Researcher of Stalinist crimes Yuri Dmitriev arrested again


Yuri Dmitriev wrongly accused for over two years.
Photo: svoboda.org

The Russian authorities once tried to accuse the well-known historian Yuri Dmitriev of having child pornography. They failed then. Now they accuse him of raping his underage daughter.

The day before yesterday, the Russian services detained Yuri Dmitriev, a well-known activist of the Memorial of Karelia, a researcher of Stalinist crimes in the north of Russia. According to the preliminary information, the police decided that the activist intends to escape to Poland and therefore arrested him. The next day, the court arrested Dmitriev for two months. He is accused of raping his 13-year-old adopted daughter. This is the second case against Dmitriev. Two years ago he was arrested and accused of possessing child pornography. At the beginning of the year, the court released Dmitriev from custody and found the accusations unsubstantiated. However, the prosecutor’s office and the Investigative Committee did not give up and are now preparing a new, even more serious case.

On the wave of “glasnost” promoted by Mikhail Gorbachev in the USSR, Dmitriev began to discover the completely secret history of Stalinist repression. Jury Dmitriev, although not a historian by education, began to collect stories about the gloomy Stalinist years already in the late 1980s, in his native Karelia in the north of Russia. Later, after the fall of communism, he organized expeditions to the Karelian forests in search of traces of the former Gulag camps and places of burial of NKVD victims. Initially, he did it on his own. Later he started working with the Memorial. At the end of the 1990s, he discovered and described mass graves of victims in various places in Russia. For these discoveries he was awarded the Gold Cross of Merit in 2015.

– He is an enthusiast and a local patriot of Karelia, only that his discoveries run counter to the current policy of hiding the NKVD crimes in Russia, an organization that the Russian authorities, derived from its successor, consider patriotic and state-creating, said Nikita Petrov, a Russian historian from the Memorial, a researcher of Stalinist crimes.

The Memorial, an organization that tirelessly investigates communist crimes and publishes lists of NKVD victims, has been persecuted in Russia for a long time. There have been searches in the organization’s offices and it has been entered on the list of so-called “foreign agents”. But, according to Petrov, regular operational activities aimed at individual researchers and historians are also carried out.

At the end of 2016, the police arrested Dmitriev for the first time. Based on an anonymous information, he possessed child pornography. The information came from a mysterious man who broke into his home and searched the computer. Only later, in the course of the trial, it turned out that he had about 140 photos of his 11-year-old adopted daughter Natalia. Of these, only 9 were later qualified as potentially pornographic in nature. The accused explained that he had taken some nude photos of his daughter for medical records of her convalescence. They were simply private photos, which in addition Dmitriev never shared with anyone or sent electronically. Dmitry’s historians and famous people of Russian culture (including writer Boris Akunin) as well as Polish historians urged the release of Dmitriev.

Yuri Dmitriev on one of the last hearings before acquittal on April 5, 2018. Source: kommersant.ru

The court finally passed a judgment on April 5 acquitting Dmitriev of the pedophile pornography possession charges and released the historian from custody.

Unfortunately, the case did not end with a total acquittal. First, the court convicted Dmitriev of illegal possession of a weapon and gave him a two and a half year suspended sentence. Some of the rusty remnants of weapons found during the search in the Karelian forests were found during the search. The suspended sentence meant that he could not travel abroad. When he was detained the other day, the services claimed that he intended to escape to Poland. However, the authorities did not give up the pedophile story and used a child, the adopted daughter of the researcher, Natalia. Shortly after acquittal of the pornography possession, Natalia suddenly became an interest of the forensic psychologist who held a series of talks with her. Several days ago, investigators revealed that during the conversation with the psychologist Natalia told that her father had raped her.

The investigator from Karelia now faces a sentence of 20 years in prison, which in his case is synonymous with life. The Memorial community is afraid that further attempts will be made to discredit people who reveal the truth about Stalinist crimes. Dmitriev’s case is a warning to stop the work. But they do not intent to do it.

Michał Kacewicz / belsat.eu

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