“Ura!” tweeted the Russian newspaper Novaya Gazeta April 5.
After more than a year in prison facing what his allies insisted were politically motivated charges of child pornography, Karelian historian and activist Yuri Alexeyevich Dmitriev was acquitted Thursday in Petrozavodsk, in the far northwest of Russia.
Dmitriev was arrested in December 2016 and charged with making pornography and sexually abusing his adopted daughter, all on the basis of nine photographs in which she was unclothed. The nine were seized from an archive of more than 100 taken, he and others say, to record the progress of a child who had health and nutrition issues being addressed by her new family. The defense team also pointed out some time ago that the nine included four copies of one print, four of another, and one more. In other words, from more than 100 photographs, three.
A campaign of pedophilia accusations began, including a derogatory television broadcast that suggested falsely that he had shared the photos on the “dark web.”
Why would the state go to such trouble for what is clearly, well, a show trial? It is no accident, comrades.
Dmitriev, longtime head of the Memorial Society’s Karelian branch, has spent decades searching for the unnamed graves of Stalin-era victims. (Memorial, a human rights group, was founded in 1992 to research the history of the Gulag and other totalitarian crimes in the Soviet Union and neighboring countries.) In 1988, as aide to a Duma member, he was on the scene when an execution site was uncovered. Most people involved wanted to cover it up and pretend it wasn’t there, but the politician for whom Dmitriev was working agreed to his insistence that they were human beings who should be properly buried.
According to an interview Dmitriev gave to a Memorial colleague in 2015, that got things going: There were, said locals, bones just lying about in such and such a spot, or under sand in a quarry. People began to ring him up. “Certain items also turned up: mugs, spectacles, underclothes. I kept on gathering the bones and items and then guys from the local Memorial society began to get involved.” But at the time, “the task we set ourselves was simple: collect the bones and give them a decent burial. Only later did I start wanting to know who these people were and why they’d been shot.”
Working with the late police lieutenant-colonel Ivan Chukhin and others, he began to compile “books of remembrance” for Karelia: to gather names from old NKVD lists, FSB archives, and other sources in order to begin to identify the dead. But there were lots of holes in the information, and he decided a different approach was needed. “I don’t need the case files,” he said. “Give me the records of the troika sessions [the 3-judge panels that could issue death sentences without a trial] and the execution reports.” “That,” he added, “was when things really started moving.”
Indeed. In 1997, Memorial members discovered where between 4,000 and 4,500 people lay buried in about 150 burial pits, at Sandarmokh woods near the camps that held prisoners working on the murderous White Sea-Baltic Canal. The total in the surrounding area brought the number to around 9,000 people. Many of them, including local Karelian victims, were determined to be buried here, where a cemetery with an Orthodox cross and a Catholic cross was opened later that year. Krasny Bor, the “beautiful grove,” is a wooded place too, nearer to Petrozavodsk. Archived KGB records show that 1,193 people were executed and buried there, and the names of many of the victims have been established. A memorial has been established there, as well.
Dmitriev’s, and Memorial’s, investigations continued. Dmitriev would ask villagers if there was a place nearby where everyone was afraid to go. “And this,” writes Jay Nordlinger in National Review, “led to graves.” Meanwhile, compilation and publication of the books of remembrance, intended to do what Memorial has called “returning the names,” went ahead.
And Yuri Dmitriev became, if he hadn’t been before, a constant reminder of the crimes of the Soviet state. This, say some of his allies and friends, is why some person or persons decided he had to be discredited, and monstrous charges were fabricated and brought against him. There was a rapid reaction: Some 40,000 people signed a petition supporting his release, and Memorial declared that he was being held as a political prisoner. The U.S. State Department expressed “concern” about “what appear to be politically-motivated criminal charges” against him.
Dmitriev was imprisoned from December 2016 till January 31, 2018. After being subjected to a court-ordered psychiatric assessment at the Serbsky Institute in Moscow— more Soviet nostalgia—Dmitriev was released pending sentencing. The prosecution had demanded that Dmitriev, 62, be jailed for a nine-year term, and seems to be saving face after the acquittal by putting him on probation for unlawful possession of an old firearm. With time served, this seems to mean he’ll have to report to local authorities from time to time over the next several months.
Commenting to the Independent Barents Observer earlier this year, Dmitriev said that his time in prison hadn’t been wasted. “I know about the fate of many of the people that were in this prison in the years 1937-1938, I know the people who were walking in these corridors and locked up in these cells, including the one where I was.” “Now,” he said, “I know about their situation, how it was for them to be locked up, their inner situation, their concerns. After all, also they were thrown in jail on some kind of false accusations.”
