14 March 2025
by Lev Shlosberg
Source: Telegram
18+ THIS MATERIAL (INFORMATION) WAS PRODUCED, DISTRIBUTED BY LEV MARKOVICH SHLOSBERG, A FOREIGN AGENT, OR CONCERNS THE ACTIVITIES OF LEV MARKOVICH SHLOSBERG, A FOREIGN AGENT [This capitalised text is published by Lev Shlosberg as a requirement imposed by Russia’s foreign agent legislation and is reproduced here for information purposes only – to illustrate the repressive nature of Russian law – RiR]
It is the prosecution’s turn to brag about their achievements in the war on “foreign interference”. This doesn’t involve NATO, thank goodness, nor our newly redeemed American friends; this is once again about the saga of the “missing foreign agent” in Pskov region.
For ten days (from 3 March) the prosecution has been poring over a draft indictment. It was compiled by Andrei Semenov, an investigator from Pskov’s investigative department which deals with matters of high importance, and allegedly regards my non-fulfilment of “a foreign agent’s obligations.” I wouldn’t be surprised if the prosecution themselves had had a hand in concocting it.
This case is indeed an artistic labour to those who cooked it up, as it’s Russia’s first stand-alone case on Article 330.1, Part 2, of the Criminal Code to go to trial. There was no precedent to go on, so they did what they could. As Mikhail Bulgakov wrote in The Master and Margarita: “a great deal of work has been accomplished.” How could one not show it off?
At 3pm today in Pskov’s prosecutor’s office I was handed the 75- (seventy-five) -page indictment. This was the abridged version: the full thing is spread over six books, 1366 (one-thousand-three-hundred-and-sixty-six) pages long in total.
As my lawyer Vladimir Danilov said, a murder case wouldn’t be this bloated. But we’re talking about something exceptional here – this is a political case.
Experience shows that if there’s something substantial with which to charge a person, then ten pages is all that is that’s needed. If there’s nothing to show, however, the legal void is filled with paper.
The prosecution mimicked the investigator in writing that “between 12 May 2024 and 31 July 2024” I distributed “a number of video recordings via a page on the VKontakte social media platform, which the defendant personally manages, without marking them as having been created and distributed by a foreign agent”.
I never published, posted, or distributed anything on the page in question, which was created in July 2023 for personal correspondence. There had literally not been a single post on it. Ever. The aforementioned videos were filmed and distributed by other individuals on a different page, which I neither owned nor managed. I’m not even mentioned in two of the five videos.
The court hearing is coming up, and we will have plenty of opportunities to lay out our position and provide evidence for my defence. Considering the public nature of this case, I will make a separate post on our position.
Our case consists of material which details the intense surveillance myself, my family, and certain people who have worked with me have been subjected to over several months: phone bills, VKontakte messages, IP addresses, internet search histories, and travel around the city and the country. They were mostly hunting for any traces of the wretched NATO, but no sign of the beast was to be found. As such they had to sate themselves with their fabricated “foreign agents”.
Friends and colleagues, my defence and I are ready to stand up for my rights in court. We believe that there is no evidence whatsoever of a crime. Indeed, there was no crime at all. What we shall be discussing in court is the very nature of the court in today’s Russia.
Thank you to all those whose thoughts have been with me and my loved ones, and have supported us.
Translated by Friedrich Berg
