Memorial’s “Winchesters” Returned
By Sean at 7 May, 2009, 1:38 pm
It appears that some of Medvedev’s liberal posturing is producing concrete results. Or at least someone is getting the signals. Finally, fi-nal-ly Memorial has gotten its materials back from the St. Petersburg prosecutor. Twelve computer hard disks, or “Winchesters” as one report calls them, about 1000 business cards belonging to A. D. Margolis (the general director of St. Petersburg Rescue Fund and editor of the St. Petersburg Encyclopedia, and heаd of several Memorial projects), and seven CDs and DVDs were returned to the human rights organization on Thursday.
The return of Memorial’s property followed another ruling in its favor by the Dzerzhinsky court that deemed the December raid by the police as unlawful. The case’s lead investigator Mikhail Kalganov decided to not press the issue further. “Yes, this is our victory,” Memorial’s lawyer Ivan Pavlov told Kommersant. “And we think that in this case the Russian legal system managed itself [well]. The court has shown that it is on the right side.” It also didn’t hurt, the advocate said, that Russia’s representative to the OSCE spoke out on Memorial’s behalf. So the question is did the legal system work or did Memorial have an influential patron? Or better yet, is this another, albeit small, sign of a Medvedevian “thaw” in the forecast?
A thorough inspection of the “Winchesters” will be done on May 13 to make sure the authorities didn’t erase anything or damage any of the files.
Thus ends an almost six month ordeal. It’s nice to see a happy ending to an incident that generated cries about the return of Stalinism. As I said in my last post on the Memorial Saga, I expect this victory to get as much press as the initial raid.
Still, despite the positive outcome, Memorial still had to jump through several hoops for a victory that they never should have been forced to fight for in the first place. Which leaves one crucial question unanswered. Why was Memorial raided exactly? I guess we’ll never really know. I don’t expect Chief Investigator Kalganov to shed any light on this any time soon. For the time being, he’s got some wounds to lick.
Popularity: 8% [?]
Comments
Sorry, the comment form is closed at this time.
With proliferation of portable terabyte hard drives, none of this makes any sense.
>>>Why was Memorial raided exactly?
It seems that a modicum of fear is needed to be injected into the system from time to time.
“Yesipovsky, 49, is the third Russian governor to be killed in a helicopter crash in the last eight years.”
What’s going on with those helicopters? Bad maintenance? Unsafe design? Bad pilots? Alcohol? Yes, helicopter accidents occur all over the world, but imagine if the US lost three governors to helicopter crashes in eight years? And then we had those high-level sleazy poachers dying in that stupid helicopter crash in the Altai a few months ago.
I wonder if there are any reliable statistics on the relative safety of helicopter flights according to country. Russia is notorious being for being much more accident prone than other nations, but it’s still frustrating.
Sean, “winchester” is just a Russian term for HDD. It’s commonly used, because the direct Russian translation of “HDD” — “NZhMD”, or “Nakopitel’ na zhestkih magnitnyh diskah” (Накопитель на жёстких магнитных дисках), is too inconvenient to use in usual life.
Evgeny, Thanks! I did not know that.
“Winchester” follows a common pattern in the Russian language (and others – see use of “sealand container”) of creating common nouns from proper nouns. In many cases source proper names no longer exist.
Winchester was the first major vendor to supply hard drives to Russia in 1980-s.
A recent example: гипрок with derivatives like загипрочить comes from Gyprock – a British company that was first to capture Russian market supplying it with gypsum/plaster boards.
Old examples: фломастер (from Flo-master) used to be any kind of marker or highlighter; рубероид (roofing felt) comes from another British company name – Ruberoid.
… all IBM projects had a code name, and some were kid of humorous, if you knew the history behind them. For example, the 3330’s code name was Merlin, and they called it Merlin because you had to be a magician to make it work. And in the case of the Winchester Program, the title… That came up because our initial configuration was a box with two spindles in it, and the two spindles each had thirty megabytes of storage. And we found people calling it a 30-30, and I said “Well, if it’s a 30-30, it must be a Winchester,” and that’s how the name got stuck on it. And by the way, it stuck with that technology for many years. It was a long time later before it finally began to just be “hard disk”.
Thanks, db! Very interesting. Now it makes total sense. I was under impression Winchester somehow was related to British Acorn computers I used back in the Academy of Sciences in mid 1980-s.
“Winchester” follows a common pattern in the Russian language (and others – see use of “sealand container”) of creating common nouns from proper nouns.
In the UK, a vacuum cleaner is usually called a Hoover.
They’re often called Hoovers in the US as well.
Let’s not even talk about Xerox.
Doom cares not about such things. However, he is curious if any among you has heard from Ger Clancy.
“I expect this victory to get as much press as the initial raid.”
Doom suspects that this sentence may be missing the word “don’t.”
Actually, there is no “don’t,” though in retrospect perhaps I should insert one. The sentence was a sarcastic demand since some people here criticized me for expecting the media to cover the last court victory in my previous post on Memorial.
Well, as far as my searches show there has been only two articles on Memorial getting their stuff back. One by Figes in the Index on Censorship and another in the St. Petersburg Times. I guess I naively/sarcastically expect this to be as big as a story as the raid.
Doom, the Irishman is posting over at Siberian Light, FYI.
I feel like I just typed something in code…
The Irishman flies at midnight.
What is called Xerox in Russia bears the name of Canon somewhere else. Depends on who seizes the market first.
“For the time being, he’s got some wounds to lick.”
It’s curious, that in context of Russian culture that may bear different connotations rather than those the author meant.
Don’t know how it works for others, for me the first thing to racall about “licking wounds” is:
“Я раны как собака лизал, а не лечил.”
“Like a dog, I licked my wounds, rather than healed them.”
http://www.kulichki.com/vv/eng/songs/vagapov.html#the_one_who_didnt_shoot
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bqhdutPCBaw
Not only it’s “good guys” who are supposed to lick their wounds –
“Пошел лизать я раны в лизолятор, -
Не зализал – и вот они, рубцы.”
“…Все взято в трубы, перекрыты краны, -
Ночами только воют и скулят,
Что надо, надо сыпать соль на раны :
Чтоб лучше помнить – пусть они болят!”
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GB4r8DQ-TgQ
But “good guys” are associated with wolves, critters that are supposed to lick their wounds:
http://www.kulichki.com/vv/eng/songs/hamilton.html#wolf_hunt
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zl3cS7zJWXw
A fighter against Stalinism should of course take this cultural background into account.
Hi guys. I’m not one to defend the MSM, but about the coverage of the good news about Memorial let me make an analogy: the arrest of a well-known innocent person is always bigger news than the release of this person. It’s human nature that outrageous travesties of justice usually attract more attention than corrective action that address those injustices.
“the arrest of a well-known innocent person is always bigger news than the release of this person.”
This doesn’t make sense, since a person’s innocence at the time he or she is arrested is yet to be determined.
I think you are perfectly aware under what context I was writing, Chris. There are countries in which arrests of well known individuals are forms of harassment, intimidation and repression.
Unfortunately, while this might be true, biased reporting is a form of harassment and intimidation of all fair employees of security services. I knew one Russian militia man, she’s a pretty reasonable girl, and I’m ashamed that biased reporting of Russia’s militia as the ultimate evil makes fair people looking bad.
I guess, in normal countries there’s no antagonism between LAW ENFORCEMENT and LAW DEFENSE bodies. And it’s one of the most important lessons for Russia. When militia personnel will keep in mind that their purpose is to enforce _the law_, not beating and defending manifestants. When human rights defenders will keep in mind that their purpose is to defend _the law_, not making political claims and acting like politicians. Only then the broken harmony between law enforcement and law defense bodies would be re-established.
Interesting. What do you mean by law defense bodies?
>Interesting. What do you mean by law defense bodies?
It’s an interesting question. IMHO one can speak not about a special body, but about social layer of such people. Human rights defenders could be defined as lawyers who are working to protect rights of groups of people, on non-commercial grounds.
This social layer is anything but uniform. There is the staff of the Ombudsman of the Russian Federation, and the Moscow Helsinki Group. (The first is paid for by the Government of Russia, the second gets their wages from the American NGOs.) Etc.
That’s my IMHO.
Quite an interesting person who combines activities of a human rights defender and political aspirations is Anna Karetnikova from Moscow-based “Antiwar group”.
You can read interesting comments of her here:
http://may-antiwar.livejournal.com
p.s. As I said, IMHO everyone should be working in one’s domain of competence. Militia should catch thieves, human rights defenders should defend or call for improving the law, politicians should struggle for seats in state bodies… That would be ideal.
I think one problem is that a certain type of self-identified rights defender/democracy activist/(insert nice-sounding designation here) confuses opposition to the state with being pro-democracy. (This is particularly common in Russia, but not unique to it.) Being in opposition to the state is seen as being pro-democratic in itself, regardless of the content of that opposition. So, a self-described “liberal journalist,” for instance, doesn’t have to worry about whether his or her stories actually have any basis in fact, or are instead pure fabrication. It is that the story is opposing the state that is important.
Chris Von Doom: And note, what’s interesting. In the U.S. there were serious clashes between supporters of Obama and McCain. But once the election took place, former opponents started to play as a single team. They took people’s choice as their own choice, because they are patriots of their country.
And it’s actually also a constituent part of a mature democracy.
Most self-described Russian “democrats” don’t have a clue what democracy is. They think it is “the government doing things that I like,” not “power being determined by consensus of the people.”
Chris Von Doom: Just some of those self-identified activists have lost their conscience and, partly, the ability of reasonable thinking.
http://lurkmore.ru/Новодворская
Read this. Have fun…
God, I hate that vile woman. In no other country would she (or a counterpart to her) be given a platform. Maybe in Germany somebody like her would fit in with the Antideutscher.
Also, she is astoundingly stupid. How the hell does she get a following?
Chris Von Doom: I remember watching her in some political talk shows during the last years (something of Solovyev?). Rare event, but unforgettable. IMHO she’s invited to TV just to have a fun of.
She’s a fanatic. Don’t you hate people who have cancer or any different uncurable disease?
She writes articles in Irredeemably Evil Times, sorry I mean New Times. She must have some audience.
Chris Von Doom:
She’s also writing books.
http://www.ozon.ru/context/detail/id/271054/
You can see a critical review of her book of memoirs:
http://yuriyc.livejournal.com/67568.html?mode=reply
Is it good that Novodvorskaya gets published? Of course, it is. Because taxes paid from the sales are filling state budget of the Russian Federation.
“I guess, in normal countries there’s no antagonism between LAW ENFORCEMENT and LAW DEFENSE bodies.”
Evgeny, I think that such antagonism is inevitable. It’s part of human nature. Once you choose a team, you root for your team and have an antagonistic relationship with the other team. The key is on the how this antagonism is manifested and on whether we can reasonably expect that the ground rules will be respected.
Speaking of “teams”, at least in the US it’s perfectly permissible for a person to switch teams (not on the same case, of course.) Years ago at law school my favorite professor was a criminal law professor. She worked as a prosecutor for several years and then became a defense lawyer. (BTW, although I have lawyer friends, I have to admit that I hated law school and I’ve never practiced law.)