Yes, of course there have been a mass of procedural violations: formally there was no official investigation, there was no order for the seizure of the book, and police major A.V. Bogdanov, who confiscated the print run, said at the start: “in order to secure its safety”, then “in order to take away the evidence”. But what sort of crime? He doesn’t know :) The report of the incident was put together on the back of an envelope, and it wasn’t signed by all participants in the proceedings, there are different KUSP numbers on it, and so on – the whole list is too long and boring to include here. But since the vigilant citizens from “The Russian Way” have written that it’s possible there are materials “of an extremist perspective”, then that means it’s possible to break the procedural rules and show no regard for the Criminal Code – things such as common sense, the reputation, the image of the country have for a long time now not been taken into consideration at all here.

It was pretty sad to see the young deputy prosecutor of the Moscow region, A.Yu. Gogitidze: the confiscated materials are “extremist”, and in any case everything’s been done right because we are a corporation and an investigator always has the right to whatever they want, and is always right. The judge corrected him (how do you know the materials are “extremist”?) and prompted him as well as she could, but Gogitidze looked as if it was her first day on the job. She read with mistakes, stood unsteadily, as though embarrassed in front of the people who had come to the court.

In the court ruling there appeared some wording regarding a suspicion of the “rehabilitation of Nazism.” And this is what they are trying to search for in the texts “Courier From Warsaw” by an anti-Nazi underground worker and hero of World War II! How ridiculous! Imaginary threats created out of dead enemy heroes.

And a new Article 171 of the Russian Criminal Code, “Illegal entrepreneurship,” appeared today in new documents which Major Bogdanov brought at the request of the judge (the papers are photocopies, not certified by anyone or anything, but even this is possible nowadays).

According to the latest information, the print-run and the “case” of Nowak-Jeziorański are supposed to have been moved to the Anti-Extremism Police Department of St Petersburg, but there are now 529 copies, not 530.

But after all judge V.V. Kovaleva did have a chance to bring this absurd story to a happy end: simply in terms of formal violations of procedure that had been committed. Even one violation would have been enough.

Of course we will continue to work for the release of our little book, with the help of Team 29, Ivan Pavlov, Еvgeny Smirnov and Nikita Anferov.


The print-run of the book by Jan Nowak-Jeziorański, Eastern Reflections, was confiscated on 11th February 2016 from the offices of the Berest printing house by Senior Police Investigator for the Moscow district of St Petersburg, police major A.B. Bogdanov, according to the official record. The police major A.B. Bogdanov went to the printing house with a group of ten officers, after he had “received information from the duty officer of the 29th police precinct about the discovery of published materials that contained texts of an extremist nature”, the official record states.

Translated by Frances Robson