Russian Photographer Sentenced to 16 Years for Sharing Publicly Available Historical Documents

**Can an average individual in Russia be jailed for distributing a book available in bookstores?**

Grigory Skvortsov, a 35-year-old photographer from Perm celebrated for his captivating photographs of industrial landscapes and city skylines, was sentenced to 16 years in prison on Thursday for doing just that.

Skvortsov was taken into custody in St. Petersburg in November 2023. For several months, his family was left in the dark regarding the specifics of the charges against him.

It was later disclosed that he faced accusations of state treason for sending publicly accessible historical documents—supplements to the book “Soviet ‘Secret Bunkers’: Urban Special Fortifications of the 1930s-60s”—to a journalist based in the United States.

The 2021 work by historian Dmitry Yurkov explores Soviet bunkers, a declassified shelter belonging to the Foreign Ministry, and the neglected architecture of Cold War secrecy. This book could be purchased in Russia and was even promoted in the state-run Rossiyskaya Gazeta newspaper.

«I didn’t have access to classified information and held no malicious intent,» Skvortsov mentioned to Pervy Otdel, a Russian lawyers’ association, during an interview from his pre-trial detention.

Skvortsov, who publicly criticized the war in Ukraine in a 2022 discussion with a German publication, stated that “the investigation commenced with allegations concerning my supposed political motives.”

His case represents the latest instance in a troubling trend of treason prosecutions in Russia, particularly since the invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. Lawyers estimate that approximately 80% of all treason cases in recent Russian history have arisen since the start of the large-scale invasion.

According to Skvortsov, he obtained the supplementary materials to the book—1,000 pages of scanned archival documents sold separately by the author—and, “along with various other images and diagrams sourced from the internet, I forwarded them to the journalist.”

“I merely wanted to share these resources with the public,” he expressed.

In his conversation with Pervy Otdel, Skvortsov contended that the FSB’s Investigative Department was more focused on concealing an inability to protect state secrets rather than uncovering the truth—also aiming to protect the book’s author.

Yurkov has maintained that he exclusively used declassified archive materials in his writing. In 2022, Russia’s state media oversight body, Roskomnadzor, claimed, referencing a court ruling, that a lecture by Yurkov about his book supposedly revealed state secrets.

However, Yurkov himself has not been charged with any wrongdoing.

“The situation is undoubtedly absurd, yet it’s not the first instance, and I fear it won’t be the last one based on such absurdity,” commented Yevgeny Smirnov, a lawyer associated with Pervy Otdel, highlighting that the book was legally purchasable in Russia.

“He [Skvortsov] was never acquainted with the protocols regarding state secrets—he simply lacked the knowledge to discern what constituted a state secret,” Smirnov told The Moscow Times.

“He was just an ordinary person who accessed these materials from a bookstore. Yet it is not the individual who inadvertently declassified the information facing consequences, but him,” Smirnov added.

The Nobel Peace Prize-winning human rights organization Memorial has included Skvortsov in its roster of individuals subjected to criminal prosecution that is likely politically motivated and characterized by significant legal violations.