Russia increases jail sentence for Gulag historian

MOSCOW: A Russian court on Monday increased to 15 years the jail sentence of a prominent Gulag historian who supporters say is being targeted for exposing horrors from the Soviet era.

In 2020, Yury Dmitriyev was sentenced to 13 years in prison on a controversial child sex charge in north-western Russia. In December, prosecutors requested that his sentence be extended by two years.

Dmitriyev, 65, is also the local head of rights group Memorial in the region of Karelia. The organisation, which has chronicled Stalin-era purges and contemporary political persecutions, says it may be shut down by Russian courts this week.

On Monday, a court in the north-western city of Petrozavodsk granted the prosecutors’ request to extend the historian’s sentence. "Fifteen years to Yury Dmitriyev," Memorial said on Twitter. Anatoly Razumov, a historian who studied Soviet-era repression, said the Gulag researcher was a victim of injustice, adding he was convinced Dmitriyev would be rehabilitated one day.

"I am ashamed of what’s happening," Razumov told AFP. Asked to comment, President Vladimir Putin’s spokesman, Dmitry Peskov, said the court ruling was not part of the Kremlin’s agenda. Dmitriyev spent decades locating and exhuming mass graves of people killed under Joseph Stalin and set up a memorial to them in Russia’s northwest.