A mystery is brewing in Moscow over the reported seizure of videotapes filmed by former Russian president Boris Yeltsin’s official cameraman.
The newspaper Kommersant on Thursday quoted the cameraman who documented Yeltsin’s stormy presidency, Alexander Kuznetsov, as saying law enforcement officers stopped him on a street on Wednesday as he and his son drove to a studio with some 600 videocassettes in a minibus.
Kommersant quoted Kuznetsov as saying that officers confiscated the tapes, which he said contained footage he took of Yeltsin over 12 years and planned to use in a documentary about “the state of democracy in modern Russia.”
That wording seemed to imply control-minded state authorities were out to stifle a film that would show the late Yeltsin in a more favorable light than his successor, Vladimir Putin, who was widely accused of backtracking on democracy in his eight years as president.
Kuznetsov could not be reached for comment. He has not been known as a champion of Yeltsin, whose achievements in wrenching Russia out of repressive Soviet rule were marred by economic erosion and corruption as well as his own drinking and ill-health.
According to Kommersant, Kuznetsov said that after he published an insider account of his years in the Kremlin, he was criticized by members of Yeltsin’s family and received anonymous, threatening phone calls demanding he surrender the videotapes.
Others said he should not have had them in the first place.
A spokesman for Russian President Dmitry Medvedev’s administration, Alexei Pavlov, said he could not immediately comment on the reported seizure, but that video footage filmed by an official Kremlin cameraman such as Kuznetsov belongs to the state.
Kuznetsov’s lawyer, Viktor Zaprudsky, said his client did have the right to collect the footage and that it had been shown on state television, the RIA-Novosti news agency reported.
Zaprudsky could not be reached for comment.
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