Yuri Dmitriev must be a “maniac”. This is what friends and colleagues say about him, and his career suggests it: meticulously and with a keen attention to detail, without any large institutions or funds in the background, he researched and dug in archives and in mounds of earth for dead people from the time of the Great Terror. He made sure that those who were murdered and buried anonymously were given a name and a place of remembrance.
With his research, Dmitriev broke a taboo, because the time of the Great Terror has hardly been worked through to this day.
Yury Alexeyevich Dmitriev (born 28 January 1956) is a local historian and activist in Karelia (Northwest Russia). Since the early 1990s, he has worked to locate the execution sites of Stalin’s Great Terror in Karelia and, through work in the archives, to identify as many as possible of the buried victims they contain. He has compiled “Books of Remembrance” for Karelia, listing all the names of those executed there.
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.
This man sums up the tragic path Russia has taken in the past 20 years under Putin. The historic truth, instead of contributing to healing, is buried and those who say the truth are buried along with it.
The authors of “Echo of Sandarmokh” have described the case of Mr. Dmitriev in a well researched and written article. Furthermore you can find the information on Wikipedia about this modern hero of Russia, including many links to delve deeper into his life and work.
Currently he is in his 60s and serves a prison sentence of 15 years, so that he will be able to leave prison if he leaves to see the day, when he is about 80 years old. He will not continue his work in the field of restoring dignity to many who died in the Soviet Union in gulags – as long as Putin’s Russia continues to go down the path of fanaticism and state violence and war.