In response to yesterday’s decision at the Supreme Court not to overturn the December 2021 ruling, animation artists and cartoonists in Russia have made a series of short films in support of the organisation.
You can watch the films on Vimeo
The appeal submitted against the December 2021 ruling by Russia’s Supreme Court was turned down on Monday morning, 28 February 2022, in Moscow. A panel of judges heard the arguments of Memorial’s lawyers supported and led by the famous defence attorney Genry Reznik against the organisation’s closure.
First, the Memorial defence team petitioned for the hearing to be postponed, in view of the invocation of Rule 39 by the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg. The petition was rejected.
Defence lawyers Maria Eismont, Anastasia Garina, Natalya Morozova, Natalia Sekretaryova and, finally, Genry Reznik then argued that the punishment of closure after over 30 years of existence was quite disproportionate to the poorly-defined offence of not indicating the organisation’s “foreign agent” status on all its output.
Further disputes concerned the status of Memorial as an international organisation with branches in other countries, the shifting definition of its supposed offences and, quoting the prosecutor’s words from the final hearing in December, the defence suggested that the true reason for closing Memorial was that in recording and publicising the crimes of the Soviet era the organisation had portrayed the USSR as a “terrorist State”.
Memorial chairman Jan Raczynski and the organisation’s executive director Yelena Zhemkova also spoke at the hearing. Only 11 people were admitted to the courtroom.
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Outside the courthouse old and young supporters of Memorial and its activities spoke of their admiration for an organisation that all agreed was very much needed in Russia.
Some, including Memorial board member Oleg Orlov, repeated words spoken earlier (for example in a defiant letter from Yury DMITRIEV in prison), that Memorial and those involved in its activities would find ways to continue their work whatever the courts decided.
Sergei Bykovsky today posted on Facebook a photo of Yury DMITRIEV in 2005 at Mount Sekirna on the Great Solovetsky Island. Dmitriev’s little foster daughter Natasha was christened on that trip.
That year Yury DMITRIEV received the new Golden Pen of Russia award for his publications about the building of the White Sea Canal in the early 1930s and the Karelian killing fields at Krasny Bor and Sandarmokh which he helped to discover where thousands were shot and secretly buried during the Great Terror.
by Crew of the Northabout yacht and other Irish “Grandfathers for Human Rights“
On Thursday, 10 February 2022, the crew of the Northabout yacht, which sailed through the White Sea Canal in 2012 and met Yury DMITRIEV, held a silent protest against his unjust and heavy sentence outside the Russian Embassy in Dublin.
Crew members travelled with DMITRIEV to Sandarmokh and learned of his work.
Yury DMITRIEV with Dr Michael Brogan (left) and Colm Brogan, 2012
Afloat: Ireland’s sailing, boating & maritime magazine,
10 February 2022
This portrait of Yury DMITRIEV was recently produced by the artist Boris Zhutovsky.
DMITRIEV has been in custody since December 2016, with only a brief period of liberty from January to June 2018 when he was allowed to live at home but not to leave Petrozavodsk.
The portrait was evidently created from photos of the researcher since DMITRIEV was little known in the rest of Russia before his first trial from June 2017 to April 2018.
The Dmitriev Affair 