[aaus-list] Fwd: From O. Figes: Scholars' Letter in Support of "Memorial"

[stephen velychenko]

Subject: Open Letter by International Scholars Regarding 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
----------

To
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 scholarly community
accross the world, wish to express our deep concern at the actions of
members of the Public Prosecutor's Office of St Petersburg on 4
December 2008 during a raid of the premises of the Research and
Information Centre "Memorial" in St Petersburg, ul. Rubinshteina
23-105, which resulted in the confiscation of the Centre's electronic
archive.

RIC "Memorial" 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 "Memorial"
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 "Memorial's"
staff in person or have used the organisation's 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 "Virtual Gulag
Museum", 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 "Memorial" and the director
of the "International Charitable Foundation for the Renaissance of St.
Petersburg-Leningrad", who is known for his commitment to
the preservation of St Petersburg's 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,

__._,_.___
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__,_._,___


-- 
Stephen Velychenko
CERES Associate;
Research Fellow,Chair of Ukrainian Studies;
Munk Center
University of Toronto
Devonshire Place
Toronto M5S 3K7