• Human rights education  Arkhangelsk region  Moscow city & Moscow region  Victims of repression

Nikita Petrov a historian with the Memorial Human Rights Centre specializing in the history of the security services: “…As a matter of fact, this is an example of pure and selfless enthusiasm. It is a humanitarian task – the task of understanding the mechanisms of repression and recovering the names of victims. And this criminal case against Suprun and Dudarev has been thought up to demonstrate to the public that people shouldn’t work in the archives.” 

Anastasia Kirilenko: “Together with historian Mikhail Suprun, another person is being tried – Aleksandr Dudarev, head of the archives of the Arkhangelsk department of the Ministry of Internal Affairs where Professor Suprun had worked.” In an interview with Radio Liberty, Vladimir Morev, the lawyer of Aleksandr Dudarev, said that the relatives of those repressed – who have the status of victims in the trial – spoke at the court hearing on 17 October: 

“The victims gave evidence of repressions during Stalin’s rule as well as their continuation in the 1960s with regard to ethnic Germans who had been deported to the Arkhangelsk region. They talked about the hardships of that period. They seemed to blame that historic period. When we asked them what they consider the accused to be guilty of, they did not understand the question. [Read more]