In Vladimir Putin’s Russia, sharing details of publications openly sold in bookstores can result in a 16-year prison sentence.

This has been the fate of Grigory Skvortsov, a 35-year-old photographer and musician from Perm.

Skvortsov was one of thousands across Russia who purchased the 2021 publication Secret Soviet Bunkers by historian Dmitry Yurkov. The book reproduced scores of once secret diagrams of Soviet installations that had recently been declassified.

Some supplementary scans were made available with the book, which Skvortsov purchased. He later shared some of those documents with an unnamed American journalist.

Since the 2022 invasion of Ukraine, Russia has drastically expanded the scope of what can be deemed a “state secret.”

In letters to friends, Skvortsov says the Russian authorities opened the case against him in order to hide their own failures in not noticing potentially sensitive information was being freely sold and passed around online.

“I did not have access to state secrets and had no malicious intent," the photographer wrote from detention. “The data was not protected by the state… These facts are being ignored by the prosecution and the courts, who are treating the case formally, clearly out of fear of repression from the FSB."

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