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Prosecutor’s Office Raids Rights Group

By Galina Stolyarova

Staff Writer

A group of armed and masked men who claimed to have been sent by the local prosecutor’s office raided the local headquarters of the Memorial human rights group on Thursday, confiscating hard drives from all of the group’s computers.

Tatyana Kosinova, one of the leaders of Memorial, said in a telephone interview later Thursday, that several masked men armed with sticks stormed into her office on 23 Ulitsa Rubinsteina at around 1 p.m. and began searching the premises.

“Staff were confined to their seats and not allowed to communicate,” she said.

A spokesman for the Investigative Committee of the Russian General Prosecutor’s Office said the search was part of an investigation of a criminal case involving the publication of the “Here Comes the Real Candidate,” an article by Konstantin Chernyayev in Novy Peterburg newspaper in June 2007.

The prosecutors allege that the article incited social and ethnic hatred.

Memorial’s staff, however, are not convinced.

“We do not have, and never have had any connection with this newspaper,” Kosinova said. “Besides, I cannot even remotely imagine what could possibly be of any interest to the prosecutor’s office in our headquarters. All our projects — the Gulag museum, the discussion club and historical research — are legal.”

Irina Flige, head of Memorial’s historical wing, which researches political repression in the Soviet era, thinks the raid was an attempt to intimidate the organization, and may pressage its closure.

“The Novy Peterburg link is so far-fetched none of us finds it in the slightest bit believable,” Flige said. “We do not know what the article was about, let alone have any personal involvement with it. This is just an excuse for the authorities to bare their teeth.”

Flige said the investigators seized all the organization’s research material from the past 20 years.

“The files contain our research into the Red Terror [during the Russian Civil War in 1918-1922] and the history of Russia’s Gulag [labor camps],” she said. “Clearly, the authorities have had enough of us.”

Kosinova said she and her staff, as well as Memorial’s lawyer, were denied access to their offices during Thursday’s raid. Staff were not allowed to use their mobile phones or answer the office phones. At around 3.30 p.m. a crew from TV Tsenter television managed to get in but was promptly pushed out with the use of sticks.

Thursday’s raid prompted a group of human rights advocates in Moscow to sign a letter of protest.

Memorial has had a series of stand-offs with security services in recent years. For example, a major scandal occured when Memorial’s volunteers discovered anomimous graves near a shooting range in Toksovo near St. Petersburg in 2003 and carried out their own analysis, concluding that the bodies were victims of Stalin’s purges.

The security services denied the allegation and said that all locations where victims of political repression had been shot had been made public and turned into memorial cemeteries many years ago.

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