The Soviet Union took an intensely discriminatory attitude to its history. What the regime wanted remembered, it magnified beyond all recognition; what it wanted forgotten, it erased. The Battle of Stalingrad, for instance, was endlessly propagandized by the Soviets; whereas the First World War, a conflict that likely took the lives of over two-million Russians, was all but erased from official accounts. The Great War was begun under Tsar Nicholas II, before the Bolsheviks came to power, and therefore had no place in modern memory
The USSR finally collapsed in 1991, and for a decade historians delved into massive archives of the Soviet state’s massive archives. But Vladimir Putin came to power in 2000, and the need to forget returned. The depositories were closed off. Requests for access to documents were denied, pressure applied to those who published. Consider the case of Yuri Dmitriev.
In 1996 Dmitriev, exploring a forest in Karelia, in northwest Russia, discovered a series of mass graves. Thousands of dead, the backs of their skulls perforated by single bullets. It was, as Dmitriev went on to discover, the final resting place of more than 9,000 people targeted in the Great Terror of 1937 and 1938. They were rounded up in Moscow, St. Petersburg, and elsewhere, forced to work in the Solovki “corrective labor camps”—monasteries converted to concentration camps on the Solovetsky Islands in the White Sea—then brought by barge to the killing fields of Sandarmokh.
Over many years of work, Dmitriev produced a massive catalog of the names of the dead. Not just their names but their birthplaces, residences, livelihoods, marriages, the dates of their arrests, and their sentences. He also published the identities of their executioners and those of the functionaries who rounded them up and pronounced false charges against them.
It was this latter work—naming and shaming the men responsible for these crimes—that has irritated the new Soviet apologists. Dmitriev went on to catalog other acts of mass murder by the state: the 8,000 victims of Karelian extra-judicial tribunals; the 2,000 condemned by Moscow “dvoikas,” or two-man panels, on trumped-up political charges; and many more.
In December of last year, Dmitriev’s home was broken into and his computer searched. Three days later he was arrested in his home in Petrozavodsk in Karelia. The charge: child pornography. Authorities cited allegedly pornographic images of his adopted daughter, but Dmitriev and those who know him insist that the pictures are not remotely pornographic. This seemed to be confirmed when police added a manifestly bogus charge of possessing an unauthorized firearm. The gun consists, according to reports, of a rusty old hunting rifle that doesn’t work.
The Kremlin claims it’s not involved with the case, and it may not be in a direct way. Some in Karelia have their own reasons for wishing Dmitriev silenced; the sons and grandsons of Stalin’s henchmen still live there. But even if the Kremlin isn’t directly involved, it’s hardly innocent. Since the Crimean annexation in 2014, Vladimir Putin’s government has urged regional governments to discourage “unpatriotic” versions of history. Putin himself has expressed admiration Stalin’s reputation; in an interview with Oliver Stone the Russian president acknowledged the “horrors of Stalinism” but contended that “excessive demonization of Stalin is one of the ways Russia’s enemies attack it.”
“[Yuri] is one of a kind,” writes Anna Yarovaya, a Russian journalist who has worked with Dmitriev; “there is no one else like him anywhere else in Russia. And if he is shut down in this way, and it’s done a little more dirtily than usually, everyone else will hunker down.”
True enough, that is the Kremlin’s way. Think of Sergei Magnitsky (1972-2009), the Russian lawyer who produced evidence of large-scale fraud on the part of Russian officials; he was arrested and died in prison. Or of Anna Politkovskaya (1958-2006), the journalist who refused to stop reporting on Russian brutalities in Chechnya; she was poisoned, recovered, then shot dead in her apartment block. Or of Boris Nemstov (1959-2015), the political reformer and relentless critic of Putin; he was shot in the back just outside the Kremlin.
The message was sent in each case, but not everyone hunkered down. Certainly Dmitriev didn’t.
A verdict was expected in September, but the trial lingers on. How strange and heartbreaking that a man dedicated to bringing crimes of the past into the light should himself be forced into the dark and called a criminal. The Soviet Empire collapsed nearly three decades ago, but its aversion to historical truth lives on.
