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November 01, 2020

Another Victim of Sandarmokh

Another Victim of Sandarmokh

There are so many things wrong in the case of historian Yuri Dmitriev, it is hard to know where to start. His case should cause as much outrage in the West as did the poisoning of Alexei Navalny. Yet it has not, likely because the political prosecutors have successfully muddied the waters with bogus charges.

A respected and widely-honored historian of the Gulag and head of the Memorial Human Rights organization in Karelia, Dmitriev was in 2016 arrested and tried based on an anonymous tip (something that is illegal under Russian law), that alleged he had child pornography on his computer. The images turned out to be photographs of his then 11-year-old foster daughter, who was dangerously underweight and suffered from mysterious endocrinal issues. He asserts he took them to protect the family against an overzealous social services agency.

Three separate expert review boards cleared Dmitriev of any indications of deviant sexual behavior, and judged the images to not be pornographic. Psychological examination of his foster daughter also exonerated Dmitriev.

So, on April 5, 2018, the Petrozavodsk City Court acquitted Dmitriev on charges of child pornography and sexual molestation. He was, however, convicted of illegal weapons possession and sentenced to strict probation for two and a half years.

Two months later, the case was reopened after an appeal from a state prosecutor and the foster daughter’s grandmother, with whom she had lived since Dmitriev’s arrest, and who has a spotty history with custody issues. Independent experts judged subsequent state interviews with the daughter to be complicated by “communicative pressure.”

In any event, in July of this year, Dmitriev was convicted on charges of molestation and sentenced to three and a half years in jail, most of which he had already served in pretrial detention, so he was set to be released in November of 2020.

Then, in a surprise move, on September 29, Karelia’s Supreme Court stepped in to overturn the July ruling as too lenient, sentencing Dmitriev to 13 years in prison.

There are numerous aspects of the case that violated Dmitriev’s human rights, and every respectable expert informed on the case agrees that it is entirely politically motivated.

It all traces back to Dmitriev’s 1997 discovery of Sandarmokh, a Soviet Gulag killing field in Medvezhegorsk, Karelia that the current administration is now trying to whitewash, saying it was actually just the burial site for Soviet soldiers killed by the Finns in Stalin’s Soviet-Finnish War of 1940-41.

Leading the charge is the Russian Military Historical Society (founded by former Culture Minister Vladimir Medinsky). When, after the RMHS visited the site to dig up soldiers in 2018, the local museum director, Sergei Koltyrin, refused to buy into the whitewash theory, he and another official were arrested on, you guessed it, child molestation charges. Just over a year later, the director, whose health was poor, died in prison after what seems to have been a forced confession.

In reality, beneath the pine trees of Sandarmokh lie an estimated 7,000-10,000 Gulag victims executed here in 1937 and 1938. There are modest monuments to the victims in the forest, and a small chapel. Yet in 2015, when we drove along the road that stands just a few dozen yards away, we saw no markers on the road pointing to the solemn site that lies just beyond the tree line.

In Russia, history is still owned by the state. And heaven help an honest historian who wants only to see its innocent victims honored.

Tags: dissidentsgulag

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