Yekaterinburg Yeltsin Center checked for foreign influence

The Ministry of Justice is checking the Yeltsin Center in Yekaterinburg for possible compliance with the criteria of a foreign agent. The reason was the request of an unnamed State Duma deputy. The Yeltsin Center declares that there are no grounds for inclusion in the register. Experts remind that the center’s Board of Trustees is headed by high-ranking officials.

The inspection of the Yeltsin Center was mentioned by Deputy Minister of Justice Oleg Sviridenko at meeting commission of the State Duma to investigate the facts of interference of foreign states in the internal affairs of Russia. Sverdlovsk Oblast MP Andrey Alshevskikh (ER) asked whether it would be possible to conduct a due diligence and “end the debate once and for all” about whether the Yeltsin Center was a foreign agent. “We started it,” Mr. Sviridenko answered. “I don’t remember which of the deputies sent us such a request, but we are checking it.” To complete it, according to the deputy minister, it will take at least a month.

After Mr. Sviridenko’s statement, the press service of the Yeltsin Center recalled that the institution annually reports to the board of trustees, which includes, in particular, the head of the presidential administration Anton Vaino, Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu, presidential envoy to the Ural Federal District Vladimir Yakushev, governor of the Sverdlovsk region Evgeny Kuyvashev and Head of Yekaterinburg Alexei Orlov.

“All our activities, both substantive and financial, are carried out in strict accordance with the Federal Law-68 “On the centers of the historical heritage of the presidents of the Russian Federation” and our charter,” the press service said. there is no announcement of the Yeltsin Center as a foreign agent.”

The Kremlin does not know what was the reason for the check, said the press secretary of the Russian President Dmitry Peskov. “On the other hand, it is in the powers of the Ministry of Justice. Normal work of the department,” he said.

The Yeltsin Center is regularly criticized by some politicians and cultural figures. Last year, State Duma deputy Anatoly Wasserman (SRZP) called it “the temple of the totalitarian sect of liberals,” and Communist Party leader Gennady Zyuganov proposed replacing it with the Center for Patriotic Education. The chairman of the Union of Cinematographers, Nikita Mikhalkov, who actively supported Boris Yeltsin during his presidency, was indignant that the Yeltsin Center had not yet been recognized as a foreign agent. In his opinion, the video about the rulers of the state, which is shown at the beginning of the exposition, is “a terrifying cartoon about the history of our country, where everything is dirt, abomination, betrayal, slavery, and the light in the window is only a single person who came and changed all this.”

Singer Vika Tsyganova said last week that the presence of the Yeltsin Center was “corrupting the Urals.” The leader of the Sverdlovsk communists, vice-speaker of the regional legislative assembly, Alexander Ivachev, also demanded that it be closed: “Ambassadors of unfriendly states hold meetings there, foreign agents give lectures, and we, it turns out, sponsor all this.” However, the governor of the Sverdlovsk region, Yevgeny Kuyvashev, has repeatedly stated that the Yeltsin Center was created in accordance with federal law and, “of course, must exist.”

“This is the only successful attempt to reconcile the two eras – the nineties and Putin’s times,” journalist Oleg Kashin, who has repeatedly criticized the concept of the Yeltsin Center (included in the register of foreign agents), told Kommersant. has really become an ideologically charged institution, there is nothing terrible. People who adhere to the view of recent Russian history reflected in the concept of the museum are quite an influential faction of the Russian authorities, people for whom Russia, its development and greatness are associated with progress, with integration into the rest of the world. Under the current conditions, the center looks like something perpendicular to where the Russian state is going, but there is no reason to reproach the Yeltsin Center here.”

At the same time, Mr. Kashin “purely as a human being” would like the Yeltsin Center, an organization with high-ranking officials on the board of trustees, to be recognized as a foreign agent following the results of the audit: “Sooner or later it will happen anyway, such is the very logic of a foreign agency: the blurring of the definitions of political activity and foreign funding allows you to recognize anyone as a foreign agent.

In October 2022, the prosecutor’s office of the Sverdlovsk region checked the Yeltsin Center after an appeal from Mr. Alshevsky. One of the reasons was a statement published by the center after the start of a special operation in Ukraine with a call to “immediately stop hostilities.” The statement was later removed from the center’s website at the request of law enforcement agencies. In the end, the prosecutor’s office found no reason to respond.

“A foreign agent cannot be recognized as a legal entity whose founder is the presidential administration and whose head is the head of the board of trustees,” said lawyer Georgy Krasnov. He emphasized the special legal status of the center of the historical heritage of the president, who has ceased to exercise his powers: “Many of the duties that lie with ordinary NGOs do not apply to it; it is protected from opportunistic political changes and attacks by individual public figures.

Katerina Yakusheva, Yekaterinburg; Alexander Chernykh