Kremlin Campaign against Yury Dmitriyev ‘an Unbridled Dance of Evil,’ Khmelnitskaya Says

Paul Goble

            Staunton, September 30 – The Russian government’s campaign against Yury Dmitriyev, a Karelian investigator who has worked to identify the victims of Stalin’s great terror came to a head this week when his sentence was increased from 3.5 years in prison to 13 years, likely life imprisonment for a man of his advanced age, Yekaterina Khmelnitskaya says.

            Dmitriyev has thus become, the Sakharov Center psychotherapist says, the victim of repressions which took place 80 years ago that the current regime is trying to cover up and get people to forget. To that end, the powers that be have engaged in “an unbridled dance of evil” (vtimes.io/news/dmitriev).

            The man who grew up in an orphanage has had his family destroyed and the life and psyche of his daughter has been destroyed by a legal system that has completely discredited itself because its own experts disowned the charges the political authorities brought against him. Even though Russian courts rarely bring back findings of innocence, they did so twice in his case.

            But the authorities continued to pursue a man whose only crime was to want to bring to public notice the crimes that had been visited upon the people in his republic and elsewhere during Stalin’s times, crimes that the current Russian government cannot bear that anyone be honest about.

            In June, a judge in Dmitriyev’s case handed down the minimum sentence. The accused should have been found innocent and let go, but his action gives some hope, Khmelnitskaya says, because it is possible that “we now are observing the passive resistance of simple judges who do not want to be tools of the authorities and aren’t ready to approve absurd cases.

            But the political authorities could not stand that possibility and pursued Dmitriyev to a higher court to ensure that he would be put away probably forever so that they could silence him in the way they have silenced so many others. And this week, they got their way, horrifying Russians who care about their country and about the truth.

            Of course, this decision isn’t the end of Dmitriyev’s case, legally or politically. Memorial has already announced plans to appeal the case up to the European Court for Human Rights. “There victory is guaranteed, although the question remains as to whether the case will be taken up in priority order,” the psychotherapist says.

            Tragically, Dmitriyev won’t be freed “neither in November nor in the coming months.” In the worst case, this appeal may not lead to a decision even within a year. And then Moscow may behave as it has done so often and ignore the findings of the European Court, Khmelnitskaya says.

            “The moral capital of this case and of Yury Dmitriyev personally is enormous and indisputable,” she says. Until the authorities went after him, he was known only among historians and specialists. Now, in yet another example of their counter-productive activities, he and the Sandarmokh killing fields are known to the entire world.

            In the coming months and years, Western leaders are likely to raise his case with Moscow officials much as they did for Soviet dissidents in the final decades of the USSR. And that will ensure that the Kremlin’s coverup will fail because ever more people will learn the truth about the past Russia’s current rulers see themselves as the heirs to.

            That is one of the political consequences of Moscow’s campaign against Dmitriyev. Another is this: the way the Kremlin has chosen to handle him is “a symptom of the transition of the regime to a qualitatively new phase, when propaganda despite its disgusting presence, no longer produces the necessary effect and gives way to an escalation of repression.”