The case of Suprun and Dudarev: to be continued
Archangelsk court has delivered the decision on the “archive case” of the historian Mikhail Suprun and the police officer Alexander Dudarev. The case of Suprun, accused of “the breach of privacy, namely – of illegal handing of the archive data on the interned and repressed Germans to German Red Cross”, was closed due to the expiry of the period of limitation (the case was initiated in 2009).
Dudarev was charged with “abuse of power”, the court found him guilty and ruled out a suspended sentence of one year of imprisonment with a one-year probation period.
“History lessons” have repeatedly written about various aspects of this case: German officials spoke out in defence of Suprun and Dudarev (German Red Cross undertook financial obligations under the project “Book of Condolence”), as well as scientists from Russia, Ukraine, Germany, Israel and the USA, human rights defenders from Memorial Society.
The lawyers of Suprun and Dudarev are intending to turn to the regional and Constitutional courts — to attain the closure of the case under “rehabilitation circumstances”. Representatives of the historian and himself have repeatedly stressed they were ready for a guilty verdict — to be able to sort things out with the notion of “privacy” at a court of higher instance, the notion around which “the archive case” was fabricated, as well as with its correlation with the possibility of writing the history of repressions of the USSR and publishing “Book of Condolence”.
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