Mikhail Suprun

Mikhail Nikolayevich Suprun (Russian: Михаил Николаевич Супрун; born April 5, 1955 in Severodvinsk ) is a Russian historian at the Pomorischen State University in Arkhangelsk, who conducts research in pursuit of the Germans from Russia during the Stalin era and in connection with the publication of his results is currently in Russia is in the absence of court.

Research

Suprun research, " the first Russian historian ", commissioned by the German Red Cross on the fate of ethnic German and Soviet citizens of German POWs who were deported during the Second World War under Stalin in a prison camp in the Arctic Ocean Arkhangelsk Region. Supruns applied to four volumes of work to which he had researched in the archives of many years of research on over 5000 individual cases and which he referred to as his " life's work ", was on the verge of publication.

Raid of the FSB

In the fall of 2009, the Russian FSB confiscated in Supruns office at the university and in his private apartment in Arkhangelsk computer, files, documents and books. However, the records came into copy over the police Major Alexander Dudarev, head of the regional information center of the police, to the German Red Cross.

Criminal proceedings

Suprun was therefore charged with Dudarev in Arkhangelsk for breaches of data protection rules and invasion of privacy. With Dudarev he had also completed " on its own power of attorney " means a license agreement in which the prosecutor sees the stepping over. Plaintiff is also the family of a Russian-Germans, whose family and personal secrets Suprun is said to have divulged without permission. Russian civil rights activists suspect political background for the process. In Germany, criticized addition to the human rights movement Memorial, the former Federal Commissioner for the Stasi files, Marianne Birthler, already in 2009 the treatment Supruns in a letter to Russian President Dmitry Medvedev as " anachronistic ". Suprun itself had declared that the accusations made against him could be - assuming ill will - " tug every journalist, biographer or editor of encyclopedias to court ". Originally, the prosecutor wanted to bring charges of treason even, but failed at the " flimsiness of the evidence ." Suprun will also be the head of the Russian State Archive Sergey Mironenko, support, arguing that the documents used by Suprun deceive no secrecy stamp and researchers are likely to quote from them. Suprun threaten if convicted two years 'imprisonment and three years' professional ban. The process takes place in the absence of the accused, who works in Poland.