Russian historian who exposed Stalin’s crimes faces fears he will declared insane
MOSCOW (Reuters) - A Russian historian whose exposure of Soviet leader Josef Stalin’s crimes angered state officials is due to begin enforced psychiatric testing this week amid fears he will be falsely declared insane, his lawyer said on Tuesday.
Yuri Dmitriev, 61, is on trial in northwest Russia on charges brought by state prosecutors of involving his adopted daughter, then 11, in child pornography, of illegally possessing “the main elements of” a firearm, and of depravity involving a minor.
Some of Russia’s leading cultural figures say Dmitriev was framed because his focus on Stalin’s crimes – he found a mass grave with up to 9,000 bodies dating from the Soviet dictator’s Great Terror in the 1930s – jars with the latter-day Kremlin narrative that Russia must not be ashamed of its past.
The narrative has taken on added importance ahead of a March presidential election which polls show incumbent Vladimir Putin, who uses his country’s World War II victory when Stalin was in charge to bolster national pride, is on track to win.
Putin asserted last year that what he called an “excessive demonization of Stalin” was being used to undermine Russia.
Dmitriev faces up to 15 years in prison if convicted of the charges, which he denies.
A previous psychiatric evaluation declared him to be of sound mind and a court-sanctioned expert group found no pornographic content in nine photographs of his daughter that are at the center of the case against him, overturning the earlier findings of other experts commissioned by prosecutors.
But on December 27, in an unexpected twist, the court ordered that the same nine photos be reexamined by experts for a third time. It also granted the prosecution’s request that Dmitriev undergo enforced psychiatric testing to determine whether he has “sexual deviations.”
However, the court declined a prosecution request to extend his detention beyond January 28.
Dmitriev’s lawyer, Viktor Anufriev, told Reuters on Tuesday he had written to the supreme court of Karelia, the region where his client is being tried, to appeal against the court order.
“He’s already been through one [psychiatric] test. The conclusions were fine, no evidence of deviance was found, and the results were not contested by prosecutors,” said Anufriev. “This [latest testing] was ordered illegally.”
Dmitriev was flown to Moscow at the end of last year to be evaluated at a psychiatric clinic, the Serbsky Center, that was infamous in Soviet times for providing false testimony to allow the authorities to lock up dissidents in psychiatric facilities.