Russian police have searched the homes of two Ukrainian activists as part of the renewal of an investigation into a 2010 criminal case against the Library of Ukrainian Literature in Moscow, which had been accused of distributing "extremist literature."
On Oct. 29, Natalia Sharina – the director of the Library of Ukrainian Literature in Moscow – was arrested for inciting to ethnic hatred and a “violation of human dignity,” according to the Russia’s Investigative Committee.
The Russian investigative committee said in a statement that it has asked a court to arrest 58-year old Natalya Sharina after the investigators found books in the library that allegedly disseminate “anti-Russian propaganda,” including stocked books by nationalist activist Dmytro Korchynsky, which are banned in Russia.
However, the other founder of the library – Yuriy Kononenko – calls the situation with Sharina’s arrest “absurd” as she was “loyal” to the Russian authorities.
Kononenko claims that Sharina was appointed the director back in 2007 to “clean up” the library of the Ukrainian nationalism, “but being loyal is not enough for the Kremlin now.”
Kononenko, who was declared persona non grata in Russia and now lives in Kyiv, explains: “Russia has been continuing its crackdown on Ukrainian diaspora for a long time. But it reached its peak when Sharina was appointed director (in 2007). She’s a total stranger to Ukraine’s literature, she doesn’t know neither Ukrainian language nor Ukrainian culture.”
Sharina’s apartment was searched a day before. On Oct. 28, Russian special police force blocked the building of the library. They confiscated the books about Ukraine’s nationalist leader Stepan Bandera and Ukraine’s Insurgent Army known as UPA, which fought against Nazi and Soviet troops in 1942 to 1954, Sharina was quoted as saying.
Police officers also confiscated books about Holodomor, the great famine in Ukraine of 1932-33, which was engineered by Joseph Stalin and the members of the Communist Party.
Halya Coynash, a human rights activist, was dismissive of the probe.
“Now Russia is targeting the director of a literature library, as well as the library itself, for allegedly ’inciting hatred’ by doing what libraries do – holding books,” Coynash wrote.
The library started its work in 1989 with the help of Ukrainian diaspora activists. Ukrainian in Russia make up world’s largest single diaspora. According to the latest 2010 official census, some 1.9 million Ukrainians were living in Russia, representing over 1.4 percent of the total population and the third largest ethnic group after Russians and Tatars.
In 2010, Moscow-based prosecutors launched a criminal case over the distribution of literature inciting to ethnic hatred within the library. However, the results of the investigation conducted by Russian law enforcement agencies later showed there were no signs of the presence of such literature in the library or any crime in the actions of its director.
The search is a part of the investigation of 2010 criminal case, according to Sharina, as they wanted to collect “additional materials,” she told the UNIAN correspondent in Moscow.
It was followed by a search of an apartment of another activist – Valeriy Semenenko, a co-chairman of a Ukrainian diaspora group in Russia in Moscow. They confiscated a computer, a laptop, and a number of books and other documents belonging to Semenenko. A lawyer was not allowed to be present at the search.
Semenenko was later questioned for hours in a Moscow city prosecutor’s office before being released. Semenenko denies reports of his arrest.
Kyiv Post staff writer Olena Goncharova can be reached at [email protected].
