The foreign agent was asked from the apartment – Newspaper Kommersant No. 15 (7460) dated 01/27/2023

The Sakharov Center (included in the register of foreign agents) will not sue the mayor’s office because of the eviction from its premises in the center of Moscow, director of the center Sergei Lukashevsky told Kommersant. Earlier, the Moscow Property Department demanded that the museum-apartment of Academician Andrei Sakharov, the space of the center and the exhibition hall be vacated. The department explained to Kommersant that the decision to terminate the contracts that have been in force for the past 30 years was made because of the new law on foreign agents.

On January 24, the Moscow mayor’s office sent a notice about the eviction of the Sakharov Center from three premises on Zemlyanoy Val. It is prescribed to vacate the museum-apartment in which the academician and Nobel laureate Andrei Sakharov lived in a month, the building of the center and the exhibition hall – in three. The reason was the status of “foreign agent” assigned to the Sakharov Center back in 2014. “Foreign agents are not entitled to receive state support,” the Moscow property department told Kommersant. “Since the Sakharov Center is included in the register of foreign agents by the Ministry of Justice of the Russian Federation, the department sent notices of termination of legal relations to the occupied premises in accordance with the terms of the contracts.” They clarified that contracts for gratuitous use were concluded with the center.

The new law “On Control over the Activities of Persons Under Foreign Influence”, which entered into force on December 1, 2022, among other things, stipulated that foreign agents “are not entitled to receive state financial support, including when carrying out creative activities.” Whether the status of a foreign agent is a direct basis for terminating property contracts of state structures and organizations from the register, the Ministry of Justice did not explain.

However, a Kommersant source in the department noted that the status of a foreign agent “does not mean a ban on activities,” but “entails the emergence of certain rights and obligations.”

The Moscow City Hall transferred the premises in question to the Sakharov Center in 1993 and 1996. For the next 30 years, Academician Sakharov’s museum-equipped apartment housed his archives and “thousands of letters from all over the Soviet Union asking for help, words of support and gratitude,” the center said in a statement. The center hosted exhibitions, conferences and public discussions. Foreign politicians, human rights activists, journalists and poets spoke there. The Russians said goodbye to Boris Nemtsov, Sergei Kovalev and Valeria Novodvorskaya.

“The center created the only exposition in the country that tells about the history of the USSR as a totalitarian regime,” the organization’s website reports in connection with the news of the eviction. “We sought to help society rethink the tragic pages of its history, to realize that the repetition of political politics is detrimental to the country and it should not be repeated that the path to a worthy future cannot lie through arbitrariness, violence and blood.

Relations with the Moscow mayor’s office have been “equal” for all 30 years, director of the center Sergey Lukashevsky told Kommersant, we are talking about “mechanical compliance with the law”: “Another thing is that the law itself is aimed at strangling any independent organization – the allocation of premises under gratuitous use agreements authorities see it as financial support.”

Lawyer Marina Agaltsova, who previously defended the Memorial educational center in court on deprivation of property at the suit of the Prosecutor General’s Office, considers the eviction “illegal”. She points out that the current legislation still “does not provide” for the termination of such agreements on the basis of the status of a “foreign agent”, and recalls the position of the Constitutional Court in 2014: “The Constitutional Court was of the opinion that the status of a foreign agency does not discriminate against the carrier in any way and is needed only for financial transparency. Now we see that we are talking about belittling the status of the legal capacity of an organization or a person.

The Sakharov Center most likely “will not sue,” Sergei Lukashevsky said. “These are the premises of the city, nothing can be done about it,” he says. “We will continue to develop the digital projects of the center, preserve the archives and collections, but there is no talk of opening in a new space. We have three more months, and we will definitely celebrate the centenary of Elena Bonner in February (human rights activist, wife of Andrei Sakharov and co-founder of the Sakharov Center, died in 2011.— “b”)”.

It should be noted that in 2020, President Vladimir Putin approved the idea of ​​​​installing a monument to Andrei Sakharov in Moscow on the occasion of the 100th anniversary of the academician in 2021. However, the Moscow City Hall and the “anniversary” organizing committee could not agree on the installation site (Sakharov Avenue, Neskuchny Garden and Sukharevskaya Square were considered). On January 23, 2023, it became known that the Andrei Sakharov Foundation, created by Elena Bonner and previously sponsoring the statutory activities of the Sakharov Center, was declared undesirable in the Russian Federation.

Maria Starikova, Alexander Voronov