Hi Jacques, oh absolutely, that's a given! I just posted a first draft that Alex approved in Russian for now, unfortunately I was a bit busy with work and overwhelmed by the positive response of collectors around the world and didn't have time to translate it yet. I am still collecting the signatures, we have a little bit of time until the case goes to court, IF the case goes to court. The letter will eventually contain both languages on official USSRPhoto.com letterhead. Let me try to roughly translate it now so at least majority can read it:
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Most respected members of the court, Your Honor!
We collectively write this letter from the only international society of Soviet photographic equipment collectors of in existence, headquarters of which is located in Chicago, USA.
When we have heard about the the case of Alexandr Komarov we were shocked by the accusations. Camera F-21 which was made half a century ago does not present itself as any kind of secret and does not have any practical applications with purpose of clandestine information gathering, but only has collector's value. This is an amazingly interesting camera and a pinnacle of technical thought and mechanical realization for that time. Almost every collector has it in their collections. But now no one would bother using it in real world, taking pictures on a non-standard film, when basically for pennies one can buy any miniature digital camera for the same purpose. Zenit MF-1, made by KMZ is absolutely technically identical to F-21/Ajax-12 and at this time is sold freely around the world by Lomographic Society for $800. The only difference between these two cameras are writing "Zenit" and the KMZ logo on the latter.
We ask the court to drop the charges against Alexandr Komarov, his biggest crime is the love for history of his birth-country (fatherland) and the intent to keep the items of historical significance (will probably rephrase in English better later, it sounds good in Russian
) and knowledge for the coming generations.
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In a nutshell this is roughly the translation for now, will work out the quirks later, but Russian version is pretty much phrased correctly already. Sorry for the delay.
Cheers,
Vlad.
