Court: Book Event Was ‘Unsanctioned Rally’

By Sergey Chernov

The St. Petersburg Times

Published: August 22, 2012 (Issue # 1723)

The prosecution misrepresented a book launch event at the Russian National Library as an “unsanctioned rally,” the defendants said last week as the Trial of 12 opposition activists continues in St. Petersburg.

A technical specialist was summoned to the Vyborgsky District Court early last week where 12 activists of The Other Russia opposition party are on trial for organizing or continuing the “extremist activities of a banned organization” [the banned National Bolshevik party], but the specialist has so far failed to appear. The court has finished hearing prosecution witnesses and has moved on to defense witnesses.

A technical specialist is needed in order to shed light on the secret video recordings made in the apartment where the activists held their meetings. One of the questions to be answered is how the file information on the recordings — allegedly compiled over six months in 2009 — all show the same recording date: “01.01.2006.”

This was one of several grounds on which the defense called for the exclusion of most of the disks as inadmissible evidence.

Meanwhile, the court is looking into one of the many episodes of the activists’ detentions that the prosecution is using to support the charges that the defendants acted as activists of the National Bolshevik Party (NBP) — banned by a Moscow city court in 2007 as extremist — rather than of The Other Russia.

Defendant Igor Boikov, a published author, brought Nikolai Konyayev, a 62-year-old author and the editor-in-chief of Rus publishers, to testify on the matter. More than 20 people, including Boikov, were detained after Boikov’s book presentation at the Russian National Library on June 17, 2011.

Konyayev testified that he was invited to the presentation of Boikov’s debut book “A Life Lived Not in Vain” by the author himself as he had helped with the publication of Dagestan-born Boikov’s short stories in local literary magazine Avrora, where Konyayev worked as an editor.  

“Boikov’s book is very relevant to us, it talks about life in Dagestan and Chechnya, it’s written vividly, and every speaker commented on the artistic values of the book, its relevance, and about the literary images it contains,” he said.

Konyayev said there was a 90-minute presentation and discussion of the book in a small room at the library that approximately 40 people attended. When he left the building however, after having spent ten minutes near a book stand, he was surprised to find an empty street with only police present.

“Usually, people stand in groups outside and talk after such events, but there was nobody,” he said.

It took a while for him and a reporter to find out that most of the public had been detained as they left the building and were already on a police bus.

Boikov said that the police detained younger members of the audience as soon as the public began to leave the building through the staff exit onto Sadovaya Ulitsa.

According to the prosecution, the activists held an unsanctioned rally near the library, demonstrating NBP flags and promoting the banned party’s extremist ideas. Prior police reports stated that the detained “used bad language in a public place.”

The prosecution claims that the “unsanctioned rally” was organized by defendants Andrei Dmitriyev and Andrei Pesotsky. Speaking in court, both said they were not present at the book presentation, had nothing to do with it and were “amazed” to find out that the investigators had named them as “organizers.”

Boikov said he was later acquitted by a court.

According to him, the authorities had initially wanted the library to cancel the presentation. He said that the library’s administration had told him that there had been calls from the police, who tried to convince the library that Boikov’s book presentation would really be a flimsy pretext for a presentation of opposition leader Boris Nemtsov’s anti-Putin pamphlet.

“Maybe the police were just making a kind of joke — they can’t be that stupid,” Boikov said Tuesday.