Photographer Jailed in Russia for Sharing Public Images of Soviet Bunkers

A photographer was sentenced to sixteen years in a Russian prison for sharing a publicly available book and declassified archival photographs of Soviet bunkers.

According to a report by The Moscow Times, 35-year-old photographer Grigory Skvortsov, known for his images of industrial landscapes and rooftop views, was convicted of treason in the city of Perm, Russia, on Thursday.

Russian photographer Skvortsov was arrested in late November 2023. It was later revealed that he had been charged with state treason for sending publicly available historical materials — supplementary documents for the book Soviet ‘Secret Bunkers’: Urban Special Fortifications of the 1930s–60s — to an American journalist.

The book was publicly available for purchase in Russia at the time. Written by historian Dmitry Yurkov and published in 2021, it covers Soviet bunkers, a declassified Foreign Ministry shelter, and secret Cold War-era military infrastructure.

Skvortsov says he also bought 1,000 pages of scanned archival documents that the author had sold separately, as well as declassified archival photographs he found online, and sent those to the same American journalist. The Moscow Times reports that the photographer had pleaded not guilty to the treason charges.

“I did not have access to state secrets and had no malicious intent,” Skvortsov says to Pervy Otdel, a Russian lawyers’ association, in an interview from pre-trial detention.

Skvortsov had previously spoken out against the war in Ukraine during a 2022 interview with a German magazine. According to the news outlet, the photographer’s case is one of a growing number of treason prosecutions in Russia since the full-scale invasion of Ukraine began in February 2022.

“The case is absurd, of course, but it’s not the first and I’m afraid it won’t be the last one built on such absurdity,” Yevgeny Smirnov, a lawyer at Pervy Otdel, says in an interview with The Moscow Times, referring to the fact that the book was publicly sold.

“He [Skvortsov] was never familiar with the procedures for handling state secrets — he simply had no way of knowing what constituted a state secret and what didn’t.

“He was just an ordinary person who got access to these materials from a bookstore. Yet it’s not the person who mistakenly declassified the information who is being held accountable, but him.”

Image credits: Header photo via Social Media/ The Moscow Times.