The Russian prosecution demanded Tuesday 15 years of detention against the historian Iouri Dmitriev, known for his research on the missing people during the Stalinist terror and accused of child pornography, said his lawyer. Viktor Anoufriev confirmed these requisitions announced by the Russian press agencies, adding that the 64-year-old historian would be entitled to a final speech tomorrow before the end of his trial.
"[Iouri Dmitriev] is doing admirably," he added, as the case has been going on for several years. This historian, who headed the antenna of the Memorial organization - co-founded by Andreï Sakharov - in Karelia, a Russian region bordering Finland, was arrested in December 2016 and accused of having produced "pornographic" images of his adopted daughter . He rejects all the accusations and always assured to have taken these photographs for "medical purposes" to follow the evolution of the health of the little girl, sick since her adoption.
An acquittal canceled in 2018
Iouri Dmitriev was acquitted in April 2018 when the prosecution required nine years of camp, but this acquittal was quashed two months later by the Supreme Court of Karelia. He had been detained again in late June 2018.
For almost 30 years, Iouri Dmitriev has listed 40,000 names of people executed and deported to Karelia during the Stalinist terror. He is also behind the discovery of one of the largest mass graves in the region, at Sandarmokh, where the remains of 7,000 to 9,000 people executed during the Stalin era were found. His supporters see in this affair a means of intimidating and silencing this historian, whose discoveries do not fit in with the official Russian discourse on the rehabilitation of the Soviet era.
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