The Thursday and Friday hearings in Dmitriev’s third trial in Petrozavodsk have been postponed while the Supreme Court in Moscow considers his lawyer’s challenge, reports Nataliya Dyomina. On 19 October Victor Anufriev’s objection to the Court’s decision not to hear his appeal was registered on the Supreme Court website.
Trial
about arrest, investigation and trial – entire process
Lawyer challenges decision not to examine appeal
Yury DMITRIEV’s lawyer Victor Anufriev has written to the chairman of the Supreme Court, Vyacheslav Lebedev, challenging the decision taken on 12 October not to examine the appeal against his client’s sentence to 13 years imprisonment.
On 4 October Judge Sergei Abramov of the Panel for Criminal Cases was assigned the 20 case files covering Dmitriev’s first and second trials and the appeal drawn up by Anufriev against the 29 September 2020 ruling of the Karelian High Court. “… having studied the cassation appeal,” the Supreme Court press service stated a week later, “the judge saw no grounds for agreeing with the arguments put forward in the appeal”. It would not be presented, therefore, for consideration by the full panel of judges.
After a cursory examination of only four working days this was an inadequate response, commentators noted, to the volume of evidence accumulated at the two trials and the thoroughly documented appeal submitted in June.
Sandarmokh, Restoring the Names
For six hours on Thursday, 5 August 2021, volunteers read out the names of those shot at Sandarmokh, Karelia’s largest killing field, during the Great Terror in 1937 to 1938.
In court again, July 2021
Photo posted on Facebook by Katerina Klodt, Dmitriev’s grown daughter, on Tuesday 21 July
Remembrance (4), “No smoke without fire?”
The OGPU investigation of the Pokrovsky brothers in summer 1932 helps us put faces to four names. Ivan was executed in Moscow, one death in the maelstrom unleashed by the forced industrialisation of the USSR and the dekulakisation of the countryside. Alexander was shot four years later at Sandarmokh, a victim of the Great Terror.
Ivan’s last resting place was uncovered in the early 1990s by researchers from Memorial working in the Central Archives of the FSB (post-Soviet successor of the Cheka, OGPU, NKVD and KGB). In 1994, a memorial was erected by the entrance to the Vagankovskoe cemetery. It reads: “To the victims of political repression, 1927-1937. May they never be forgotten!”
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