Yury Dmitriev

It was then that he first encountered mass graves of those shot in the 1930s.

Dmitriev is known for his part in the discovery and investigation of two major burial sites, Sandarmokh and Krasny Bor, and their subsequent transformation into "informal" memorial complexes.

Yekaterina Klodt, Dmitriev's daughter by his first marriage, has described her father's determination to do as much as he possibly could to identify the victims buried in the anonymous and secret graves of the Stalin era.

"I often asked him why he continually sat at the computer, writing or copying something out," she told Gleb Yarovoi.

Dmitriev answered: "I do not know who I was in a past life, but I understand the meaning of my life now and I know that I must do this."

As she grew older Yekaterina would frequently tell him to take a break—how much longer would he go on with these lists?

"I can't stop," Dmitriev replied, "I must finish the book, people are waiting for it."

Dmitriev's life consisted, for year after year, of winters spent in the archives followed by summers scouring the forested areas around particular cities and towns with Witch (Vedma), his Alsatian, hunting for possible burial sites.

The thousands executed over 14 months from October 1937 to December 1938 fall into three broad groups.

Many were from Karelia, a total of 2,344 free inhabitants of the republic.

A smaller number (624) were forced "settlers" (i.e. peasants exiled to the North after the collectivisation of agriculture).

A great many of those shot (1,988) were already prisoners of the Belbaltlag (White Sea Canal) camp system.

A smaller group of 1,111 prisoners were brought there from the Solovki island prison.

Together they made up almost half of those shot during the Great Terror in Karelia.

"Alongside hard-working peasants, fishermen and hunters from nearby villages," wrote Yury Dmitriev wrote:[15] "there were writers and poets, scientists and scholars, military leaders, doctors, teachers, engineers, clergy of all confessions and statesmen who found their final resting place here."

Yury Alexeyevich Dmitriev (Юрий Алексеевич Дмитриев; born 28 January 1956, Petrozavodsk) is a local historian and activist in Karelia (Northwest Russia).

In 1957 he was adopted by a childless army officer and his wife; he found out he was not their child at the age of 14.

His father was posted to East Germany, and Yury spent part of his childhood in Dresden.

He began but did not finish a course at the Northwest Health Department of the Leningrad Medical College.

He has worked continually since the late 1980s to compile "Books of Remembrance" for Karelia, listing all the names of those executed there.

During the Gorbachev years, Dmitriev was a member of the Karelian People's Front, and served between 1988 and 1991 as an aide to USSR People's Deputy Mikhail Zenko.

Since the early 1990s, he has worked to locate the execution sites of Stalin's Great Terror in Karelia and, through work in the archives, to identify as many as possible of the buried victims they contain.

At first Dmitriev was junior partner to Ivan Chukhin (ru: Чухин, Иван Иванович), a deputy of the RSFSR Supreme Soviet and State Duma (1990-1995), and the first chairman of the Memorial Society in Karelia.

Chukhin felt compelled to engage in the work because his own father had been involved in acts of repression under Stalin.

When Chukhin, a retired police officer, was killed in a car accident in May 1997 Dmitriev carried on alone.

On 1 July 1997, with members of St Petersburg Memorial, Dmitriev located a massive killing field, 12 kilometres from Medvezhyegorsk, that subsequently acquired the name of Sandarmokh; some weeks later, guided by local inhabitants, he confirmed the identification of the Krasny Bor execution site, 20 km from Petrozavodsk.

As a result of Dmitriev's activities, he was appointed secretary of the Petrozavodsk Commission for Restoring the Rights of Rehabilitated Victims of Political Repression and in 2002 became (and remains) a member of the organisation of the same name at the republican level, covering all of Karelia.

In 2003, in addition to his Books of Remembrance, Dmitriev also published a collection of documents about the construction of the White Sea-Baltic Canal and the fate of the numerous prisoners and "special settlers" engaged in its construction.

On 13 December 2016 Dmitriev was arrested and charged with making pornographic images of his foster daughter, Natasha, who was 11 at the time.

From the outset Dmitriev's colleagues declared the charges to be baseless and motivated by a determination to discredit the historian and his work.

The closed trial attracted national and international attention and criticism.

On 26 December 2017, a second assessment by a court-appointed body of the photographs of his foster daughter concluded that they contained no element of pornography and had been taken, as the accused insisted, to monitor the health of a sickly child.

On 5 April 2018, Dmitriev was acquitted of all but one minor offence.

Within two months he was arrested and soon put on trial again.

Given a short sentence at the end of his second trial in July 2020, the verdict was overruled by the High Court of Karelia and the charges returned for an unprecedented third judicial examination.

Dmitriev and his lawyer Victor Anufriev battled through the courts in Petrozavodsk, St Petersburg and Moscow to have their appeal against the verdict and sentence heard.

In October 2021 the case finally reached the Supreme Court of the Russian Federation.

But on December 27 his sentence was increased to 15 years.

Dmitriev is a Russian Orthodox Christian.

Yury Dmitriev spent his first year in a Soviet orphanage.