Why Yuri Dmitriev was convicted

RAlas, a de facto death sentence – these are the most frequent comments of the many Russians, who are not indifferent to the fate of Yuriy Dmitriev. They consider that the decision of the Karelia Supreme Court to sentence the historian to 13 years in prison in a penal colony for “violent acts of a sexual nature against a person under the age of fourteen” is a beacon of what threatens others who encounter the system mill. advised: a death in custody, hated and slandered.

The sixty-four-year-old from Russia’s northwestern republic has been in custody with brief interruptions since late 2016; the sentence is already the third in its matter. His case officially revolves around alleged attacks against Dmitryev’s adopted daughter, who was born in 2005. But it is not only human rights activists who are convinced that it is really about eliminating the historian and smearing his work.

Shortly before the verdict on appeal was announced, nearly 250 human rights activists, historians, opposition politicians, writers and others called in an open letter to the Karelian Supreme Court to relocate Dmitriev’s trial to another region because of “doubts about the objectivity” of the Court. The latter was unaffected by the fact that the defendant was not in the room due to the pandemic, but from pre-trial detention and only saw half of the events due to poor transmission. The lawyer, who has been defending Dmitriev for almost four years, was unable to participate in the appeals process due to a crown quarantine; and the designated substitute defense attorney, whom Dmitriev refused, had only three days to work on 19 files on the case. Because even the political processes accumulate many documents, reports, requests, resolutions.

Dmitriev himself was adopted as a child.

The evaluation of illegal acts is also part of Dmitrijev’s work. In Karelia he represents the human rights organization Memorial, which is harassed as a “foreign agent” because of its work with victims of the old and new system. Dmitrijew, a lean and tough man who spent a lot of time in the forest, investigates the “repression”, as the Soviet state terror in Russia is called. He discovered several places of mass shooting, for example in 1997 in the Sandarmoch forest, where Stalin’s executioners from the NKVD secret police shot thousands of Russians, Ukrainians, Poles, Germans, Georgians and members of other nationalities in the ” Great Terror “in 1937 and 1938.