Remembrance (3): Four brothers

13 May 202118 August 2025 / editors (JC)

Alexander Pokrovsky and his three brothers were born in a village in what today is Russia's Oryol Region. By the early 1930s, they had moved to Moscow. Ivan (1904-1933), Simeon (b. 1911), and Sergei (b. 1915) There in summer 1932 the OGPU (predecessor of the NKVD) arrested them and by October that year all four … Continue reading Remembrance (3): Four brothers

Remembrance (2): Shot at Sandarmokh

13 May 202113 May 2021 / editors (JC)

Alexander Pokrovsky, 1912-1937 "Remembrance (1)" recalled the efforts of volunteers like Yury DMITRIEV over the past quarter century, thanks to which the names and reputations of some three million victims of the Soviet regime have been restored. It would be natural to proceed from the discovery of the killing field at Sandarmokh in 1997 to … Continue reading Remembrance (2): Shot at Sandarmokh

Remembrance (1): Lists and Names

9 May 202113 May 2021 / editors (JC)

Faced by the grim and relentless persecution of Yury DMITRIEV over the last four years, it’s easy to lose sight of the achievements of the past quarter century, those countless acts of remembrance across Russia and former Soviet states that make any simple return to the past unthinkable. Yury Dmitriev resumes work, 2018 During the … Continue reading Remembrance (1): Lists and Names

A second attempt to deny Dmitriev a proper defence

23 April 202123 April 2021 / editors (JC)

Halya Coynash After two acquittals and a sentence much shorter than that demanded, new measures were taken in Russia to secure a long sentence against world-renowned historian of the Soviet Terror, Yury DMITRIEV. One, the appeal hearing last September at the Karelian High Court came before Alla Rats, a judge whose bias had already been … Continue reading A second attempt to deny Dmitriev a proper defence

A glimpse: 2 April 2021

6 April 20216 April 2021 / editors (JC)

What an awful picture,” writes Alexander Recoubratsky. “An elderly man in handcuffs, surrounded by guards. This is no villain but the historian Yury Dmitriev who found the burial places of Stalin’s victims in Karelia as he is led to yet another, dishonourable trial. He has already spent almost five years in prison.” (Photo, Natalia Dyomina.)