‘He’s documenting Stalin’s victims, even from prison’
Gulag historian Yuri Dmitriyev faces 15 years in a labour colony for child sex charges disputed by campaigners who say he’s being put on trial by the state for digging up the past
Historian Irina Flige first met Yuri Dmitriyev during a cigarette break between searching KGB archives. It was then that she gave him information that would change his life: the evidence of executions of at least 1,111 Gulag prisoners in Dmitriyev’s native Kareliya during Stalin’s Great Terror.
The researchers agreed to a joint expedition, and on 1 July 1997 set off to the lakes and pine woods in northern Kareliya where they understood the bodies were buried. They expected the searching would take several months, but after four or five hours of wandering in the forest, Dmitriyev came running to Flige, with obvious excitement. “Found them,” he said.
Over the next three decades, Dmitriyev made it his life’s work to document the bodies in the clearing that came to be known as Sandarmokh. In total, he helped trace at least 7,000 of Stalin’s victims, relating to nearly 100 separate execution events over 1937-38, the darkest days of Russia’s modern history.
It was a colossal achievement that embarrassed the veterans of Russia’s secret police in the process. Then the state accused him of paedophilia.
On Wednesday, a closed court in Kareliya will rule on shocking charges relating to the alleged manufacture of child pornography, sexual abuse of his adopted daughter Natasha, and possession of illegal firearms. Prosecutors have requested a 15-year sentence in a strict labour colony, which would likely include the 64year-old’s final years.
It is the second process to be launched against Dmitriyev, and follows the acquittal of him on child pornography charges in 2018.
That verdict, which bucked a 99 per cent guilty trend nationwide, appears to have been an unusual demonstration of independence by Judge Marina Nosova. (She later had a promotion to the Supreme Court overturned for her troubles.) This time around, few expect the judge to make a similar mistake.
In an open letter in support of the historian, a wide coalition of dissidents, cultural leaders and his colleagues dismissed the latest charges as bogus.
“He’s a stubborn, strange bastard, maniacally focused, and he has a terrible temper,” says Flige. “But having a bad character is not a crime and it’s the reason he managed to do the work he did. Even in prison, he’s continuing to document Stalin’s victims.”
Friends have taken to calling the lugubrious, long-bearded Dmitriyev the “Old Man Khottabych” – after the eccentric, Soviet-era cartoon genie stuck in a lamp.
The historian’s activism hides a troubled backstory. He spent his first year on Earth in an orphanage, before being adopted by a Soviet military family. He then failed to complete a medical degree, was sent to jail for fighting, and has been out of work for most of adulthood.
But his work on preserving the memory of Stalin’s victims at Sandarmokh and other mass burial sites has made him a local celebrity. “The guys in uniform can’t forgive him for that,” says Andrei Chovan, a cobbler in Medvezhegorsk. “I said to everyone who would listen back in 2018 that they were celebrating too soon. That they would arrest him again and never let him out. I was right.”
Chovan has followed Dmitriyev’s career with interest ever since discovering his own grandfather was among those likely buried at Sandarmokh. Nikolai Palchikov was executed aged 40 after being found guilty of “contra-revolutionary” activities supposedly undertaken as a 19-year-old during the Russian Civil War. Palchikov’s wife, and Chovan’s grandmother only found out about his death two decades later.
The cobbler says the details of his execution are still talked about in his family in hushed tones. “We had no
He’s stubborn, strange and maniacally focused. But having a bad character is not a crime and it’s the reason he managed to do the work he did
idea he was buried at Sandarmokh, and we’d even go mushroom picking in the area,” he told The Independent. “Of course, there were all kinds of rumours, but that’s the local language around here.”
Chovan says he believes the campaign against Dmitriyev has been pushed locally, but with Moscow’s agreement. Veterans of the Soviet secret police and their descendants were still active in the area, he added: “Silencing their most persistent critic has benefits.”
Moscow is increasingly taking an ambivalent view on the crimes of the Stalinist era. On the one hand, the Kremlin officially recognises repressions are part of the history of the era. On another, it has also tried to move the story on from the more horrific moments of Stalinism, while emphasising victory in the Second World War. Local activists say they saw noticed a clear change in government policy towards Dmitriyev after the annexation of Crimea in 2014.
After attending the annual memorial day at the Sandarmokh memorial complex since 1997, local government cut off all links in 2016. Around the same time, controversial local historians Yury Kilin and Sergei Verigin began pushing a dubious theory that the bodies contained in Sandarmokh were not victims of Stalinist terror, but those of Red Army victims of Finnish concentration camps. It was also around this time that state investigators say they received their first “anonymous message” about Dmitriyev taking naked photographs of his adopted daughter.
The first trial accepted Dmitriyev’s explanation of the photos – that he was following advice to document the girl’s physical development in case of claims of physical assault. It also drew on a psychological assessment that concluded he had no sexual interest in children.
This time around, the case has been elaborated with additional murky allegations: that the amateur historian “repeatedly touched the girl between her legs”. According to the prosecution, the child is supposed to have told her grandmother: “I want to write a complaint about Dmitriyev, and if I say all I know about him, then he will go to jail for 30 years.”
Independent experts have criticised the line of questioning pursued by state psychologists, suggesting the girl was led into incriminating statements. On his part, Dmitriyev has admitted to touching the girl between her legs – but only “to see if she had wet herself”. Medical records show the girl was suffering from incontinence at the time.
At his final word last week, Dmitriyev reasserted his innocence. “I have done nothing harmful to Natasha and I could not allow myself to do anything harmful to her,” he said.
His long-time colleague Flige says she has not given up hope of a miracle – noting authorities have been increasingly flexibile in sentencing when they can see there is widespread public interest. “Nothing is real, and they aren’t judging anything based on real events, but on signals,” she said. “It’s impossible to predict: It could be anything from an acquittal to the full 15 years.”
Nothing is real, and they aren’t judging anything based on real events, but on signals: it’s impossible to predict. It could be anything from an acquittal to the full 15 years