Russian historian Dmitriev given jail time for ‘violent acts of a sexual nature’ against adopted daughter

Historian Yury Dmitriev has been handed a prison sentence for sexually abusing his daughter, an orphan he adopted. Dmitriev’s supporters believe the charges are politically motivated, related to his work on Stalin’s Great Terror.

The prosecutor’s office had requested 15 years in a strict penal colony, but the presiding judge gave Dmitriev three and a half years. Due to time served, this means he will likely be released in November. 

In 2016, Dmitriev was arrested after photographs of his daughter were found on his computer. The historian was accused of making child pornography, but was acquitted by a Petrozavodsk court in 2018. He was also found not guilty of another charge – illegal possession of parts of weapons. 

A few months later, his acquittal was canceled and he was re-arrested, with an extra indictment – “violent acts of a sexual nature against a minor.” Based on his daughter’s testimony, Dmitriev was accused repeatedly touching her genitals when she was eight years old. The historian claimed that he was just checking to see if she had wet herself, as the child was often involuntarily doing so. A diagnosis of enuresis was confirmed by a hospital.

According to his supporters, the case against Dmitriev is politically motivated and has been fabricated due to his discovery of Great Terror execution sites in northwestern Russia.

Conducted by Soviet leader Joseph Stalin in the 1930s, the Great Terror (or ‘Great Purge’) was a repression campaign against political enemies and ethnic minorities, in which hundreds of thousands of people were killed. In his career as a historian, Dmitriev searched for massacre locations, and in the 1990s, famously helped discover Sandarmokh, where over 6,000 people are buried in communal pits. 

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