Michael Baker reviews "The Dmitriev Affair" (documentary film, 2023, dir. Jessica Gorter).
Several key legal cases have come to define the last few years in Russia. Take Yulia Tsvetkova, the young artist who was arrested for posting body-positive sticker designs on a social media page. Or the four editors of the student journal DOXA, put under a year’s house arrest for posting a video supporting students’ right to protest in the aftermath of Alexey Navalny’s arrest. Not to mention Navalny himself: dead after three years of prison for "extremism" (surviving an assassination attempt).
These arrests were but a handful among tens of thousands, but each became totemic in view of their broad support among the general population. The Russian state had submitted these people to senseless cruelty for the crimes of honourable work and activism.
Yury Dmitriev beat them all to it. In mid-2016, the filmmaker Jessica Gorter and her team met Dmitriev while working on another film, about the reception and memory of Stalin in modern Russia (The Red Soul, released in 2017). After talking to him, Gorter sketched out a plan for a new documentary focused solely on Dmitriev himself.
He was first arrested less than six months later. Gorter’s new film, The Dmitriev Affair, traces the events of the intervening seven years of court cases, public vilification and eventual imprisonment. As Dmitriev has done himself, Gorter draws constant parallel between his suffering at the hands of the Putinist state and the true reason for his imprisonment: his lifetime of work researching and remembering those who died under Stalinism. In 2018, Dmitriev claimed that at his age, five years in a Russian penal colony would be as good as a life sentence. At time of writing, he is two years into a fifteen-year sentence in a former GULAG site in Mordovia.
Dmitriev and Memorial
The man’s work speaks for itself. Dmitriev was central to establishing and running the Karelia branch of Memorial, an organisation dedicated to archiving, researching and publishing evidence of Soviet state repression over the course of the twentieth century. Karelia was home to a number of the Soviet Union’s most notorious mass graves; it is no exaggeration to say that their notoriety is due, in large part, to Dmitriev, who discovered the first site of many in 1996.
Camcorder footage of the young Yury digging up and brushing dirt from a skull, revealing a bullet hole in the back of the head, cuts to crowds surrounding a monument in Sandarmokh forest a couple of years later. Some of the documentary’s most heartbreaking footage comes from these scenes, hearing from families of some of the estimated six thousand people killed at Sandarmokh. Two elderly women hold one another for support and, both weeping, tell the story of their father’s disappearance, of having to leave home at the age of fifteen, finding neither answers nor closure for the best part of sixty years. “This state aims to wipe out the individual as if he never existed,” says Dmitriev to the camera. “The people want to remember each and every one.”
After tramping through forests to locate graves directly, much of the remaining work consisted of cross-referencing names and bodies in KGB archives, then publishing and publicising findings through Memorial, often in the form of books. To name just one of countless discoveries: since February 2022 there has been renewed discussion of the Ukrainian “Executed Renaissance”, an entire generation of writers, composers, artists, scholars and translators killed for their proud Ukrainian nationalism in the 1920s and 1930s. For decades, it was believed that many of this generation were taken away on a single boat, which was presumed to have drowned (or been drowned) at sea due to no extant record of its arrival. Through careful archival work and the analysis of discovered bodies, Dmitriev identified the remains of several of the Executed Renaissance in the graves of Sandarmokh.
State retaliation
A key element of Putin’s leadership has been the cementing and crystallisation of a national mythos for the Russian Federation, often involving "Russian" victory in the Second World War. As a result, Joseph Stalin has undergone something of a rehabilitation: school textbooks have been judiciously edited, popular history rewritten to diminish Stalinist crimes. At the opening of the Wall of Sorrow in Moscow in October 2017, Putin managed to give an entire speech on the topic of Soviet repression without ever mentioning Stalin’s name.
This shift put Memorial in a particularly vulnerable position. The documentary shows footage from a news broadcast emphasising the organisation’s foreign connections, including receiving some funding from the Polish government. This was an early example of what is now a very recognisable trend: almost every independent news source or organisation in the country, not to mention hundreds of individuals, have now been designated "foreign agents" in announcements updated every Friday night. Foreign espionage, evidently, is the only rational explanation for opposing Putin’s leadership. In 2015, Memorial was the first major organisation to earn this particular badge of honour.
Dmitriev, along with the rest of Memorial, has not shied away from the political implications of his work. He has made loud and frequent comparisons between Putin’s repression and Stalin’s; he gave an immediate and full-throated denouncement of the annexation of Crimea in 2014; and he has never hesitated to call out state violence and falsification, regardless of the consequences he has faced.
His first arrest was not his first run-in with the state. Earlier in 2016, new data laws were introduced that meant no archival data on GULAG victims could be accessed without the written permission of the individual concerned, or their relatives. Dmitriev points out the absurdity: he was in the middle of preparing a database of 126,000 people who faced "dekulakisation" during the period of collectivisation, transported to the penal facilities of Karelia from right across the Soviet Union. How does one locate and identify 126,000 families to ask for written permission? The project was stalled.
Arrest and charges
In late November 2016, as administrative action against Memorial ramped up, Dmitriev was asked to attend a police station for questioning. The day before, someone had entered his flat and accessed his computer while he was out, and then an anonymous tip to the police alleged that "Dmitriev has been taking nude photos of his daughter Natasha". He was arrested the following day, and his flat searched (this time legally).
His daughter was 9 at the time. She was adopted (as was Dmitriev himself) after he and his second wife discovered they were unable to have children. Dmitriev claims that the pictures were taken for telemedicine appointments, following the advice of local health practitioners. Natasha was consistently underweight, and growing more slowly than expected throughout her childhood. Dmitriev took photos of her to send to a doctor, who could then refer her to the correct specialist.
These facts became the central motor for the ensuing court case, as well as the one that followed. The prosecution leaked the photos of Natasha to the press, and every major (state-owned) news channel in Russia broadcast them as "proof" of the depraved people that ran institutions like Memorial, the kind of people who would dare to bring shame on Russia’s national history.
In 2018, Dmitriev’s first verdict was delivered: three different court-appointed officials confirmed that the photographs were in no manner pornographic; that a psychological examination of Dmitriev revealed no "perverse sexual inclinations"; and that the evidence provided gave no grounds for punishment. He was found not guilty on those charges, though he did receive a 2.5-year sentence for possession of firearm parts (an old rifle found upon searching his apartment).
As director Jessica Gorter said herself in a Q&A after the screening, “each person must make up their own mind about the charges”. But in five years of working with Dmitriev, including during the period when Natasha lived with him, she saw nothing that aroused any suspicion regarding his relationship with her, nor with his grandchildren (the children of his eldest daughter Katya) that he looked after on a daily basis, nor any of the hundreds of school students he worked with as part of his work with Memorial (some of whom have since put out a joint petition calling for his release).
Dmitriev’s final statement to the court in 2020 painstakingly details his version of events: as far as this reader is concerned, it reads like a father who was worried about his daughter’s health, nothing more.
Dmitriev’s friends and family have stayed resolutely behind him. His eldest daughter Katya delivered him food and other provisions, handled media requests, and phoned him regularly. When he was allowed home after the first trial, he was visited by Memorial colleagues, friends and family, interviewers from every independent media outlet in the country, and even a couple of celebrities – the documentary shows the historian reflecting on the horrors of Stalinism with Dmitry Bykov, perhaps Russia’s most famous living writer.
Up until this point, Dmitriev had stayed in regular contact with his adopted daughter Natasha, who had been returned to the maternal grandmother that first gave her up for adoption. The film shows Dmitriev presenting, via Zoom, a letter from Natasha saying how much she missed him, and that she hoped they would let him go soon. Natasha also stayed in regular contact with the rest of Dmitriev’s (in practice, her own) family. On the day of Dmitriev’s acquittal, she disappeared, all communications were ceased. No texts were answered, no calls returned, no letters received.
The individual repression against Dmitriev was part of a targeted campaign against Memorial more broadly. The government had stopped all new digging and research on the Sandarmokh mass graves just five years after their discovery. Now, as if to make a point, not Memorial but a nationalist "military history research group" was granted access to the site, and encouraged to dig up new findings.
The historical narrative, however, had suddenly taken quite a shift. Rather than these new bodies being additions to the thousands murdered by Stalin and his hangmen in the 1930s, they were now Russian PoWs, held and executed in concentration camps by the Finnish army during the height of WWII. The evidence for this was, to put it lightly, scant. The Finnish government encouraged people to look at their national archives, which list everyone known to be killed by the Finnish army in WWII.
Individuals aware of the Dmitriev trial, or with personal connections to the victims of Stalinist repression, tried to query the new research: all to no avail. The documentary shows footage of a guard ordering inquisitive guests to stop asking him questions, before cutting to older footage from the 1990s, still in Sandarmokh forest. An old man has come in search of his older sister, a student at Moscow State University who went missing in the 1930s. “She was unlucky enough to have learned English,” he tells the camera. “I remember her boasting to me that she could read Walter Scott in the original”. The man refers to the muddy ground beneath him as “shameful earth”. One can only hope that some of that shame is felt by those now digging up that earth, rewriting history for the needs of a murderous, nationalist government.
Retrial
Just before the deadline closed for appeals, a veritable mountain of new evidence was added by the prosecution, and the judge reopened Dmitriev’s case for review. The charges had now been escalated: he was not just accused of having pornographic images, but committing acts of a sexual nature against the same daughter. The central piece of new evidence was an interview conducted by an investigator with Natasha herself. Multiple experts in witness testimony and psychology have analysed the interview and concluded that Natasha shows clear signs of duress, while not displaying any of the expected markers for an individual recounting childhood trauma. It should be noted that testimony under duress is not an uncommon feature of the modern Russian judicial system (though Russia is, of course, far from alone in this).
Dmitriev himself was arrested while trying to leave Petrozavodsk against a court order. Few were in doubt about why his case had been reopened, and few were surprised by the outcome. Fifteen years of detention in a "strict regime" penal colony is, as the man himself has said, as good as a life sentence. It is insult to injury that this sentence for uncovering Stalinist massacre will be carried out in a former GULAG in Mordovia – over a thousand miles from Dmitriev’s home and family. He remains characteristically stoic. In an interview taken just before the historian’s court case began, Gorter asks him if he is afraid. “What’s there to fear?” he laughs. “One fears what they do not know, and all of my options have been explored. I simply have to bear my cross.”
Dmitriev received his final sentence on 27 December, 2021. On the 28th, the Russian Supreme Court ordered Memorial International to dissolve. A couple of days later, the court rejected the European Court of Human Rights’ instruction to halt the dissolution pending further discussion about the "foreign agent" law.
Putin’s activity on the world stage has always come in tandem with repression at home. It is no surprise, two years into the war in Ukraine, to hear that the Russian courts refused to cooperate with the ECHR at the end of 2021. With the gift of hindsight, it is hard not to view Dmitriev in his Mordovian penal colony as a canary pulled up from a mine.
Unlike his metaphorical equivalent, this canary is not yet dead. Dmitriev was able to hear news of his documentary being screened across Europe, and was happy to hear it was well received. §
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