This sentence is regarded by the supporters of Yuri Dmitriev as a quasi-victory, while the prosecution had requested 15 years in prison.
The Russian historian Yuri Dmitriev, who is known for his research on the missing of the stalinist terror, was sentenced on Wednesday to three and a half years in prison for “sexual violence”, just relatively light in a case that accused of aiming his work of memory. This conviction, considered by the supporters of Yuri Dmitriev as a quasi-victory, while the prosecution had requested 15 years in prison, was greeted by applause in the court of Petrozavodsk, where the historian was found.
given his time spent in preventive detention, it should be out of prison as early as November. “Yuri responded very positively to the verdict. It is a person is very strong, he knows that he is not guilty,” said his lawyer Viktor Anoufriev in front of the hearing room, hailing a “positive” result, and noting that the floor didn’t seem to want to call. The historian 64-year-old has spent nearly 30 years to compile the list of 40,000 names of those deported or executed under Stalin in Karelia, a Russian region bordering Finland.
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Head of the local branch of the NGO Memorial, which specializes in the documentation of the crimes of the soviets, he was arrested for the first time in 2016, accused of making the images “pornographic” of his adoptive daughter. He had then been acquitted in April 2018, a fact extremely rare in the Russian judicial system. But the supreme Court of Karelia had reversed this decision two months later and ordered a second trial behind closed doors, this time for “sexual violence on a minor”.
For its supporters, this case is an attempt by the authorities to intimidate and silence Yuri Dmitriev, whose research does not fit with the official discourse of the Russian rehabilitation of the soviet era. “This verdict has two facets: the first is that Yuri will soon be free. But this verdict, despite its lightness, is not fair,” responded one of the leaders of Memorial, Ian Ratchinski, taking the view that the tribunal had allowed the Russian authorities to save face.
“Rewrite history”
Anatoli Razoumov, a historian who had moved to Petrozavodsk with several dozen other advocates of Yuri Dmitriev, has suggested that “the civil society and the support Dmitriev” had avoided a penalty too heavy. In recent years, Yuri Dmitriev has been at the origin of the discovery of one of the largest mass graves in Karelia, in Sandarmokh, where the remains of 7000 to 9000 people executed in the stalinist era have been found. The discovery goes against the grain of official discourse, on the background of the war memorial, aiming to restore the soviet period.
An organization which is headed by the authority has undertaken excavations at Sandarmokh to demonstrate that a part of the body discovered by Yuri Dmitriev were those of soviet soldiers executed by Finns between 1941 and 1944. Many prominent Russian and foreign had denounced unjustified prosecutions aimed Yuri Dmitriev, calling for the image of Natalia Soljenitsyna, the widow of soviet dissident and Nobel literature laureate Alexander Solzhenitsyn, to combat the “falsification” of history.
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Other Nobel prizes, writers belarusian Svetlana Alexievitch and German Herta Müller, had in a letter to the Council of Europe estimated that the discoveries of Yuri Dmitriev at Sandarmokh were a “bone in the throat of the authorities,” which, according to them, seek to “rewrite History”. In his statement before the verdict, Yuri Dmitriev was in particular justified its excavations, its eyes extremely important to the memory of Russian.
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The Russia of Vladimir Putin
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“on My way, my drive is to bring back from oblivion these people who have gone through the fault of a government of our fatherland, unjustly accused, executed, buried in the woods like animals,” he said, according to the text published by the news site Meduza. “The strength of a State lies not in its tanks and its guns, its bombs, nuclear (…) No, the strength of a State lies in its people”.
