Five years of proceedings already. Begun in December 2016, the legal proceedings against Yuri Dmitriev, 65, resulted in a new conviction, Monday, December 27: fifteen years of detention in a penal colony with severe regimes, instead of the thirteen years inflicted a little more one year, September 29, 2020. Two more years pronounced by the court of Petrozavodsk, Karelia, as yet another vengeance against this historian specializing in the gulag, who headed the local branch of Memorial in this region of northwest of Russia. ” Nothing to add… “, wrote on her Facebook account her eldest daughter, Katerina Klodt, overcome by exhaustion.
The trial “Shame”, as human rights defenders have called it, is also one of extraordinary relentlessness. Accused of taking pictures “Pornographic” of her adopted youngest daughter, photos intended for the child protection organization responsible for monitoring the development of the disabled girl – a fabricated affair, have continued to denounce her many Russian and foreign supporters -, Yuri Dmitriev was successively convicted, acquitted (twice), then retried. In July 2020, the sentence seemed almost lenient: three and a half years in prison. But it was counting without the Supreme Court of Karelia that overturned the judgment. Or the Petrozavodsk court which ended today by adding the two additional years claimed by the prosecution.
Work that clashes with the official discourse
Yuri Dmitriev is actually paying for his stubbornness in unearthing Stalin’s crimes. For thirty years, this emaciated man has indeed applied to draw up the list of 40,000 names of people executed and deported during the Great Terror in Karelia, a region bordering Finland. He also discovered the Sandarmokh mass grave where he identified more than 6,000 murdered victims. Work which clashes with the full force of the official discourse on the heroism and greatness of Russia, “Heiress of the USSR”, as the new Constitution adopted in September 2020 specifies in black and white.
The authorities seek at all costs to demonstrate that the dead of the mass grave would not be victims of Stalinist repressions but soldiers of the Red Army shot down by the Finns during the occupation of Karelia. Since 2014, an interministerial commission has also postponed access to the archives of the security services, already padlocked for the period 1917-1991, for another thirty years.
You have 11.89% of this article left to read. The rest is for subscribers only.