essential reading (charges, defence, timeline, etc)
photo Darya Poryadinova, SOTA TV
This is where Yury DMITRIEV has been held, apart from outings to the courthouse, since June 2018.
During his first trial the measure of restraint was eased during the last six months from custody at Detention Centre 1 to an agreement not to leave Petrozavodsk. If he is convicted next week and the prosecution gets its way it will be a long while before DMITRIEV is a free man again.
When hearings resume on 13 December the defence (represented by Victor Anufriev and Roman Masalyov) will make its closing statement. Yury Dmitriev will then address the court and also pronounce his Last Words at this trial. Word from Moscow is that the trial may finish as early as Tuesday 14 December.
Dmitriev as a free man (March 2018)
Veteran photo-reporter Victoria Ivleva who took this picture is herself currently detained.
Several hearings in Yury DMITRIEV’s third trial at the Petrozavodsk City Court are due to take place this week and next: today, tomorrow and Friday, and on Monday, 6 December.
What happens today (writes Natalia Dyomina on Facebook) promises to be unpredictable. DMITRIEV’s principal defence attorney of the past five years Victor Anufriev has been ill [last year he missed important hearings while self-isolating due to Covid-19] and Dmitriev signed an agreement with a second attorney from Petrozavodsk. At the last court hearing, however, the substitute lawyer could not be present: he was due to appear at another trial, agreed much earlier, some way from the Karelian capital.
Victor Anufriev, February 2021
Soon Judge Khomyakova was up to her old tricks. Dissatisfied with these “delays” she herself appointed an attorney, giving him or her (the identity of the new lawyer is unknown) only a few days to get acquainted with no less than 25 substantial case files from the two earlier trials.
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Anna Akhmatova wrote Requiem, from which this famous couplet is taken, over almost thirty years (1935-1961). In Russia the poem could not be published in full until 1987.
Nikolai Gumilyov, Anna Akhmatova and their son Lev (1915)
Her first husband, fellow poet Nikolai Gumilyov, was shot on trumped-up charges in 1921 [47-01]. Their son Lev was twice arrested and sent to the camps, during the Great Terror and again in 1949. Her third husband Nikolai Punin died in August 1953 [11-23], a few months after Stalin, in the hospital of a labour camp complex in northwest Russia.
As she was well aware, Akhmatova was giving voice to millions who suffered a similar ordeal. When she died in 1966 Khrushchev’s brief and ambivalent “Thaw” had come to an end. For the next twenty years there would be silence about the crimes of the 1920s-1950s; any discovered remains were hastily reburied or moved elsewhere [42-08]. Not until the late 1980s did the rehabilitation of the “victims of political repression” under Stalin (and Lenin) resume.
The Dmitriev Affair 