Press Release, 19.09.2019

Photo: Boris Misnik, Jan Raczynski and Emilia Slabunova

Today, the Tverskoy District Court of Moscow decided not to consider the claim of the Yabloko Chair Emilia Slabunova against the Public Prosecutor General’s Office and the Karelian Public Prosecutor’s Office on checking the legality of the excavations of the graves of the victims of Stalin’s reprisals by the Russian Military Historical Society in Sandarmokh, due to the fact that the Public Prosecutor General’s Office had not submitted its objections. Slabunova file a lawsuit on 3 July.

“This characterises the style of work of the Public Prosecutor’s Office: careless, neglectful and disrespectful attitude to the court,” Emilia Slabunova said.

The second defendant in the case – the Karelian Public Prosecutor’s Office – sent their objections to the court by e-mail right before the meeting, so the Yabloko party could not get acquainted with them in advance.

“We will get acquainted with the objections and we will present our arguments against all the objections by the next meeting,” Slabunova noted.

Jan Raczynski, Chairman of the Board of the Memorial International Society, and Boris Misnik, Coordinator of the Yabloko Federal Political Committee, came to support Slabunova.

The next hearing of the case will take place in the Tverskoy District Court (Kalanchevskaya, 43A) on 24 September at 5.15 p.m.

It should be noted that Slabunova have appealed three times to the supervisory authorities with a request to verify the lawfulness of the excavations since August 2018, but still did not receive a substantive answer.

At the end of the summer of 2018, the Russian Military Historical Society carried out work in the territory of the burial place for victims of political reprisals during Stalin’s Great Terror period. The burial place is the largest in the north-west of Russia. The Society announced that it was searching for soldiers of the Red Army shot by “Finnish invaders” which, according to the Society, should prove that there had been no mass burials of Stalin’s victims. The legitimacy of the work raised many questions from journalists, human rights activists and historians.

In August this year, the Society conducted its second expedition to Sandarmokh. Emilia Slabunova appealed to the Tverskoy District Court of Moscow with a request to stop the second expedition of the Russian Military Historical Society to Sandarmokh before the court decides on her suit, but her appeal was declined.