Life-threatening reprisals against Russian historian of Stalin’s Terror Yury Dmitriev

69-year-old Yury Dmitriev has been placed in the appalling conditions of a Russian punishment cell for supposedly failing to properly “carry out morning exercises’.  The world-renowned historian and political prisoner is in very bad health and has repeatedly asked to be released from these exercises which intensify his dizziness and weakness. Instead, he has been flung into a punishment cell with this perhaps delaying his transfer to the prison hospital for an urgently needed and potentially life-saving medical examination.

Dmitriev has been imprisoned, with one brief period of freedom, since December 2016, with the conditions in Russian penal institutions a serious strain on the health of men half his age.  The Memorial Society reports that this new five-day term in a SHIZO, or punishment cell, began on 11 June 2025.  He had made several requests over the past month to be released from the torture of these daily exercises, with all requests ignored.

Memorial reported back on 28 January 2025, when Dmitriev turned 69, that there was mounting concern over his state of health.  The prison medics had, for the past two years, advised that an oncological examination was required due to a growing tumour.  There are, however, no oncologists or other specialists within the prison system, and permission was not given for an examination by an outside specialist who could come to the prison colony in Mordovia.   Last year, he was given medication that made him feel worse.  After his lawyer made repeated appeals, the prison did take a blood test for cancer markers.  The results of this test would have made it possible for Dmitriev to get a referral for a biopsy.  The document with these results, however, ‘disappeared’. 

By ‘losing’ such vital results, the prison was already putting Dmitriev’s life in danger back in January 2025.  Any suspicion of cancer needs proper examination and, if confirmed, swift response.

It is now June and nothing has been done.  The results remain ‘lost’ and, rather than organizing a proper medical examination, the prison staff are tormenting Dmitriev and then punishing him for being unable to cope with the strain from their ‘morning exercises’.

It has been clear since Dmitriev’s first arrest in December 2013 on preposterous charges that he was facing reprisals for his work in exposing the crimes of the Soviet Terror, the victims and perpetrators of those crimes.  It is beginning to feel as though there are literally no limits to the revenge which those behind his persecution plan to exact. 

It was thanks to Dmitriev and his colleagues in Memorial that Ukraine learned the fate of 289 Ukrainian writers, playwrights, scientists and other members of the intelligentsia, who were among 1,111 prisoners from the Solovetsky Labour Camp executed by the NKVD from 27 October to 4 November 1937.  The huge task achieved in identifying the victims buried in mass graves at the Sandarmokh Clearing in Karelia led to Sandarmokh becoming a place of pilgrimage, not only for the descendants of those Ukrainians, Russians and others murdered there ‘by quota’ during the Terror.

Since Vladimir Putin came to power, the Russian regime has increasingly ‘rehabilitated’ dictator Joseph Stalin and the NKVD, while muffling information about the Terror, Holodomor and Stalin’s other crimes.  It is now bringing its aggressive rewriting of history and glorification of Stalin to parts of Ukraine currently under its occupation.

It is almost certainly no coincidence that Dmitriev’s arrest in December 2016 came  just months after the first attempts to ‘rewrite’ history by claiming that at least some of the mass graves at Sandarmokh were of Soviet prisoners of war killed by the Finnish army.  Nor was Dmitriev the only victim.  Fellow historian Sergei Koltyrin died in a Russian prison on 2 April 2020, less than a year after he was imprisoned on charges that were eerily similar to those against Dmitirev. Koltyrin had always worked very closely with Dmitriev and Memorial, and had until 2015 taken part in the annual International Days of Remembrance at Sandarmokh. Shortly before his arrest, he had also spoken out publicly against the barbaric excavations at Sandarmokh aimed at whitewashing Stalin and the Soviet regime by perpetuating the unproven claims about the mass graves, or some of them, being of Soviet POWs.

First attempt to imprison and discredit Yury Dmitriev :absurd ‘child pornography’ charges

Dmitriev was arrested on 13 December 2016, purportedly on the basis of an anonymous report about naked photos of Dmitriev’s adopted daughter Natasha on his computer.  Dmitriev has an adult son and daughter, and grandchildren, but had himself been adopted, and had wanted to give another child the chance of a loving home.  He and his then partner adopted Natasha who had been left in a children’s home by her grandmother.  She was just three, sickly and underweight, and Dmitriev was advised to monitor her development, which he did, in part, through photos of her naked, with her height and weight recorded.  Although Dmitriev’s entire family had welcomed Natasha as a permanent member of the family, her official status was as приёмная дочь [or foster daughter], with this meaning that Russia’s social services were always there in the background.  This was the other reason that the photos were taken naked, since Dmitriev wanted to ensure that nobody could claim that the little girl was mistreated and try to take her away. There were 100-200 photos in all, which were initially considered by a Karelian art historian, Sergei Sergeyev to be ‘pornographic’  The court then asked for an official expert assessment, with this task given to the so-called Centre for Socio-Cultural Expert Assessments ["Центр социокультурных экспертиз"], a highly dubious outfit, already used for the ‘assessments’ behind the persecution of Pussy Riot; persecution of the Jehovah’s Witnesses and others

The claim that the photos were pornographic were firmly rejected in court by Dr Lev Shcheglov, the President of the National Institute of Sexology, as well as two other specialists who also confirmed that it was common practice in Russia to take photographs for such medical purposes. 

Dmitriev had been charged with three offences, the third, under Article 222 § 1, ‘possession of a part of a firearm’.  This was part of a rifle barrel which Dmitriev says he had found among rubbish and taken so that it didn’t get picked up and used by children).

Acquittal No. 1

It was evident from a scurrilous program on Russian state-controlled Rossiya 24 hat the ‘FSB were collaborating with such propaganda channels and that the criminal charges were aimed at discrediting both Dmitriev and Memorial  

The attempts failed then, and have since, with Dmitriev the recipient of a huge number of international awards, and widely recognized as a political prisoner. 

Although the hearings were behind closed doors, and prosecutor Yelena Askerova still demanded a 9-year sentence, Judge Marina Nosova from the Petrozavodsk City Court, acquitted Dmitriev of the main ‘pornography’ charges, finding him guilty only of the very minor ‘possession’ charge with a sentence of 2.5 years. Acquittals can cause difficulties in Russia, and a total acquittal would certainly have raised questions, since Dmitriev had been in detention for 13 months.  

Enter the Karelia Supreme Court

The acquittal was challenged by prosecutor Askerova, allegedly on the initiative of the same grandmother who had left Natasha in a children’s home as a toddler.  There were no grounds, yet the Karelia Supreme Court revoked the 5 April 2018 ruling and sent the case back for retrial.

On 27 June 2018, Dmitriev was re-arrested, with Russia’s Investigative Committee now charging him with ‘acts of a sexual nature’, also against Natasha, whom he had not seen since his arrest in December 2016.  

The secrecy around the trial meant that it was only learned on the eve of the second acquittal what the additional charge, the alleged ‘acts of a sexual nature’, were about.  The prosecutor claimed that Dmitriev had on several occasions touched his adopted daughter around her groin.   This was in connection with a period when Natasha was 8 years old and began having attacks of enuresis (involuntary urinating).  If Dmitriev noticed the tell-tale smell of urine, he would, like any other parent, pat the little girl’s knickers around the area of the groin to see if they were wet, and if necessary, get her to have a wash. There is confirmation in Natasha’s medical records that she was suffering from enuresis, and that she was due to be placed in the Karelia hospital for a proper check-up soon after Dmitriev’s first arrest.

Acquittal No. 2

On 22 July 2020, judge Alexander Merkov from the Petrozavodsk City Court acquitted Dmitriev for the second time of the ‘child pornography’ charge and that of ‘depraved acts’, while acquitting him for the first time of the possession of firearms charge. 

By this stage, Dmitriev had been in custody for almost three and a half years.  Merkov convicted him of the charge laid after the first acquittal, the alleged ‘acts of a sexual nature’,  but only sentenced him to the three and a half years that he had, in any case, spent in detention.  He thus applied his right to impose a sentence considerably lower than the minimal stipulated by the criminal code, with this as close to an acquittal as you can get in Russian political trials. 

Karelia Supreme Court (‘judge’ Alla Rats)

It was these acquittals that judge Alla Rats [Алла Раць] from the Karelia Supreme Court overturned on 29 September 2020, with a new ‘expert assessment’ ordered of the photos and the charges sent back for a third attempt.  The same court almost quadrupled the sentence on the charge which had only appeared after the first acquittal, with the sentence now 13 years in a harsh regime prison colony.

There were glaring violations at that hearing.  Two of the three judges involved in this ruling, including Rats, had passed rulings against Dmitriev in previous proceedings and should have withdrawn himself. Rats had refused to postpone the hearing until Anufriev, who was in quarantine, could be present and ignored Dmitriev’s formal rejection of the state-appointed lawyer who was being foisted on him.  She then gave this lawyer (Artem Cherkasov) only 3 days to familiarize himself with a case stretching back almost four years. Memorial reported on the eve of the hearing that there was nothing to indicate that Cherkasov had even visited Dmitriev in SIZO [the remand prison].  Dmitriev was also effectively denied the possibility of defending himself.  The pandemic was used as an excuse for the historian not being brought to the court and having to take part in the proceedings by a very inadequate video link.  He could not hear around half of what was said in court, yet when he asked for the words to be repeated, the judge threatened to remove him from the hearing.

All of these issues were raised, and ignored, by judge Sergei Zhernov from the Third Cassation Court in St. Petersburg, who on 16 February 2021 upheld the ruling from 29 September 2020 and 13-year sentence.  

Third attempt at the Petrozavodsk City Court

Judge Yekaterina Khomyakova was reportedly in a hurry over this ‘trial’, and the verdict and sentence handed down on 27 December 2021 was identical to that demanded by the prosecutor.  In total, the sentence is now 15 years.

Please write to Yury Alexeevich Dmitriev and / or help to publicize the present situation and Russia’s failure to provide Dmitriev with proper medical care.

Address:

431100 РФ, Республика Мордовия, Зубово-Полянский район, р. п. Потьма, ул. Красноармейская, д. 10, ФКУ ИК-18 УФСИН России по Республике Мордовия, Дмитриеву Юрию Алексеевичу, 1956 г. р.