in the
confiscation of the Centre¹s electronic archive.
 

RIC ³Memorial² is renowned for its research into the history of repression
under Stalin, the phenomenon of the Gulag and unofficial movements of the
1950s-1980s in the USSR. The staff of RIC ³Memorial² helped to establish the
fate of many thousands of people, citizens of the USSR and other countries,
who fell victim to the repressions during the 1930s-1950s. Many of us know
members of RIC ³Memorial¹s² staff in person or have used the organisation¹s
archive.
 

A total of eleven hard drives were confiscated. These drives hold several
databases containing: biographical information on more than 50,000 victims
of Stalinist repression; the results of the search for execution and burial
sites of victims of repression (several hundred sites described or
photographed); the photo collection (over 10,000 photographs) and
accompanying textual material of the ³Virtual Gulag Museum², which is a
unique online source linking more than one hundred local Russian museums.
Also confiscated were the database to the oral history archive and an
electronic collection of photographs, including scans of historic materials
from private archives. What is more, the prosecutors took a hard drive and
documents belonging to the art historian Aleksandr Margolis, a member of
³Memorial² and the director of the ³International Charitable Foundation for
the Renaissance of St. Petersburg-Leningrad², who is known for his
commitment to the preservation of St Petersburg¹s historic architecture.
 

The scholarly community fears the loss of a unique collection, which has
been amassed over the course of more than twenty years of dedicated
research. This collection is of priceless value for future generations of
researchers in both Russia and the wider world and must not be compromised
or destroyed. 
 

We are dismayed at the way the results of scholarly research and researchers
are being treated by the authorities of St Petersburg and urge you to take
action to ensure the electronic archive is immediately returned to its
rightful owners.
 

Yours sincerely,
 


------ End of Forwarded Message


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