British student ordered to leave Russia as media speculate she was spying
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Version 0 of 1. A British student has become the latest foreign researcher to be deported from Russia as media speculated that she was spying. Laura Sumner, a history graduate from the University of Nottingham, has been ordered to leave Russia within 10 days for a visa violation, reported LifeNews, a site known for its close ties to the authorities. According to Pavel Titov, a migration service official, Sumner had travelled to Russia to research archives in Nizhny Novgorod, but had received a commercial rather than an academic visa. Designated for business visitors, a short-term commercial visa is in general much easier to obtain than a student or scientific one. Oversight of what the visa-bearer actually does in Russia has in the past been minimal. According to LifeNews, Sumner’s research interest was the “life of Russian workers and their connection to the revolutions in the first half of the 20th century”. In reality, however, the publication said she was “yet another foreign spy” gathering information for her academic adviser, Sarah Badcock, a specialist in “regime change in Russia”. “The topics that Professor Badcock works on are important in light of the west’s work to create conditions for a ‘colour revolution’ in Russia,” LifeNews wrote, referring to the revolutions that have brought pro-western governments to power in former Soviet republics such as Ukraine and Georgia. On her Twitter account, which she has since deleted, Sumner described her research topic as “Urban worker identity in Sormovo factory (Nizhny Novgorod), early Soviet Russia, 1917-1921.” In a statement provided to the Guardian, a University of Nottingham spokesperson said the school was in contact with Laura over “what appears to be a minor infringement in visa regulations as a result of recent changes to those regulations” and was “liaising with appropriate authorities” to advise other students and staff traveling to Russia. Over the past year, at least four western academic researchers in Russia have been fined, deported or threatened with penalties as a result of alleged visa violations, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty reported earlier this week. “We have seen some reports of western academics facing increased scrutiny and obstacles inside Russia,” Will Stevens, a spokesman for the US embassy in Moscow, told the publication. Based on a survey of its membership, the Association for Slavic, East European and Eurasian Studies said no more more than six of its scholars were known to have had problems with Russian visas in the past year, but one had been banned from the country for five years. Some say the vast majority of western academics in Russia continue to be treated with respect, but Kevin Rothrock, the editor of RuNet Echo, which reports on the Russian internet, wrote that the recent “pressure on academics seems to be a political shenanigan”. David McDonald, a Russian history professor at the University of Wisconsin, said Russia’s FSB and migration service had “begun to enforce more systematically laws that were already on the books or that have undergone revision in the last several years”. He also stressed that archival sources are required in virtually all graduate dissertations and ridiculed the idea that scholars studying 20th-century revolutions could be determining how to create conditions for a colour revolution. “I have yet to see a single article or statement in any professional forum that has even posited such a link between the late 1910s and the present, since such a claim would strike any historian I know of whatever political stripe as bizarre at best or simply inconceivable, of a piece with debating whether the Starship Enterprise might have successfully countered the Hunnic invasions,” McDonald said. |