The Russian authorities did everything they could to break him, but, at 70 years old, Yuri Dmitriev has not given in. Since May 2022, Dmitriev, a historian specialized in the Soviet-era gulags, has lived the life of a convict in the heart of Mordovia, a stark region located 500 kilometers east of Moscow, dotted with lakes, rivers and prison camps that date back to the Soviet era. Imprisoned since 2016, he is one of the oldest detainees in Russia’s prisons.
For 30 years, Dmitriev worked to locate mass graves that prove the Soviet regime’s Stalin-era crimes, horrors that the Kremlin is determined to cover up at all costs. The Russian Federal Security Service (FSB), one of the KGB’s successors, is suspected of having fabricated a child sexual abuse case against him, both to silence him and to intimidate anyone else who does not conform to the regime’s official historical narrative. According to human rights advocates, he was the victim of a “shameful trial,” and the charges against him were actually a case of kompromat, an old technique used by Russian state services to tarnish an opponent’s reputation.
His transfer to a strict penal colony in Mordovia represents the end of a long series of legal proceedings, which were orchestrated from his initial arrest on December 13, 2016, to the final verdict, issued on December 27, 2021. For months, the elderly man tirelessly attended hearing after hearing, standing, despite his hunch, resolute each time. Dmitriev was officially prosecuted for acts of sexual assault against his adopted daughter, initially granted a conditional release, and then acquitted in a first trial, which concluded on April 5, 2018, with the judges recognizing that the evidence against him was insufficient. Less than three months later, he was incarcerated again.
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