Perm photographer Grigory Skvortsov, arrested in Moscow on charges of treason, said in a letter from a pretrial detention center that a criminal case was opened against him because of a publicly available book about Soviet bunkers. Skvortsov's letter was cited by the human rights project «First Department».
We are talking about the book «Soviet «Secret Bunkers»: Urban Special Fortification of the 1930s-1960s» by historians Dmitry Yurkov and Sergei Poletayev and illustrator Anastasia Zotova.
The investigation claims that the photographer gave the book to an American journalist. «They accuse me here of «being able to understand» the secrecy of the objects described in D. Yurkov's book «Sov. sec. bunkers» (stamped «declassified» on the cover). I saw someone with one, so be careful with it, warn the people there, it’s not a good idea to take it abroad – there’s a lot of space here,” Skortsov said.
Book “Soviet "Secret Bunkers"” sold in the public domain. The project website says that the authors of this work studied 2 thousand pages of documents from 11 archives, including researching declassified information about Soviet fortifications, for example about «Metro-2».
Skvortsov's friends said that on November 29, 2023, he was supposed to fly from Perm to St. Petersburg, but disappeared. It later turned out that on that day, the Lefortovo District Court of Moscow sent the photographer to a pretrial detention center on charges of treason (Article 275 of the Criminal Code).
Skvortsov is a well-known photographer in Perm, he was interested in industrial and architectural photography. In a pinned post on VKontakte, he talked about one of the Perm factories: “Yesterday I went to the archive and unzipped the drawings of the forge shop from 1916, it seems that no one had ever taken them before me.” In 2019, Skvortsov became a laureate of the industrial photography competition organized by Rostec.
Skvortsov was also into roofing and founded the industrial band Jagath, which was known for performing in mines, abandoned construction sites, and factory workshops.
In 2021, the Moscow City Court sentenced Andrey Pyzh, the author of the UrbanTurizm YouTube channel, to five years in prison in the case of export abroad of information containing state secrets. On this channel, he published videos filmed in abandoned buildings and closed facilities.
FSB and an unregistered lawyer guarding Metro-2. What do we know about the case of blogger Pyzh, arrested for illegal access to state secrets