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More than 20 years ago I met the Soviet dissident Sergei Kovalev in Strasbourg. The Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe held a session. The 1990s was a time when dissidents and intellectuals could be part of the Russian delegation.
A time that today feels very far away.
“Russia is the cross of Europe,” Kovalev said at the time.
Today, when the Russian historian Yuri Dmitriev has been sentenced to 13 years in prison, I think of Kovalev’s words.
It does not appear that Europe wears the cross of Russia. Only one person does that. A little man with dry skin, sunken cheeks and a friendly look: Yuri Dmitriev.
Photo: Oksana Yushko
Twice I have taken the train to Petrozavodsk to attend the trials against Dmitriev. I have seen him four times as he is carried to and from the courtroom, through the narrow hallway, surrounded by cheering and clapping people. Who exclaims: Wait, Jura! As for a campaign, he believes and hopes the impossible: that a person who has ended up in the clutches of the security structure can still survive. Because the accusations are so absurd, because it is so obvious who Dmitriev is.
He is not a pedophile. He is a man who has dedicated his life to mapping Stalin’s mass graves in Karelia. That is why he is now being punished.
While the FSB archives were still open, Dmitriyev sat winter after winter with the NKVD archives of archbishops in the 1920s and 1930s, recording names and information on a tape recorder. No writing or photocopying was allowed in the archives. The only way to take advantage of the information was to speak it on a tape recorder and then go home and print all the material on a computer. A terribly laborious method, the only one possible to get data out of archives.
Dmitriyev did.
In the summers he dug for mass graves. Over time, she developed a detailed understanding of how it is generally seen in places where thousands of people have been forced into a hole in the ground, shot to the neck, and then covered with dirt.
Dmitriyev not only had information about the dead. He also had lists of the NKVD executioners who carried out the massacres. NKVD was the forerunner of the KGB, which was the forerunner of the current Russian security service FSB.
The Karelia FSB regards Dmitriyev as a personal enemy. That is why the persecution against him did not end, not even after the Petrozavodsk district court acquitted him of the charges of possession of child pornography two years ago. The intelligence service did not give up. Dmitriyev had exposed what the FSB is: an organization that carried out the Stalin massacre.
Therefore, he is punished.
During my travels in Karelia, I often heard people say: Dmitriev revived the ancestral spirits. Now take revenge.
Talking about spirits is really a metaphor. The point is that Dmitriev is an extremely uncomfortable person for the Putin regime because he is literally digging up corpses. He disagrees with the flat version of Russian history that relativizes Stalin’s crimes beyond recognition. It gives the victims a name, a story. And it does so by manually tracking them and giving them a grave.
Killing has a right to a grave and family members have a place to go is profound in the sense of justice for most Russians. That is why Dmitriev’s work in Karelia has received so much support among the population. The memorial site he has founded in Sandarmoch is well-attended and well-maintained, and each year in August thousands of people make pilgrimages to the site, both from Russia and abroad, for a memorial ceremony. Dmitriyev has given Russians tools and a place to remember their past without intermediaries.
That is what the Putin regime cannot forgive him for.
Read more:
A trial is being prepared to bury the truth about Stalin’s victims
An endless spectacle will blacken the man who unearths Stalin’s crime
