-----Original Message----- From: Peter Brantley russian authorities have seized an important collection of materials on the history of the gulag that was being digitized in partnership with american institutions -
http://edwired.org/?p=430 http://gulaghistory.org/about "This news is not new, nor it is - alas - very surprising. But it is terrible nonetheless. Acting on what appear to be very trumped up charges, Russian authorities raided the offices of the St. Petersburg based human rights group Memorial in mid-December and seized the extensive files Memorial has gathered on the history of the Gulag in the former Soviet Union. Memorial is our partner on the Gulag: Many Lives, Many Days project [A project of the Center for History and New Media, George Mason University.]. "This seizure included the removal of hard drives containing data Memorial has gathered on tens of thousands of victims of the Gulag and was in the process of making available through their Virtual Gulag Museum. For now, the website remains up and running, but the underlying data - much, if not most, of which is still not available online - is now in the hands of a prosecutor and, we can only assume, now removed from public view until such time as the political winds start blowing a different way in Russia." ________________________________________
