17 | November | 2021 | The Dmitriev Affair

In a letter (received yesterday by Nataliya Dyomina) from the Petrozavodsk detention centre where he has spent most of the last five years, Yury DMITRIEV wrote in support of Memorial:

“I know the people who are presently in charge of Memorial and can confidently say that Memorial will go on working whatever the Supreme Court decides. The truth that Memorial has been unearthing, from citizens of Russia and in other countries is in great demand. People have a right to know the true history of their nation and not that which is being broadcast on Russian Television.

“Our work is needed, so we’ll go on working. The experience of working in difficult conditions has been well studied and it can also be applied today.”

On 23 June 1992 Russian President Boris Yeltsin issued edict no 658, declassifying legislative and other acts that “served as the basis for mass repressive measures and violations of human rights”. This clearly applied to KGB [NKVD] archives and the Great Terror of 1937-1938. Yet as Sergei Krivenko and Sergei Prudovsky of Memorial noted in April this year [end note] that process has stretched out over thirty years and today is still not completed. The edict specified that it should be finished within three months …

Much has been said and written about the failure to make a clean break with the past in post-1991 Russia, through lustration and an international trial to expose the crimes of the Communist regime – the veteran dissident Vladimir Bukovsky devoted an entire book to the subject. Instead, researchers, activists and relatives of the victims in Russia (and in much of the rest of the former Soviet Union) have spent years gathering evidence of those “crimes against humanity”.

Books of Remembrance have been compiled and published in 72 of Russia’s 83 regions; monuments have been erected at several hundred burial grounds, graveyards and commemorative sites across the country; and ceremonies are held each year to remember the victims.

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