Access to Information Tightening in Russia

Some more scary stuff from Memorial and the Russian government’s transparency to the historical archives, notes Paul Goble’s blog over at the Moscow Times:

In an article in the current issue of Moscow’s “New Times,” Nikita Petrov, the deputy head of history society and activist organization the Memorial Center, wrote that this is one manifestation of what he describes as the “serious illness” Russia’s archives now suffer from, “the unconstitutional prohibition on access to information.”

Russian laws call for “systematic and regular” declassification of documents, he pointed out, “but this work is not being carried out” consistently and across the board. Decisions regarding the declassification of archived materials belonging to Soviet institutions that have continued to exist are made by those institutions’ own officials, who often find reasons not to release information.