Can an average citizen in Russia face imprisonment for distributing a book that is available in bookstores?
Grigory Skvortsov, a 35-year-old photographer from Perm celebrated for his captivating industrial and rooftop photography, was sentenced to 16 years in prison on Thursday for precisely that reason.
Skvortsov was taken into custody in St. Petersburg in November 2023, and for several months, his family was left in the dark about the specific charges against him.
Eventually, it became clear that he was accused of treason for sending publicly accessible historical documents—additional materials related to the book “Soviet ‘Secret Bunkers’: Urban Special Fortifications of the 1930s-60s”—to an American reporter.
The 2021 work by historian Dmitry Yurkov explores Soviet-era bunkers, a declassified Foreign Ministry shelter, and the hidden architecture of Cold War-era secrecy. The book was sold in Russia and even featured in advertisements in the state-owned Rossiyskaya Gazeta newspaper.
“I didn’t have access to any state secrets and had no ill intentions,” Skvortsov stated in an interview from pre-trial detention, speaking to the Russian lawyers’ association Pervy Otdel.
Skvortsov, who expressed his opposition to the war in Ukraine during a conversation with a German publication in 2022, noted that “the investigation started with allegations regarding my supposed political motives.”
His case represents the latest in a rising trend of treason prosecutions in Russia following the invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. Attorneys estimate that nearly 80% of treason charges in contemporary Russian history have emerged after the onset of this full-scale war.
Skvortsov explained that he purchased supplementary materials for the book—1,000 pages of scanned archival documents that were sold separately by the author—and “along with other images and diagrams sourced online, shared them with the journalist.”
“I simply wished to make this information public,” he remarked.
During his discussion with Pervy Otdel, Skvortsov contended that the Investigative Department of the FSB was more focused on obscuring a failure to safeguard state secrets than on uncovering the truth—while simultaneously protecting the book’s author.
Yurkov has maintained that his work exclusively utilized declassified archival documents. In 2022, the Russian media regulatory body Roskomnadzor claimed, based on a court ruling, that a lecture by Yurkov about the book allegedly revealed state secrets.
Nevertheless, Yurkov himself has not been charged with any offenses.
“The case is, of course, absurd, but this isn’t the first time, nor will it be the last, that such nonsensical cases arise,” commented Yevgeny Smirnov, a lawyer at Pervy Otdel, pointing out that the book was legally sold in Russia.
“Skvortsov was never trained in the protocols for handling state secrets—he had no means to distinguish between what was classified and what was not,” Smirnov shared with The Moscow Times.
“He was merely an everyday individual who obtained these materials from a bookstore. Yet, rather than holding accountable the person responsible for the careless declassification, they target him,” Smirnov elaborated.
The Nobel Peace Prize-winning rights organization Memorial has included Skvortsov on its list of individuals facing criminal charges likely influenced by political motives and characterized by significant legal infractions.
