a petition against Julia Privedennaia's political trial

[Rossen Djagalov]

Fellow Slavicists,

Please, forgive yet another e-mail asking you to lend your signature to a
worthy cause, but circulating this petition
http://www.thepetitionsite.com/117/justice-for-julia is the one thing I can
objectively do to help a Russian friend of mine, Julia Privedennaia, who is
currently facing a politically motivated trial in the Moscow Region Court.
My hope is to send the petition to the US Embassy in Russia (and possibly a
few other embassies, if there is a sufficient number of signatures by the
relevant nationals), from where such materials typically get forwarded to
the Attorney-General's Office of the Russian Federation, becoming part of
the legal case and giving it a certain international character. 

Julia war arrested approximately a year ago, as a result of her activities
for the non-parliamentary opposition, and ironically, of her preoccupation
with legal injustice and police brutality in Russia. After two months in
custody, she has been released on bail, pending the outcome of the trial.
Fortunately, Julia has had a number of friends to support her. In a press
conference following her arrest, Liudmila Alekseeva (President of the Moscow
Helsinki Group), Sergei Mitrokhin (Chairman of the Yabloko Party), Sergei
Grigoriants (President of the Glasnost Foundation), Svetlana Gannushkina
(Chariman of the Committee for Citizens' Mutual Help) spoke about the absurd
nature of the accusations and offered to become her legal guarantors.
Journalists involved with human-rights cases such as Valeriia Novodvorskaia
and Yelena Sannikova have provided regular coverage of Julia's trial. Many
of these articles have been collected on the following web site
http://www.fakel-portos.ru/jp.php or could be simply found by googling
Julia's name.

While her involvement in oppositional politics was never mentioned in the
formal trial (except for a note from the FSB to the effect that in recent
years, she has been engaged in "anti-Russian activities"), the formal
charges against her stem from her participation in the PORTOS youth group
(Poeticized Society for the Development of a Theory of People's Happiness)
in the town of Liubertsy (near Moscow). Dating back to the perestroika era,
that group had up to 150 mostly college-age members, who ran an agricultural
co-operative, studied Esperanto, wrote poetry, and published a magazine
Theory of Happiness. Because throughout the 1990s, the co-operative was
subject to occasional physical attacks by local gangs, asking for protection
money, PORTOS members purchased a few hunting rifles and pneumatic guns,
whose safe storage the local police would periodically check. After a raid
by RUBOP (a special police division) in 2000, which put an end to PORTOS's
functional existence, these served as the basis of the main charge of
"organizing an illegal armed formation."
The other charge--"illegally holding two or more minors"--was the
prosecution's way of describing the collective's relationship to its junior
members (15- and 16-year-old, most of whom came from families with
problems), who had joined PORTOS with the consent of their parents. One does
not have to subscribe to PORTOS's eclectic practices and ideologies, made up
of Makarenko's pedagogy; intolerance to drinking and smoking; poetry writing
and esperantism; utopianism and critical attitude of contemporary Russian
realities, to see that PORTOS was these kids' best chance in life at a time
when their families and the Russian state had all but given up on them.

In the ensuing 2000-2002 court case, which was also widely condemned by
human-rights activists, three of PORTOS's main organizers were given
sentences from 4.5 to 5.5 years, two of whom to forced incarceration to
mental hospitals. The diagnosis of "delusional ideas for reformism" was
produced by experts from the Serbskii Psychatry Institute, which is
notorious for its systematic certification of Soviet-era dissidents as
mentally ill, a practice it has resumed in the 2000s with respect to some
oppositional activists. The court has recently ordered that Julia be also
subjected to such a psychiatric examination and she is currently awaiting
its results. Knowing her, as well as a number of other PORTOS members
personally, I can vouch that I rarely seen people who are as sane as the are.

Mostly, however, it is remarkable that so many years after the end of the
first PORTOS case, the same charges should be brought against Julia. Arrest
warrants have also been issued against two other PORTOS members, Olga
Shirokaia and Tamara Kostyuk, who currently reside outside of Russia. Given
their outspoken engagement with various oppositional causes in recent years,
there is little doubt that this revisiting of the PORTOS case is political
in nature and it is quite likely that the trial will proceed accordingly.

I do not know what effect--if any--your signature under the petition will
have, but occasionally such expressions of international solidarity have
been known to help.

Thank you,
Rossen

P.S. If you happen to know of anyone not on this list-serve who would sign
the petition, please, don't hesitate to forward this e-mail to them.

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