Mon, December 27, 2021
MOSCOW (AP) — A Russian court on Monday extended the prison term handed to an activist who investigated Stalin-era repression to 15 years on what he says are trumped-up charges.
Yuri Dmitriyev, 65, rose to prominence after uncovering mass graves of victims of Stalinist repressions. He was arrested on charges of sexually abusing his adopted daughter, which rights activists have dismissed as fabricated and politically motivated.
Dmitriyev was accused of making child pornography, indecent acts and illegal possession of a part of a weapon. He was acquitted in 2018, only to have the case reopened a few months later.
In July 2020, he was found guilty of sexual assault against his daughter and sentenced to 3 1/2 years in prison, which several months later was extended to 13 years. He has already spent five years in prison.
On Monday, the sentence was extended yet again, to 15 years, by the Petrozavodsk city court in the Russian region of Karelia, on the border with Finland. Dmitriyev’s defense lawyers plan to appeal the ruling.
According to the investigators, Dmitriyev was accused of making pornographic materials by taking naked photos of his daughter. Experts during the first trial found the photographs were not pornographic.
Dmitriyev used to head the Karelian branch of the human rights centre Memorial, which recognizes him as a political prisoner. The European Union and several prominent Russian cultural figures have called on Russian authorities to drop the charges.
Memorial’s Human Rights Center, a prominent group that studies and documents political repression in the Soviet Union, is facing closure in Russia for alleged failures to use the “foreign agent” label on all its publications, and for justifying terrorism. The court hearing is scheduled for Thursday.
John Haltiwanger
Mon, December 27, 2021
Russian President Vladimir Putin looks at a flag with portraits of Soviet leaders Vladimir Lenin and Joseph Stalin while visiting Ivanovo, Russia, on March 6, 2020.Mikhail Svetlov/Getty Images
A Russian Gulag historian had his prison sentence extended to 15 years.
The historian, Yuri Dmitriev, has uncovered mass graves from Stalin's purges.
Critics say the charges against Dmitriev are politically motivated due to his work.
A Russian court extended the prison sentence of a prominent historian and activist, Yuri Dmitriev, as part of a sex abuse case that critics have condemned as politically motivated, Reuters reported on Monday.
Dmitriev had two more years added to his 13-year sentence, and is now set to spend 15 years behind bars. Last July, Dmitriev was found guilty of sexually abusing his adopted daughter. He's vehemently denied the allegations against him.
Dmitriev was first arrested in late 2016 on child pornography charges but was acquitted in 2018. But a second criminal case was opened against him several months later and he was eventually sentenced to three and a half years in prison. His sentence was abruptly extended to 13 years last year, not long before Dmitriev was set to be released.
Supporters and critics say the charges against Dmitriev are fabricated and punishment for uncovering mass graves from the Stalin-era containing the bodies of people held in Soviet prison camps known as Gulags. During the Great Purge (1936-38), also known as the "Great Terror," Joseph Stalin engaged in a brutal campaign to neutralize anyone perceived as disloyal or a threat to his rule. It's estimated at least 750,000 were killed during this period.
When Dmitriev's sentence was extended last year, a spokesperson for the US embassy in Moscow decried the move as "another step backwards for human rights and historical truths in Russia."
Experts with the UN have also condemned Russia over the treatment of Dmitriev, who's been lauded by human rights groups for his work.
"In response to Mr. Dmitriev's relentless search for the truth, the Russian authorities have sought to silence him by attacking his personal integrity, and thus the legitimacy of his historical work," a group of UN human rights experts said in February. "By so doing, they are preventing millions of family members whose relatives were imprisoned or perished in the Gulags from finding answers on what happened to their loved ones."
"Not only are the Russian authorities failing to uphold the right to truth owed to the victims, their families and to the larger society, they are attempting to prevent legitimate research and to re-write the history books to play down the true extent of the crimes committed during the Great Purge," the experts added.
Dmitriev is the chief of the Karelia branch of Memorial human rights group, a Moscow-based group that has spearheaded efforts to document crimes against humanity in the Soviet Union. The Russian government is threatening to shutter the group, founded in the late 1980s — over allegations it's violated Russia's "foreign agents" act. Memorial has dismissed the charges as politically motivated.
Experts say that Russian President Vladimir Putin, a former KGB operative, is vying to whitewash Stalin's crimes against humanity and downplay Soviet-era repression.
"Memorial employees are now regularly questioned and investigated by police," Anne Applebaum, a fellow at the SNF Agora Institute at Johns Hopkins University, wrote in The Atlantic earlier this month. "Dictators distort the past because they want to use it. Putin certainly wants to use the past to stay in power. If Russians are nostalgic for their old dictatorship, then they have less reason to push back against the new one. He may also want to use the past to give legitimacy to violence."
In a June 2017 interview, Putin lamented that "excessively demonizing Stalin is a means to attack Soviet Union and Russia." Referring to Stalin as a "complex figure," Putin added that he was against forgetting the horrors of Stalinism. Putin also said he thought "the overwhelming majority of the citizens of the former Soviet Union admired Stalin."
Lavrentiy Beria
Lavrentiy Beria | |||
|---|---|---|---|
| Лавре́нтий Бе́рия (Russian) ლავრენტი ბერია (Georgian) | |||
 | |||
| First Deputy Chairman of the Council of Ministers | |||
| In office 5 March – 26 June 1953 | |||
| Premier | Georgy Malenkov | ||
| Preceded by | Vyacheslav Molotov | ||
| Succeeded by | Lazar Kaganovich | ||
| Minister of Internal Affairs | |||
| In office 5 March – 26 June 1953 | |||
| Preceded by | Semyon Ignatyev | ||
| Succeeded by | Sergei Kruglov | ||
| In office 25 November 1938 – 26 June 1953 | |||
| Preceded by | Nikolai Yezhov | ||
| Succeeded by | Sergei Kruglov | ||
| |||
| Personal details | |||
| Born | Lavrentiy Pavlovich Beria 29 March 1899 Merkheuli, Sukhum Okrug, Kutais Governorate, Russian Empire | ||
| Died | 23 December 1953 (aged 54) Moscow, Russian SFSR, Soviet Union | ||
| Cause of death | Execution by shooting | ||
| Citizenship | Soviet | ||
| Political party | Communist Party of the Soviet Union (1917–1953) | ||
| Spouse(s) | Nina Gegechkori | ||
| Parents |
| ||
| Awards | Hero of Socialist Labour | ||
| Signature |  | ||
| Military service | |||
| Rank | Marshal of the Soviet Union | ||
| Wars | World War II | ||
Beria was the longest-lived and most influential of Stalin's secret police chiefs, wielding his most substantial influence during and after World War II. Following the Soviet invasion of Poland in 1939, he was responsible for organizing purges such as the Katyn massacre of 22,000 Polish officers and officials.[1] Beria would later also orchestrate the forced upheaval of minorities from the Caucasus as head of NKVD, an act that was declared as genocidal by various scholars and in 2004 as concerning Chechens by the European parliament.[2][3][4][5][6] He simultaneously administered vast sections of the Soviet state, and acted as the de facto Marshal of the Soviet Union in command of NKVD field units responsible for barrier troops and Soviet partisan intelligence and sabotage operations on the Eastern Front during World War II. Beria administered the expansion of the Gulag labour camps, and was primarily responsible for overseeing the secret detention facilities for scientists and engineers known as sharashkas.
After the war, he organised the communist takeover of the state institutions in central and eastern Europe. Beria's ruthlessness in his duties and skill at producing results culminated in his success in overseeing the Soviet atomic bomb project. Stalin gave it absolute priority, and the project was completed in under five years.[7]
After Stalin's death in March 1953, Beria became First Deputy Chairman of the Council of Ministers and head of the Ministry of Internal Affairs. In this dual capacity, he formed a troika with Georgy Malenkov and Vyacheslav Molotov that briefly led the country in Stalin's place. A coup d'état by Nikita Khrushchev, with help from Marshal of the Soviet Union Georgy Zhukov, in June 1953 removed Beria from power. After being arrested, he was tried for treason and other offenses, sentenced to death, and executed on 23 December 1953. During his trial, and after his death, numerous allegations arose of Beria being a serial sexual predator and serial killer.
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