Yury Dmitriev

Yury Alexeyevich Dmitriev (Russian: Юрий Алексеевич Дмитриев; born 28 January 1956) is a local historian and activist in Karelia (Republic of Karelia). From the early 1990s onwards, he worked to locate the execution sites of Stalin's Great Terror in Karelia and, by studying the archives, tried to identify as many as possible of the buried victims they contain. Since the late 1980s Dmitriev worked continually to compile "Books of Remembrance" for Karelia, listing all the names of those executed there. Dmitriev is a devout Russian Orthodox Christian. On 13 December 2016 Dmitriev was arrested and charged with making pornographic images of his foster daughter, Natasha, who was 11 at the time. From the outset Dmitriev's colleagues declared the charges to be baseless and motivated by a determination to discredit the historian and his work. The closed trial attracted national and international attention and criticism. On 26 December 2017, a second assessment by a court-appointed body of the photographs of his foster daughter concluded that they contained no element of pornography and had been taken, as the accused insisted, to monitor the health of a sickly child. On 5 April 2018, Dmitriev was acquitted of all but one minor offence. Within two months he was arrested and soon put on trial again. Given a short sentence at the end of his second trial in July 2020, the verdict was overruled by the High Court of Karelia and the charges returned for an unprecedented third judicial examination. Dmitriev and his lawyer Victor Anufriev battled through the courts in Petrozavodsk, St Petersburg and Moscow to have their appeal against the verdict and sentence heard. In October 2021 the case finally reached the Supreme Court of the Russian Federation. But on December 27 his sentence was increased to 15 years. Since May 2022, Dmitriev...