vlad.tribnet.com / Issue #163 / Special reports / Reading article...

Newspapers critical of Gov. Yevgeny Nazdratenko are claiming political harassment after police temporarily confiscated their entire press run and barred the doors of their printing press.

Police say the newspapers are being kept out of the building because a fractious dispute over who owns the property.

But the newspapers’ publishers claim that Nazdratenko is using the police to silence critics, a charge the krai administration dismisses. The printing press is co-owned by Mayor Victor Cherepkov — Nazdratenko’s rival in an ongoing political feud.

“It’s absolutely illegal,” said Vladimir Gilgenberg, a Krai Duma member and critic of Nazdratenko, whose Dalyokaya Okraina newspaper was seized by police. “I think it is an outright political action, an effort to suppress the alternative press.”

Police seized three weekly papers — Krasnoye Znamya, Vestnik and Dalyokaya Okraina — when newspaper staff drilled through a wall into a press room sealed by Dalpress. They ran off 11,000 copies of their papers before police kicked them out at 2 a.m. March 16 and shut down the press.

The owners had their papers back by late afternoon, but a 24-hour police guard is making sure the press does not run again.

The press building was previously owned by the Communist Party and was home to several party newspapers. In 1991, all party property was handed over to the state, and the krai government asked Dalpress, its publishing organization, to take over the building and ordered some occupants to vacate.

But Vladimir Shkrabov, the publisher of the former party paper Krasnoye Znamya, refused to move out and sued to regain ownership of the building. In a conference hall on the ground floor, Shkrabov located a printing press. Until the press was closed last week, it printed 19 newspapers, including Primorye, a publication of the Mayor’s Office.

The conflict came to a head after Dalpress, claiming a court victory, sealed the room containing the press last week. Shkrabov’s side broke through a supporting wall to the building and began publishing their newspapers.

Police called to the scene found themselves confronted by Krai Duma deputies supportive of the mayor and officials of the Mayor’s Office, said the Dalpress publisher, Yury Bondarenko. At the order of an investigator, they seized all the newspapers.

Police investigator Tamara Medvetskaya said police, confronted by rival sides with court papers, acted to maintain order. “We don’t support either side,” she said.

Lada Astikas, spokeswoman for Nazdratenko’s office, said the regional administration had nothing to do with the police action.

“You could blame it on the United Nations or whomever you wish,” Astikas said. “But from a normal point of view, it was simple hooliganism [by those who broke through the wall].”

Eleonora Dmitrienko, correspondence editor for the Primorye newspaper, said Dalpress publisher Bondarenko is closely connected with Nazdratenko. “He’s a close friend of the governor,” she said. “Nazdratenko helps him out.”

Bondarenko dismisses the charge, and accuses Shkrabov and his allies of inflating a property dispute into a press freedom case in an attempt to win support.

Either way, the newspaper owners said they don’t have anywhere in Vladivostok to publish now. The newspapers vow they will fight to reopen their press, but in the meantime they will go elsewhere. Primorye will be printed in Khabarovsk, more than 600 kilometers to the north, Dmitrienko said.

“We will print our paper where we can,” she said. “If we have to publish on Mars, on the moon, or in America, the paper will be published.”

As he carried bundles of seized newspapers from the police station to his pickup truck Monday, Sergei Semerikov, the head of the Krasnoye Znamya news department said, “The war continues.”