Yury A. Dmitriev

Dmitriev's incarceration extended until March 2020.

After a psychiatric examination at the Serbsky Institute in Moscow, the historian was released from custody on 27 January 2018 on condition that he did not leave Petrozavodsk. The charges against him were not dropped and the next court hearing was scheduled for 27 February 2018. On 5 April 2018 the judge acquitted Dmitriev on two charges relating to the photos of his adopted daughter Natasha, removing the threat of nine years' imprisonment, demanded on 20 March by the prosecution. The court found Dmitriev guilty of the lesser and separate offence of possessing a firearm. After more than a year in custody, Dmitriev was sentenced to three further months restriction of liberty, meaning that he has to report twice a week to the city prison. On 13 April 2018, the Petrozavodsk city prosecutor, Yelena Askerova, submitted a formal appeal to the court against the acquittal of Yury Dmitriev on all but one charge. Dmitriev was again arrested in June 2018, supposedly for breaching the terms of his release in January. On 14 June the Supreme Court of Karelia overturned the April verdict and ordered a retrial. Later additional charges were added and Dmitriev again underwent a psychiatric examination (see "Round Two", below).

On 27 January Dmitriev was released from custody and allowed to return to his home, on condition that he did not leave the city of Petrozavodsk. On 20 March, the city prosecutor Askerova reaffirmed the accusations against him and demanded 9 years of prison in a severe regime colony. The next court hearing is scheduled for 22 March 2018.

On 5 April 2018, Dmitriev was acquitted of the child pornography charges by Judge Marina Nosova at the conclusion of his trial at the Petrozavodsk City Court. She found him guilty of possessing parts of a shotgun and sentenced him to three months probation plus community service. Dmitriev had denied all the charges.

On 13 April 2018, the Petrozavodsk city prosecutor, Yelena Askerova, submitted a formal appeal to the court against the acquittal of Yury Dmitriev on all but one charge. This appeal was accepted by the Supreme Court of Karelia and a hearing was set for Thursday, 14 June. Dmitriev's defence attorney, Victor Anufriev, submitted an appeal against his client's conviction for possessing parts of a firearm. On 14 June 2018, the acquittal was overturned by the Supreme Court of Karelia.

On 28 June 2018 Yury Dmitriev was arrested again, apparently for breaking the terms of his release in April: he was stopped by police, travelling out of the city of Petrozavodsk to attend the funeral of a friend. The NTV national TV channel published footage of Dmitriev at the police station and claimed that he had been attempting to flee the country. To the former charge of child pornography was now added that of "sexual acts of a forcible nature" (Article 132, part 4).

On 31 December 2017, Yury Dmitriev was one of 16 journalists, bloggers, writers and historians, imprisoned or otherwise persecuted by the authorities, who were recognised at the annual Sakharov awards for "Journalism as an Act of Conscience".

When charges were brought against the imprisoned Dmitriev in early 2017 it became clear that he had a many supporters. By early July an Internet petition in his defense had drawn over 30,000 signatures in Russia and elsewhere.

They and his defence team consider the charges to be fabricated, a misinterpretation of what little evidence the investigators have found. There is also concern about the prospects for a fair trial. On 10 January 2017 a 13-minute segment of the news programme entitled "What does Memorial have to hide?" on a national TV network Rossiya-24 showed the allegedly "pornographic" photographs Dmitriev had taken of his foster daughter Natasha. The defence team believes they were leaked to the media by the investigators, although as evidence in a forthcoming trial they were sub judice.

After months in police custody his trial began on 1 June 2017. As with other trials in Russia concerning sexual offences against minors, neither press nor public were admitted to the hearings at the Petrozavodsk City Court.

On 11 July four expert witnesses testified on behalf of the defence, casting serious doubts on the interpretation of the evidence by the prosecution and its experts. Dmitriev's attorney Victor Anufriev announced that the hearings had ended for the time being and would resume on 1 August. He expressed the hope that his client could address the court on 22 August and that a verdict would be delivered by 1 September 2017.

Thanks to the persistence of the defence, however, the trial continued. On 15 September 2017, the court agreed to submit the photographic evidence to other experts, after the defence had petitioned four times for such a decision.

The hearing scheduled for 18 October was postponed because the new experts were not ready to present their fresh assessment of the same 9 "pornographic" photographs. A hearing was held on 25 October but the assessment of the photographs was still not ready. On 26 December 2017, the new court-appointed body finally presented the findings of its experts that there was no element of pornography in the photographs taken by Dmitriev and concluded that their purpose was to monitor the health of a sickly child.

On 27 December 2017, the court changed the measure of restraint imposed on Dmitriev. After more than a year in custody at the city's Detention Centre No 1, he would be released on 28 January 2018 (his 62nd birthday), on condition that he did not leave the country. On 28 December, without notifying his defence attorney, the court had Dmitriev flown under escort to Moscow where he was taken to the Serbsky Center to begin assessment. On 30 December, Dmitriev's son delivered food for his father to the Serbsky Center.

By early December 2017 over seventy video clips of famous Russians speaking in Dmitriev's defence—writers, musicians, priests, historians, film-makers, actors—had been posted on a variety of social media and reposted to his supporters' Facebook page and to the Dmitriev Affair website. Among them were TV presenter and literary critic Alexander Arkhangelsky, Natalya Solzhenitsyn, film director Andrey Zvyagintsev, and the sculptor-designer of the Wall of Sorrow monument, Georgy Frangulyan, who commented: "What has happened [to Dmitriev] is appalling, it's tragic".

On 13 December 2016 Dmitriev was arrested and charged with making pornographic images of his foster daughter, Natasha. 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.

When Dmitriev was first arrested at the end of 2016 he was finishing nine years of work on a Book of Remembrance that would name over 64,000 of the deported "special settlers" of the 1930s whose descendants make up 25-30% of those now living in Karelia.

In 2016 Dmitriev was awarded an Honorary Diploma of the Karelian Republic by the administration of the new head of Karelia, Alexander Hudilainen (Худилайнен, Александр Петрович).

In 2015 he received the Gold Cross of Merit from Poland for his work in locating mass burials at Sandarmokh and on Solovki, and identifying the victims they contained: ethnic Poles in the Soviet Union were one of the nationalities targeted during the Great Terror.

The explanation offered by Dmitriev for the existence of the 140 photographs, 9 of which are claimed by the prosecution to be "pornographic", is that they record the improving health of a neglected and under-nourished little girl from a children's home, whom he and his second wife had taken into their care. He stopped keeping this photographic record in 2015. Today eleven years old, the daughter has recently won the Petrozavodsk city cup for her age-group in a martial arts tournament.

Yekaterina Klodt, Dmitriev's daughter by his first marriage, has described her father's commitment to his work. "I often asked him why he continually sat at the computer, writing or copying something out," she told Gleb Yarovoi. Dmitriev answered: "I do not know who I was in a past life, but I understand the meaning of my life now and I know that I must do this." As she grew older Yekaterina would frequently tell him to take a break—how much longer would he go on with these lists? "I can't stop," Dmitriev replied, "I must finish the book, people are waiting for it." Dmitriev's life consisted, for year after year, of winters spent in the archives followed by summers scouring the forested areas around particular cities and towns with Witch (Vedma), his Alsatian, hunting for possible burial sites.

Novaya Gazeta newspaper commented: "The decision was unprecedented for Russian justice where the percentage of acquittals does not exceed the statistical margin of error." In trials without a jury the percentage of acquittals in the Russian judicial system is now markedly less than 1% of the total. The result in the Dmitriev Case, therefore, was an achievement against the odds. (In trials where the case is heard before a jury, the proportion of acquittals was higher, around 20% of the total in 2009.)

In 2005 Dmitriev was awarded the new "Golden Pen of Russia" prize for his publications.

In 2003, in addition to his Books of Remembrance, Dmitriev also published a collection of documents about the construction of the White Sea-Baltic Canal and the fate of the numerous prisoners and "special settlers" engaged in its construction.

As a result of Dmitriev's activities he was appointed secretary of the Petrozavodsk Commission for Restoring the Rights of Rehabilitated Victims of Political Repression and in 2002 became (and remains) a member of the organisation of the same name at the republican level, covering all of Karelia. He is a member of the Karelian branch of the Memorial Society, and in 2014 became its chairman.

From 1998 to 2009, Dmitriev headed the Academy for the Defence of Socio-Legal Rights, a Karelian human rights NGO. As president of that body, in 2002, Yury Dmitriev wrote to the then head of the Karelian republic, Sergey Katanandov, objecting to the proposal by the Karelia Council of Veterans to put up a statue in Petrozavodsk to Yury Andropov. (KGB chairman from 1967 to 1982, Andropov headed the Komsomol in Karelia during the Great Patriotic War, from 1940 to 1944.) Katanandov did not reply to Dmitriev's letter and the 10-foot-high memorial to Andropov was erected. The decision, commented Dmitriev, reflected the nation's attitude to its recent history: "We don't know the past, and we don't want to know."

At first Dmitriev was junior partner to Ivan Chukhin (ru: Чухин, Иван Иванович), a deputy of the RSFSR Supreme Soviet and State Duma (1990-1995), and the first chairman of the Memorial Society in Karelia. Chukhin felt compelled to engage in the work because his own father had been involved in acts of repression under Stalin. When Chukhin, a retired police officer, was killed in a car accident in May 1997 Dmitriev carried on alone. On 1 July 1997, with members of St Petersburg Memorial, Dmitriev located a massive killing field, 12 kilometres from Medvezhyegorsk, that subsequently acquired the name of Sandarmokh; some weeks later, guided by local inhabitants, he confirmed the identification of the Krasny Bor execution site, 20 km from Petrozavodsk.

He began but did not finish a course at the Northwest Health Department of the Leningrad Medical College. During the Gorbachev years, Dmitriev was a member of the Karelian People's Front, and served between 1988 and 1991 as an aide to USSR People's Deputy Mikhail Zenko. It was then that he first encountered mass graves of those shot in the 1930s.

Yury Dmitriev spent his first year in a Soviet orphanage. In 1957 he was adopted by a childless army officer and his wife; he found out he was not their child at the age of 14. His father was posted to East Germany, and Yury spent part of his childhood in Dresden.

Yury Alexeyevich Dmitriev (born 1956 in Petrozavodsk) is a civil rights activist and local historian in Karelia (Northwest Russia). Since the early 1990s, he has worked to locate the execution sites of Stalin's Great Terror and identify as many as possible of the buried victims they contain. As a result of his commitment, Karelia's past is better documented in this respect than almost any other part of the Russian Federation.