Yury Dmitriev
Yury Alexeyevich Dmitriev is a local historian and activist in Karelia. From the early 1990s onwards, he worked to locate the execution sites of Stalin's Great Terror in Karelia and, by studying the archives, tried to identify as many as possible of the buried victims they contain.
Since the late 1980s Dmitriev worked continually to compile "Books of Remembrance" for Karelia, listing all the names of those executed there.
Dmitriev is a devout Russian Orthodox Christian.
On 13 December 2016 Dmitriev was arrested and charged with making pornographic images of his foster daughter, Natasha, who was 11 at the time. From the outset Dmitriev's colleagues declared the charges to be baseless and motivated by a determination to discredit the historian and his work. The closed trial attracted national and international attention and criticism. On 26 December 2017, a second assessment by a court-appointed body of the photographs of his foster daughter concluded that they contained no element of pornography and had been taken, as the accused insisted, to monitor the health of a sickly child.
On 5 April 2018, Dmitriev was acquitted of all but one minor offence.
Within two months he was arrested and soon put on trial again. Given a short sentence at the end of his second trial in July 2020, the verdict was overruled by the High Court of Karelia and the charges returned for an unprecedented third judicial examination. Dmitriev and his lawyer Victor Anufriev battled through the courts in Petrozavodsk, St Petersburg and Moscow to have their appeal against the verdict and sentence heard. In October 2021 the case finally reached the Supreme Court of the Russian Federation. But on December 27 his sentence was increased to 15 years.
Since May 2022, Dmitriev has been serving the rest of his sentence in strict-regime camp 18 in Mordovia.
Childhood and early adult years
Yury Dmitriev spent his first year in a Soviet orphanage. In 1957 he was adopted by a childless army officer and his wife; he found out he was not their child at the age of 14. His father was posted to East Germany, and Yury spent part of his childhood in Dresden.He began but did not finish a course at the Northwest Health Department of the Leningrad Medical College. During the Gorbachev years, Dmitriev was a member of the Karelian People's Front, and served between 1988 and 1991 as an aide to USSR People's Deputy Mikhail Zenko. It was then that he first encountered mass graves of those shot in the 1930s.
Restoring the names
Dmitriev is famous for his part in the discovery and investigation of two major burial sites in Karelia, Sandarmokh and Krasny Bor, and their subsequent transformation into "informal" memorial complexes.Yekaterina Klodt, Dmitriev's daughter by his first marriage, has described her father's determination to do as much as he possibly could to identify the victims buried in the anonymous and secret graves of the Stalin era. "I often asked him why he continually sat at the computer, writing or copying something out," she told Gleb Yarovoi. Dmitriev answered: "I do not know who I was in a past life, but I understand the meaning of my life now and I know that I must do this." As she grew older Yekaterina would frequently tell him to take a break—how much longer would he go on with these lists? "I can't stop," Dmitriev replied, "I must finish the book, people are waiting for it." Dmitriev's life consisted, for year after year, of winters spent in the archives followed by summers scouring the forested areas around particular cities and towns with Witch, his Alsatian, hunting for possible burial sites.
At first Dmitriev was junior partner to Ivan Chukhin, a deputy of the RSFSR Supreme Soviet and State Duma, and the first chairman of the Memorial Society in Karelia. Chukhin felt compelled to engage in the work because his own father had been involved in acts of repression under Stalin. When Chukhin, a retired police officer, was killed in a car accident in May 1997 Dmitriev carried on alone. On 1 July 1997, with members of St Petersburg Memorial, Dmitriev located a massive killing field, 12 kilometres from Medvezhyegorsk, that subsequently acquired the name of Sandarmokh; some weeks later, guided by local inhabitants, he confirmed the identification of the Krasny Bor execution site, 20 km from Petrozavodsk.
The thousands executed at Sandarmokh over 14 months from October 1937 to December 1938 fall into three broad groups. Many were from Karelia, a total of 2,344 free inhabitants of the republic. A smaller number were forced "settlers". A great many of those shot were already prisoners of the Belbaltlag forced labor camp system. A smaller group of 1,111 prisoners were brought there from the Solovki island prison. Together they made up almost half of those shot in Karelia during the Great Terror.
"Alongside hard-working peasants, fishermen and hunters from nearby villages," wrote Yury Dmitriev wrote: "there were writers and poets, scientists and scholars, military leaders, doctors, teachers, engineers, clergy of all confessions and statesmen who found their final resting place here."
In 2003, in addition to his Books of Remembrance, Dmitriev also published a collection of documents about the construction of the White Sea-Baltic Canal and the fate of the numerous prisoners and "special settlers" engaged in its construction.
Recognition at home and abroad
As a result of Dmitriev's activities, he was appointed secretary of the Petrozavodsk Commission for Restoring the Rights of Rehabilitated Victims of Political Repression and in 2002 became a member of the organisation of the same name at the republican level, covering all of Karelia. He was a member of the Karelian branch of the Memorial Society, and in 2014 became its chairman.From 1998 to 2009, Dmitriev headed the Academy for the Defence of Socio-Legal Rights, a Karelian human rights NGO. As president of that body, in 2002, Yury Dmitriev wrote to the then head of the Karelian republic, Sergey Katanandov, objecting to the proposal by the Karelia Council of Veterans to put up a statue in Petrozavodsk to Yury Andropov. Katanandov did not reply to Dmitriev's letter and the 10-foot-high memorial to Andropov was erected. The decision, commented Dmitriev, reflected the nation's attitude to its recent history: "We don't know the past, and we don't want to know."
In 2005, Dmitriev was awarded the new "Golden Pen of Russia" prize for his publications.
In 2015, he received the Gold Cross of Merit from Poland for his work in locating mass burials at Sandarmokh and on Solovki, and identifying the victims they contained: ethnic Poles in the Soviet Union were one of the nationalities targeted during the Great Terror.
In November 2016, a month before his arrest, Dmitriev was awarded Karelia's highest prize, the Honorary Diploma of the Karelian Republic, by the head of Karelia Alexander Hudilainen.
On 31 December 2017, Yury Dmitriev was one of 16 journalists, bloggers, writers and historians, imprisoned or otherwise persecuted by the authorities, who were recognised at the annual Sakharov awards in Moscow for "Journalism as an Act of Conscience".
Criminal prosecution
In late 2016, Dmitriev was arrested on charges of child pornography. In 2018, he was acquitted of those charges. Later in 2018, he was arrested again for charges of sexual assault. In 2020, he was found guilty of those charges and sentenced to 3 and a half years in prison. This sentence was later increased to 13 years.His defense team considered the charges to be fabricated, a misinterpretation of what little evidence the investigators had found. There was also concern about the prospects for a fair trial. On 10 January 2017 a 13-minute segment of the news programme entitled "What does Memorial have to hide?" on a national TV network Rossiya-24 showed the allegedly pornographic photographs Dmitriev had taken of his foster daughter Natasha. The defence team believed they were leaked to the media by the investigators, although as evidence in a forthcoming trial they were sub judice.
The explanation offered by Dmitriev for the existence of the 140 photographs, 9 of which were claimed by the prosecution to be pornographic, is that they recorded the improving health of a neglected and under-nourished little girl from a children's home, whom he and his second wife had taken into their care. He stopped keeping this photographic record in 2015.
It was subsequently revealed by the defence that there were only three such photographs: copies of two photos boosted the total to nine.
When charges were brought against the imprisoned Dmitriev in early 2017 it became clear that he had many supporters. By early July, an Internet petition in his defense had drawn over 30,000 signatures in Russia and elsewhere.
First trial (2017-2018)
After months in police custody, Dmitriev's trial began on 1 June 2017. As with other trials in Russia concerning sexual offences against minors, neither press nor public were admitted to the hearings at the Petrozavodsk City Court.On 11 July, four expert witnesses testified on behalf of the defence, casting serious doubts on the interpretation of the evidence by the prosecution and its experts. Dmitriev's attorney Victor Anufriev announced that the hearings had ended for the time being and would resume on 1 August. He expressed the hope that his client could address the court on 22 August and that a verdict would be delivered by 1 September 2017.
Thanks to the persistence of the defence, however, the trial continued. On 15 September 2017, the court agreed to submit the photographic evidence to other experts, after the defence had petitioned four times for such a decision.
New assessment of photographs
The alternative organisations proposed for this task, first by the prosecution and then by the judge, proved to be obscure private firms without the legal right to act as forensic experts.The hearing scheduled for 18 October was postponed because the new experts were not ready to present their fresh assessment of the same 9 pornographic photographs. A hearing was held on 25 October but the assessment of the photographs was still not ready. On 26 December 2017, the new court-appointed body finally presented the findings of its experts that there was no element of pornography in the photographs taken by Dmitriev and concluded that their purpose was to monitor the health of a sickly child.