Historical revisionism, under Putin, knows no bounds. Yuri Dmitriev, a tenacious researcher and activist who campaigned to create a memorial to the victims of Stalinist terror in Karelia, a province in Russia’s far northwest, has just been condemned by a court in Karelia to thirteen years in a prison camp. For this man of sixty-four, this is practically a death sentence. Dmitriev’s father had revealed to him that his own father, Yuri’s grandfather, had been shot by Stalin’s secret police in 1938; and Yuri found his vocation as a researcher—in archives, but also in the cemetery-forests of Karelia. “I wanted to find out about the fate of those people,” Dmitriev told me.
Source : Yuri Dmitriev: Historian of Stalin’s Gulag, Victim of Putin’s Repression
