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

Can a regular citizen in Russia face imprisonment for sharing a book that is sold in stores?

Grigory Skvortsov, a 35-year-old photographer from Perm known for his captivating portrayals of industrial settings and urban views, was sentenced to 16 years in prison on Thursday for precisely that reason.

Skvortsov was apprehended in St. Petersburg in November 2023. For months, his family was unaware of the specific charges against him.

Subsequently, it was disclosed that he faced accusations of treason for transmitting publicly accessible historical documents—additional materials related to the book “Soviet ‘Secret Bunkers’: Urban Special Fortifications of the 1930s-60s”—to a journalist in the U.S.

The 2021 publication by historian Dmitry Yurkov explores Soviet bunkers, a declassified shelter from the Foreign Ministry, and the overlooked architecture of Cold War secrecy. The book was available in Russia and even promoted in the state-owned Rossiyskaya Gazeta newspaper.

“I had no access to state secrets and no ill intentions,” Skvortsov said during an interview with Pervy Otdel, a group of Russian lawyers, from his pre-trial detention.

Skvortsov, who criticized the war in Ukraine in a 2022 interview with a German publication, mentioned that “the investigation started with claims regarding my supposed political motives.”

His case is part of an escalating trend of treason charges in Russia since the country’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. Lawyers estimate that around 80% of treason cases in contemporary Russian history were initiated after the full-scale invasion.

According to Skvortsov, he purchased the supplementary materials to the book—1,000 pages of scanned archival documents that were sold separately by the author—and “after collecting various photos and diagrams from online sources, I sent them to the journalist.”

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

In his interview with Pervy Otdel, Skvortsov contended that the FSB’s Investigative Department was less concerned with uncovering the truth and more focused on covering up their failure to safeguard state secrets and protecting the book’s author.

Yurkov has maintained that he relied solely on declassified archival sources when compiling his book. In 2022, the Russian state media regulator Roskomnadzor claimed, referencing a court ruling, that Yurkov’s lecture concerning the book supposedly revealed state secrets.

However, Yurkov has not faced any charges himself.

“The situation is ridiculous, of course, but it’s not the first instance of such absurdity, and I fear it won’t be the last,” remarked Yevgeny Smirnov, a lawyer with Pervy Otdel, noting the book’s availability for sale in Russia.

“He [Skvortsov] was never informed of the protocols for managing state secrets—he had no means to discern what constituted a state secret,” Smirnov told The Moscow Times.

“He was just an average individual who accessed these materials from a store. Yet it’s not the person responsible for mistakenly declassifying the information who is facing consequences, but him,” Smirnov stated.

The Nobel Prize-winning human rights organization Memorial has included Skvortsov in its roster of individuals facing criminal prosecution believed to be politically motivated and characterized by severe legal violations.