In Vladimir Putin’s Russia, sharing details of publications openly sold in bookstores can result in a 16-year prison sentence.
This has been the fate of Grigory Skvortsov, a 35-year-old photographer and musician from Perm.
Skvortsov was one of thousands across Russia who purchased the 2021 publication Secret Soviet Bunkers by historian Dmitry Yurkov. The book reproduced scores of once secret diagrams of Soviet installations that had recently been declassified.
Some supplementary scans were made available with the book, which Skvortsov purchased. He later shared some of those documents with an unnamed American journalist.
In November 2023, Skvortsov was being visited by a friend when Russian police entered his apartment in Perm.
According to a relative, police filmed what happened next.
“He was beaten and insulted,” the relative of the photographer told RFE/RL's Siberia Realities. “Then they forced him to say on camera who he sent information from Yurkov’s book to.”
The relative, who asked not to be named, says it had been months since communication between the American and Skvortsov had taken place and police had to remind him of the American’s identity. “They told him the name themselves, they 'suggested' it to him,” he said.
Since the 2022 invasion of Ukraine, Russia has drastically expanded the scope of what can be deemed a "state secret."
No money changed hands in Skvortsov's interaction with the American, and friends say the documents were sent to help out a like-minded person -- common practice among urban explorers and history enthusiasts. "He did not pursue any selfish goals," a friend told RFE/RL's Siberia Realities.
Skvortsov's friends say architecture had always been a passion of his. In 2010 he graduated from the Perm Construction College with a degree in architecture, but he soon earned success as a photographer.
"He had no equal in photographing industrial sites. He loved it: roofs, abandoned buildings -- he could make eye-candy from any workshop,” a colleague says.
“Real estate companies in Perm and elsewhere in Russia ordered advertising shoots from him,” the Perm associate recalls. “I remember there was even an exhibition of his in the building of the local administration. He was very much in demand."
In 2017, Skvortsov founded the “industrial ambient” band Jagath. "We create our music in abandoned industrial places -- at the bottom of a damp underground sewer shaft and inside huge hollow oil tanks," Jagath’s website says.
The band’s music is described as niche, but it was released by a British record label, and attracted attention from Sonic Seducer Magazine, a German music publication. It was during an interview with that magazine that Skvortsov voiced his opposition to the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
Friends of Skvortsov assume that someone who saw his interview with Sonic Seducer informed on him to Russia's Federal Security Service (FSB).
When asked how Russia's security agencies discovered Skvortsov had given the historical materials to an American journalist, the photographer's relatives say they believe surveillance of him began after the interview, and about a year before his November 2023 arrest.
Skvortsov says an acquaintance came under scrutiny from the FSB over sharing materials from the Soviet Secret Bunkers book. After this, the photographer contacted the American journalist and asked that the materials he shared not be republished anywhere.
In letters to friends, Skvortsov says the Russian authorities opened the case against him in order to hide their own failures in not noticing potentially sensitive information was being freely sold and passed around online.
“I did not have access to state secrets and had no malicious intent," the photographer wrote from detention. “The data was not protected by the state.... These facts are being ignored by the prosecution and the courts, who are treating the case formally, clearly out of fear of repression from the FSB."
Supporters of the photographer who formed their own Telegram group say they intend to appeal his sentence.
