Authorities charged an artistic director at the Yeltsin Center with “discrediting the Russian armed forces” — the second employee of the library and cultural center dedicated to the late Russian president to face such charges in the past month.
Vladimir Shmyrov, a film critic who runs many of the Yeltsin Center’s film screenings, was ordered to appear next week for a preliminary hearing at a district court in Yekaterinburg, the central city where the center is based.
It wasn’t immediately clear what prompted the charge against Shmyrov, who has organized screenings about censored Soviet films.
Neither Shmyrov nor the Yeltsin Center could be reached for comment. However, a Yekaterinburg news site quoted a statement from the center saying Shmyrov had denied the charges: “We hope that the court will be fair and will not agree with the accusation made in the charges.”
Last week, the same Yekaterinburg court fined another official at the Yeltsin Center for reposting an anti-war message on social media three years ago, an act the court deemed illegal under a law passed shortly after Russia’s all-out invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.
‘No To War’
That official, Lyudmila Telen, reposted on Facebook a Russian-language image that read “No To War” on February 25, 2022, the day after the start of the invasion. The image was a repost from Yeltsin’s elder daughter, Tatyana Dyachenko.
Dyachenko herself has not been fined or punished for the original post, which had circulated widely among many Russian liberals who were shocked by the invasion.
Telen is a former journalist who previously worked as a web editor for RFE/RL’s Russian Service.
The Yeltsin Center is modeled on US presidential libraries and is the official nongovernment repository of archival materials related to Yeltsin, who died in 2007.
Vladimir Putin, whom Yeltsin handpicked as his successor in 1999, has largely avoided maligning Yeltsin, whose tenure in the 1990s as Russia’s first independent president was marked by economic chaos.
Putin’s popularity stems in large part from the prosperity that Russia saw in the 2000s, fueled by oil and gas revenues, and the perception that Yeltsin was too weak to stand up to Western pressure.
Russian authorities have also avoided targeting or maligning Yeltsin’s surviving family members, including his 93-year-old widow, Naina , and his children.
That includes Dyachenko, who along with her husband, Valentin Yumashev, were powerful political figures in the Yeltsin administration, and were among those who initially backed Putin in the waning months of Yeltsin’s presidency. Both have stayed out of public view in recent years.
The Yeltsin Center, however, has come under scrutiny since the Ukraine invasion. Russian nationalists have criticized the center for some of the book readings and other cultural events it has hosted.
Last year, the center was forced to cancel a planned book talk by Nina Khrushcheva, a US-based historian who is the granddaughter of Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev. One lawmaker called the book reading “an exhibition of Russophobia.”
