A photographer from Perm has been sentenced to 16 years for treason over a publicly available book.

The Perm Regional Court has sentenced 35-year-old photographer Grigory Skvortsov to 16 years in a high-security penal colony for treason (Article 275 of the Criminal Code) over a publicly available book about Soviet bunkers. His support group reports this.

The prosecutor had requested an 18-year sentence for him during the closing arguments.

In April, it was reported that Skvortsov had refused the services of his lawyer.

“Most likely, this decision was entirely his,” his friends speculated. “Grisha probably didn’t turn down his lawyer under pressure. At least, that’s not like him. Although, perhaps people change when they’re held in a detention centre and their spirit is broken day after day. …> From his letters, it’s clear that he is consistently pressured and threatened with a very long sentence, sometimes even life imprisonment. And they hint or openly say there won’t be a fair trial.”

Friends suggested that Skvortsov refused his defence lawyer because she advised him not to plead guilty. Previously, the photographer had refused to admit guilt, calling the charges “absurd.”

The photographer was detained in November 2023. For a long time, his relatives did not know what he was accused of. In 2024, Skvortsov wrote in a letter from the detention centre to “First Department” that he was charged with treason because he allegedly gave an American journalist a copy of the book “Soviet ‘Secret Bunkers’: Urban Special Fortifications of the 1930–1960s” by historian Dmitry Yurkov. The book is based on declassified information about Soviet fortification structures.

Later, the photographer wrote that, although the book appears in the case, what he gave the journalist “was not exactly it.” According to Skvortsov, he found online diagrams containing information about the locations of special facilities, which had been freely available for decades “with the connivance of the FSB and GUSP.” He noted that such diagrams still remain freely accessible online.

He also bought from Yurkov, the author of the work on bunkers, photographs of declassified archival documents from the book’s supplementary materials. Yurkov’s friends had promoted these materials in their blogs and in “Rossiyskaya Gazeta.”

In the end, Skvortsov gave the journalist both the images bought from Yurkov and the diagrams he found on the internet. He said he wanted to share this information with the public, but after learning of the security services’ interest in him, he forbade the journalist from publishing this data.

“The investigator ignored my statement that I didn’t use the book, only the supplementary materials. He still submitted the book, not the electronic file, for examination,” the photographer noted. He also said the investigator claimed Skvortsov himself created the “electronic diagram,” rather than finding a pre-existing plan showing the locations of special sites.

The photographer said that after his arrest, the security forces beat him, forced him to say on camera to whom he had sent the data, and themselves “prompted” the journalist’s name. Skvortsov said his device passwords were beaten out of him.

The photographer opposes the war. While under investigation, he was held in Moscow’s Lefortovo Detention Centre No. 2.