Perm social activist Aleksandr Chernyshov who spent 15 days in custody and was to be released on May 20, was involved in a criminal case that became known the day before his arrest ended – Kasparov.Ru’s correspondent reported on May 22 with a reference to representatives of Memorial in Moscow Region.
Local activists came to meet Chernyshov, but it turned out that he was no longer at the detention center.
At first they were told he was packing his things, but he never came out, and later they were told that Aleksandr had been released from the other side of the building due to some kind of force majeure.
The people who met him do not know where Chernyshov is now; it is likely that he was immediately detained in connection with some kind of criminal case.
The civil activist spent 15 days in custody after being banned from the flight from Moscow to Turkey, where he was allegedly punished for disorderly conduct (swearing and cursing at Sheremetyevo Airport on May 5). Aleksandr claimed in court that he did not do it, and asked to view surveillance footage to establish exactly where he was and what he was doing at the time when he allegedly swore and “expressed disrespect for society”, but his application for this was denied.
It is worth noting that on May 19 mass searches took place in Perm in connection with the removal of the archive of Perm Memorial, which has been recognized as a “foreign agent” and liquidated as a Memorial structure. The FSB reported that they had opened a criminal case on attempted smuggling of cultural property (part 3, article 30, and part 2, item “c” of Article 226.1 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation). The law enforcers came to Nadezhda Agisheva, Tatiana Margolina, Svetlana Makovetskaya, Igor Averkiev, Oksana Asaulenko, Sergey Maksimov, Tatiana Cherepanova and Vera Sedinina.
The defendants in the case are already the former head of Perm Memorial Robert Latypov, who left the country in 2022, and Chernyshov.
The FSB believes that they attempted to smuggle archival documents of cultural and historical value out of Russia.
The value of the documents was determined by expert examination. If found guilty, Latypov and Chernyshov face from 5 to 10 years in prison and a fine of up to 1 million rubles. “It’s all in white thread”, the former head of Memorial in Perm commented on the criminal case regarding the removal of the archives.
