Russia increases jail sentence for Gulag historian

MOSCOW, Dec 27, 2021 (AFP) – A Russian court on Monday increased to 15 years the jail sentence of a prominent Gulag historian who supporters say is being targeted for exposing horrors from the Soviet era.

In 2020, Yury Dmitriyev was sentenced to 13 years in prison on a controversial child sex charge in north-western Russia. In December, prosecutors requested that his sentence be extended by two years.

Dmitriyev, 65, is also the local head of the rights group Memorial in the region of Karelia. The organisation, which has chronicled Stalin-era purges and contemporary political persecutions, says it may be shut down by Russian courts this week.

On Monday, a court in the north-western city of Petrozavodsk granted the prosecutor’s request to extend the historian’s sentence.

“Fifteen years to Yury Dmitriyev,” Memorial said on Twitter.

Anatoly Razumov, a historian who studied Soviet-era repression, said the Gulag researcher was a victim of injustice, adding he was convinced Dmitriyev would be rehabilitated one day.

“I am ashamed of what’s happening,” Razumov told AFP.

Asked to comment, President Vladimir Putin’s spokesman, Dmitry Peskov, said the court ruling was not part of the Kremlin’s agenda.

Dmitriyev spent decades locating and exhuming mass graves of people killed under Joseph Stalin and set up a memorial to them in Russia’s northwest.

Over the past few years, he has faced a series of trials on a number of charges, including sexually abusing his adopted daughter. He has pleaded not guilty.

He was arrested in 2016 and charged with child pornography over several nude photos of his adopted daughter that he said he took to monitor her growth. A court acquitted him in 2018.

In a stunning turnaround, the not-guilty verdict was later overturned by a higher court and Dmitriyev was put back on trial, accused of forced sexual acts involving a child.

He was sentenced to three and a half years in jail in July 2020, most of which he had already spent in pre-trial detention.

Prosecutors appealed against the verdict, asking for a harsher sentence.

As a result, the supreme court in Karelia in September 2020 ordered him to a high-security penal colony for 13 years.

Memorial has declared Dmitriyev a political prisoner and says “his activity in preserving the memory of political repressions” is the real reason for his prosecution.

On Tuesday, Russia’s top court will consider a request to shut down Memorial International, the group’s central structure, over breaching its designation as a “foreign agent.”

In a separate case, prosecutors are demanding that a court in Moscow close Memorial’s Human Rights Centre, accusing it of condoning “terrorism and extremism” in addition to breaches of the “foreign agent” legislation.

A new hearing, in that case, is set for Wednesday.

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