Popular historical web site Hrono.info was up-and-running Tuesday after being transferred to a new provider, but its editor said he suspected an article critical of St. Petersburg Governor Valentina Matviyenko was responsible for its brief closure, not Adolf Hitler’s “Mein Kampf.”
The web site with historical sources was closed down after the cyber crime squad of St. Petersburg police contacted the provider on June 19 with a warning that the site contained “Mein Kampf.”
The book is banned by a Russian law on countering extremist activities, although Hrono editor Vyacheslav Rumyantsev said he only posted an outline of the book.
Rumyantsev said Tuesday that he suspected that the real reason for the closure last week was an article critical of Matviyenko that was posted on the site’s magazine section on June 15, four days before the police warning.
“It was a very quick reaction,” he said. “’Mein Kamp’ was on the site for two years, and no one lifted a finger.”
The article criticized the bureaucracy faced by survivors of the Siege of Leningrad, specifically the red tape involved in claiming funeral expenses. It said paying for the funerals of all the remaining survivors would be cheaper than paying Matviyenko’s declared 2008 salary of 1.7 million rubles.
Rumyantsev also noted that the warning came from St. Petersburg police, although both he and this former provider are in Moscow.
“I think it’s very strange that the site and the provider are in Moscow. Why do they take orders from St. Petersburg?” he said.
A St. Petersburg police spokesman, Vyacheslav Stepchenko, said last week that the physical location of the site’s provider was “irrelevant.”
Contacted Tuesday, he denied Rumyantsev’s suspicions. The site’s provider was warned amid the police’s usual “monitoring of Internet resources,” he said. “It is in no way linked to other factors.”
He said the police took a long time to react to the posting of “Mein Kampf” due to “limited human resources in the police system.”
Rumyantsev posted an article Tuesday headlined “The Invisible Fight” that suggested the closure might have been connected to the article on Matviyenko. But the article concludes that the story is only a “version” of what might have happened, saying the site has no “time or desire” to go to court with Matviyenko or the police. The resurrected site no longer contains the excerpts from “Mein Kampf,” although it still has the Matviyenko article.