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This draft review appears on People & Nature with thanks to Historical Materialism journal, to which it has been submitted for publication, in an upcoming special issue on antisemitism and the fight against it.

Review by Simon Pirani of Antisemitism and the Russian Revolution, by Brendan McGeever (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019). 247 pages.

In January 1918, two months after Soviet power was established in Petrograd, one of the Red Guard units tasked with securing that power on the ruins of the Russian empire entered Hlukhiv, just over the Russian-Ukrainian border, north east of Kyiv. The unit was pushed out of Hlukhiv by the counter-revolutionary Ukrainian Baturinskii regiment within weeks – but soon joined forces with a group of Red partisans who had arrived from Kursk in southern Russia, and took the town back. A pogrom ensued. The Baturinskii regiment changed sides, claiming they had only resisted Soviet power because the “Yids” had paid them to. The Red Guards, thus reinforced, rampaged around the town proclaiming “eliminate the bourgeoisie and the Yids!”

How many of the town’s 4000 or so Jews fell victim is unknown, but it was in the hundreds. Newspaper reports and eyewitnessed accounts detailed how, for two and a half days, families were lined up and shot, their houses were ransacked and Jews were thrown from moving trains. One report described how 140 were buried in a mass grave. There is no doubt that Hlukhiv’s newly-established Soviet authorities were complicit. After two days of constant killing, they issued an order, “Red Guards! Enough blood!” – but then authorised looting. The synagogue was destroyed and the Torah ripped up. The head of the local soviet then demanded payment from the Jewish survivors.

The funeral of a Jewish pogrom victim, Ukraine 1919

“In the case of Hlukhiv”, writes Brendan McGeever, “Soviet power was secured by and through antisemitism” (page 48). Within days of the massacre, Vladimir Antonov-Ovseenko, who commanded the Red forces in Ukraine, ordered the recomposition of all Red units in Hlukhiv and surrounding areas; those who resisted were to be shot. McGeever judges that this was “likely” a response to the pogrom. He also shows that the Bolshevik centre in Moscow systematically avoided discussing “Red” pogroms publicly. While Jewish newspapers reported Hlukhiv accurately, larger-circulation Bolshevik newspapers failed to identify the “Red” perpetrators.

The Hlukhiv pogrom was a relatively minor precursor to the ferocious wave of terror unleashed against Ukrainian Jews during the chaotic, multi-sided military conflicts of 1919, in which 1-200,000 died. Those pogroms were the climax of a wave that began in 1917, the year of revolution, and amounted to “the most violent assault on Jewish life in pre-Holocaust modern history” (page 2).

There is no doubt – and McGeever reiterates it throughout his narrative – that the overwhelming majority of victims in Ukraine in 1919 were killed by “White” counter-revolutionary and Ukrainian nationalist forces, or in territory controlled by them. Neither is there any question that the policy of the Bolshevik leadership, rooted firmly in Russian socialist tradition, was what we might today call “zero tolerance”. McGeever traces how that policy played out in practice.

How is it that the Russian revolution, “a moment of emancipation and liberation”, was “for many Jews accompanied by racialised violence on an unprecedented scale” (page 2)? McGeever answers by focusing, on one hand, on the minority of pogroms committed by (at least ostensibly) “Red” forces, and on the other, on the strengths and weaknesses of Soviet institutions’ response. The strengths, he argues, emanated largely from initiatives by Jewish socialists, including many who remained outside the Bolshevik party in 1917 and joined during the civil war.

McGeever’s book is impeccably researched, thoughtfully argued, and – no small thing at a time when academic publishing more and more resembles a sausage machine – well organised and carefully edited. In this review I look at three key issues: the way that antisemitism overlapped with revolutionary politics (e.g. “eliminate the bourgeoisie and the Yids!”); the limits to the Bolshevik response; and the part played by Jewish socialists in combating antisemitism.

“Red” antisemitism

The revolution of February 1917 destroyed the tsarist empire and the legal apparatus of its dictatorship. More than 140 anti-Jewish statutes, which made Jews second-class citizens and confined them to the Pale of Settlement, were swept away, along with legal constraints on peasant farmers, on freedom of speech and assembly, and on much else. But the explosion of social mobilisation, which culminated later in 1917 in mass desertion from the army, land seizures by peasants and factory occupations, had its ugly sides, including a resurgence of antisemitism.

McGeever records that, from the start, the soviet movement issued appeals to combat antisemitism, and warned of its ability to “disguise itself under radical slogans” (page 26). And it needed to: speakers at a street corner rally in Petrograd urged crowds to “smash the Jews and the bourgeoisie!” (as the Red Guards would do in Hlukhiv a few months later) (page 24); people queuing to vote for the Constituent Assembly called on “whoever’s against the Yids” to vote Bolshevik (page 31); absurdly, as Alexander Kerensky left the Winter Palace, when his government fell, he read a slogan, painted on a wall, “down with the Jew Kerensky, long live Trotsky!” (page 32).

Before the revolution, the socialist opponents of tsarism had all resolutely opposed antisemitism, although they were divided as to how to respond to its manifestation among workers. (The Russian left parties seem to strike a contrast with those in France, Germany and Austria, where antisemitism ran rampant not just on the streets but among prominent politicians.[1]) In 1917, anti-Bolshevik socialists, and the Mensheviks in particular, accused the Bolsheviks of harbouring or tolerating antisemitism. McGeever urges that such accusation be treated with caution: under circumstances when the right-wing socialists were siding with the pro-war government, while the Bolsheviks were siding with the fast-radicalising masses, this was easy mud to throw. But the aspirations that underpinned the Bolsheviks’ seizure of power in October – peace, bread and land – can not be neatly fenced off from antisemitism either. “Revolution and antisemitism existed not only in conflict but in articulation as well”, McGeever insists (page 30).

Jews demonstrating in St Petersburg in March 1917.
The banners greet the “democratic republic” and “people’s socialism”. 
Via Sergey Fomin on Livejournal

This articulation persisted in the hellish conflict in Ukraine in 1919. McGeever makes a convincing case that, especially (but not only) among Ukrainian peasants, revolutionary hopes overlapped with murderous antisemitism. The peasants, overwhelmingly Ukrainian by nationality, saw towns – with high proportions of Russian and Jewish people, whether workers or middle class – as hostile and foreign. “[T]he ‘cityman’ represented a ruthless profiteer, an oppressor of the poor Ukrainian toiler” (page 91). This perception could turn into hostility to “communists”, who were “urban, non-Ukrainians who stood aloof from peasant life; they were ‘Russian oppressors’ and, above all, ‘speculating Jews’” (page 92). Such prejudices were on one hand fed on by the Whites, but on the other hand could fade into a grotesque combination of pro-soviet antisemitism. “Down with the Yids, down with this Moscow Communist government, long live Soviet power!”, shouted peasants in Poltava (page 92)

The violent culmination of this left antisemitism was the armed incursion led by Nikifor Grigor’ev, a peasant ataman who first allied with the Red army and then turned on it. McGeever quotes his Universal, a manifesto that called peasants to revolt (page 98):

In place of land and freedom they [the Bolsheviks] have subjected you to the commune, to the Cheka, and to the commissars, those gluttonous Muscovites from the land where they crucified Christ. […] Down with the political speculators! … Long live the power of the soviets of the people of Ukraine!

In early May 1919, Grigor’ev, having taken Odessa in the name of the Red Army, turned against the Bolsheviks. Over the next 18 days his units perpetrated at least 52 pogroms, in which at least 3400 Jews were killed. McGeever relates, in excruciating detail, how local Soviets, and some Red army units that were supposed to be fighting Grigor’ev – in particular, the notorious 8th Soviet Ukrainian regiment – joined in. In some regiments, communists who opposed antisemitism were heavily outnumbered by pogromists: in the 3000-strong 6th regiment, which carried out a pogrom in Vasylkiv in mid April, a group of communist soldiers who called on their comrades-in-arms not to attack Jews comprised 42 members, falling to 20 during early 1919 (page 125).

McGeever’s excruciating account of “Red” pogroms should give any communist pause for thought. His insight that the social forces on which the Bolsheviks relied were prone to antisemitism – that it was not, as the Bolsheviks claimed, solely an external, “counter-revolutionary” phenomenon (see below) – is essential. Further, in the conclusions to the chapter on Ukraine in 1919, he writes that “antisemitism provided a conduit for […] partisan Red Army soldiers to make the journey from ‘revolution’ to ‘counter-revolution’”; that in the social formation that supported Bolshevism in Ukraine, “antisemitism was a dominant form of consciousness”; that the Bolsheviks’ attempts to combat this were fraught with difficulties since “antisemitism and ‘Bolshevism’ were often co-extensive projects in the popular imaginary”; and that the Grigor’ev revolt “seemed to represent what many within the Bolsheviks’ social base in Ukraine desired: a populist leftist government that represented ‘true Bolshevism’ or true ‘Soviet power’” (pages 110-111). This left me with questions.

The description of the Ukrainian peasantry, and peasants who at times found themselves in the Red Army, as “the Bolsheviks’ social base” (on pages 92, 94 and 111) over-simplifies a complex, many-sided relationship. The Bolshevik presence in Ukraine was largely urban (through party branches in the towns, who were active in the soviets) and military. As McGeever acknowledges, the Red Army in Ukraine included large numbers of peasants-in-uniform who had transferred directly from defeated White forces and partisan formations. “Although nominally Soviet, the Bolshevik leadership could scarcely be confident of their allegiance, let alone attempt to control them”; the centralisation of the Red Army in Ukraine was “simply impossible” (page 93).

And this was just the start of the problem. Peasant support for the Reds was often constrained not only by antisemitism but by opposition e.g. to compulsory grain procurement and clashing conceptions of what “soviet democracy” might mean. Rural and urban political cultures really were distant from each other. Across Ukraine, and much of Russia, “green” peasant formations resisted both Reds and Whites, or sided with the Reds, only to revolt against them when the Whites were irreversibly defeated. There were Don Cossack Reds under Filipp Mironov who joined the Red Army but, when they pressed demands for political autonomy, were suppressed; there were the left Socialist Revolutionaries (Borotbisty) (mentioned in passing by McGeever) and of course the formations led by the anarchist, Nestor Makhno (mentioned in a footnote).

To investigate these multiple facets of Ukrainian peasant politics would be another book. But McGeever’s book sometimes lacked a sense of this larger context within which the battles over antisemitism were fought. I also wonder whether he attributes more agency to the Bolsheviks than they could possibly have had in Ukraine in 1919. With Grigor’ev, he writes, they “were gambling the future of the revolution on a partisan and highly contentious social base” (page 96), and he quotes Antonov-Ovseenko’s absurdly indulgent view of Grigor’ev. Perhaps further research would show that Grigor’ev was simply playing the Reds, who were unable to do more than acknowledge the poisoned chalice of his support, for as long as it lasted.[2]

Whatever the answer to such questions, they do not detract from the strength of McGeever’s main argument. “Red” pogroms were conducted not only by temporary fellow-travellers such as Grigor’ev, but also by more well-established units, and by local party organisations. Examples McGeever gives (pages 108-110) include pogroms during the Soviet-Polish war of 1920 perpetrated by units of the First Red Cavalry, led by Semen Budennyi, one of the Soviet government’s most trusted forces. Scores of Budennyi’s troops, possibly up to 400, were executed as punishment (page 180).

The Bolshevik response

In 1918, the Bolshevik government in Moscow mounted an emphatic response to the new state’s first wave of pogroms – albeit with considerable delay, between the Hlukhiv massacre in March and the formation of the short-lived Commission for the Struggle against Antisemitism and Pogroms in May. It took further action in 1919-20: in the Red Army, pogromists faced punishments up to and including execution, which in keeping with the prevailing chaos were implemented unevenly and sometimes not at all. Jewish socialists played a leading role in coordinating this response, and I discuss this below. Here I look at McGeever’s arguments about the political limitations of these initiatives, which comprised one of the world’s first state-led anti-racist campaigns.

In early 1919, as antisemitic violence gathered pace, the first senior Soviet leader to take action was Khristian Rakovskii, then effectively head of the Soviet government in Ukraine. He issued an order warning that those spreading “antisemitic propaganda” were subject to arrest, with a specific warning to those in Red Army uniforms of “the most brutal and severe measures” (page 114). This order, issued nearly a year after Hlukhiv, was the first public acknowledgment by a Bolshevik leader that there were Red, as well as White, pogromists. Such frankness in public was an exception to the rule. McGeever shows that the Soviet press was extremely slow to take up the cudgels against antisemitism, and that when it did, it first avoided mention of, and later actually suppressed information about, Red Army involvement.

In Ukraine, the coverage of the anti-Jewish massacres was mixed. In April 1919, as reports of pogroms intensified, local Bolshevik party newspapers regularly denounced antisemitism, but the two largest-circulation Red Army newspapers there published not a single article on antisemitism between them. Jewish communists attributed the problem, in part, to Moscow. In mid-May, with Grigor’ev’s slaughter campaign in full swing, their protests were finally heeded with the first-ever lead article on antisemitism in Pravda, the Moscow-based Bolshevik flagship title. A second, and last, lead article on the subject appeared in June – only after the Orgburo, the day-to-day working committee of senior party leaders pointed out “for the third time” how “essential” it was to speak out (page 128). As for antisemitism in the Red Army, this was effectively “render[ed] invisible”. A table, categorising pogroms in January-August 1919 by type of perpetrator, was sent to Zhizn’ Natsional’nostei (The Life of Nationalities), the newspaper of the Commissariat for National Affairs. A column attributing 120 pogroms, with 500 fatalities, to the Red Army, was simply deleted – and the number of killings attributed to Grigor’ev cut from 6000 to 4000 (page 131).

The Bolsheviks’ refusal publicly to discuss antisemitism in the state’s institutions and army was informed by an understanding of it as an external, “counter-revolutionary” force. McGeever points to key statements by Lenin, who called antisemitism the work of “capitalists, who strive to sow and foment hatred between workers of different faiths, different nations and different races”, and Evgenii Preobrazhenskii, who attributed it solely to “the Russian bourgeoisie”, who use it to “divert the anger of exploited workers”. McGeever argues that such “reductive conceptualisations failed to account for the many-sided nature of antisemitism, and, in particular, the way it traversed the political divide, finding expression within the left as well as the right” (page 120).

After the civil war, as the Soviet state consolidated its institutions and control over its territory, this crude view of antisemitism as a weapon wielded by external enemies became standardised. So did the public silence on “Red” pogroms. One of several examples given by McGeever is a book on the Ukrainian pogroms of 1919 by Sergei Gusev-Orenburgskii, published in Petrograd in 1921. It was “heavily redacted by Soviet censors such that each and every reference to Bolshevik and Red Army antisemitism was deleted”, shortening it by 100 pages (page 133). Keeping Red Army antisemitism out of the public domain at all costs became “a well-established practice” (page 135).

The reductive view of antisemitism also disarmed the Bolsheviks before workers and peasants who saw Jews as lazy speculators. “In the popular imaginary, ‘the Jew’ was often positioned in an antagonistic class relation to the ‘working people’”, McGeever writes (page 183). This perception filtered through Soviet and Red Army institutions in numerous ways. Given the circumstances – of being surrounded by an unprecedented racist slaughter – the anti-capitalist discourse used by party propagandists sometimes trod a politically questionable line. What were officials in Moscow thinking when they sent directives in mid-1919, at the height of the Ukrainian nightmare, to “sweep away the speculators who have stolen from you”? What were Red Army commanders in Kyiv smoking when they sanctioned the distribution of posters urging “beat the bourgeoisie”, a wording all too close to the age-old pogromists’ chant, “beat the Yids” (page 184)?

Later on, in the 1920s, McGeever relates how Jewish communists discussed the position of Jews in the Soviet state with reference to the fight for hard work and against speculation, “and ‘Jewish speculation’ specifically” (page 202). Here a key trope of left antisemitism merged with the obsession with “honest labour” and productivity, which became prominent in Soviet discourse as the Bolsheviks strove to put the economy back on its feet and restore labour discipline.
 
The second conference of Jewish sections of the Communist Party, June 1919.
From Antisemitism and the Russian revolution / the archives of the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, New York

McGeever describes how, during the civil war, local, and even national, Bolshevik officials often retreated before a mass of demands that Russians, rather than Jews, be sent to fill responsible posts, and a constant barrage of unsubstantiated complaints that Jews were avoiding front-line service in the Red Army. He looks at a proposal by Lenin, made in November 1919 when the Bolsheviks were putting together institutional structures in Ukraine, on top of civil war wreckage, to “keep a tight rein on Jews and urban inhabitants, […] transferring them to the front, not letting them into government agencies (except in an insignificant percentage and in particularly exceptional circumstances, under class control)” (page 193). The proposal was adopted and published in a sanitised version with the reference to Jews omitted. But McGeever argues convincingly (page 195) that Lenin was responding to the widespread belief that Jews were underrepresented at the front and overrepresented in comfy offices.

Another recommendation made in Bolshevik leadership meetings was to counter antisemitism in the Red Army by deploying Jewish communists in regiments dominated by peasants, which “would have the effect of reducing counter-revolutionary sentiments among the Red Army milieu” (page 187). To my mind, that was a good suggestion, although McGeever thought that, while motivated by a desire to counter antisemitism, it emphasised “changing Jews” rather than changing those with antisemitic ideas.

This controversy over the deployment of Jews in Ukraine was part of a longer-standing discussion about Jews taking prominent Soviet state positions. Trotsky, the ultimate assimilated internationalist Jew, spoke in 1923 and wrote again in his autobiography in 1930 about how in 1917 he had refused some of the most senior state positions for fear of acting as a red rag to antisemitic bulls chasing “Jew-communists”.[3]

Jewish socialists’ practice

The first Soviet state responses to the 1918 pogroms came at the end of April, in Moscow, when the regional government body (Moscow Sovnarkom) coordinated a propaganda campaign, and called on the Cheka (extraordinary commissions, the embryonic security police apparatus) to act against pogroms. McGeever shows that these actions were preceded by, and pushed forward, by a group of non-Bolshevik Jewish socialists.

In March 1918, in the midst of an unprecedented revival of Yiddish culture after the 1917 emancipation, these Yiddish speakers – members of the Poalei Zion, the United Jewish Socialist Workers Party and the Left Socialist Revolutionaries – formed the Moscow Evkom (Jewish committee) (page 56). They protested vehemently at the lack of central action against rising antisemitism; on 11 April their representative, David Davidovich, addressed the All Russian Central Executive Committee (VTsIK, effectively the government). “It was the non-Bolshevik Jewish socialist who pressed antisemitism on to the agenda of the Bolshevik leadership. This dynamic would resurface time and again” (page 66). For the Jewish socialists,

[T]he slaughtering of Jews was not epiphenomenal, nor was it a mere facet of the revolutionary process. It was the fundamental question in the spring of 1918, and it shaped their own engagement with the revolution during this period

The earth-shattering political events that followed – the outbreak of the Russian civil war, the failed German revolution of November 1918, and the Proskuriv pogrom by the Whites in mid-February 1919 – galvanised Jewish socialists. The Jewish groups – like many other socialist parties across the old Russian empire – split, usually along pro- and anti-Bolshevik lines. The Jewish communists, retaining varying degrees of autonomous organisation, merged into the Bolshevik party. They called on Jews to join the Red Army to fight Whites and pogromists. As one of these groups, the Komfarband, declared at its founding conference in May 1919, the pogroms had “not been able to stop the revolutionary process”, but on the contrary, had raised “the level of revolutionary energy among the urban [Jewish] poor, before whom stands the prospect of physical extermination” (page 148).

The Jewish communists’ response to the pogroms was underpinned by an “ethical imperative”, in McGeever’s phrase (pages 85, 160-161, 171). They spoke from the subject position of “racialised outsiders”, a concept he borrows from the sociologist Satnam Virdee. There was a tension between this and the approach of most Bolsheviks, for whom the fight against pogroms was subordinate to the larger struggle against counter-revolution.
Jewish organisations at a May Day demonstration in Petrograd, the Soviet capital, 1919.
Photo from the Jewish Museum, Moscow, via the Perevodika site

This was starkly evident at a conference of the Evsektsiia (Jewish sections of the Bolshevik party) on 1 June 1919. Ia. Mandel’sberg, a Komfarband representative, interjected in a debate about the sections’ orientation to the Jewish middle class, that “the main enemy of the Jewish working class is antisemitism, and to fight it we need urgently to outline a set of concrete measures”. Semen Dimanshtein, head of the Evsektsiia and more ideologically committed to Bolshevism, retorted that “antisemitism is not a special Jewish question, as Mandel’sberg thinks … it is a plague on the revolution; it is the slogan of the counter-revolution” (page 163).

None other than Mikhail Kalinin, the chairman of the VTsIK and titular head of the Soviet state, who was attending the meeting as a guest, intervened, implicitly supporting Mandel’sberg. He pointed out: “There are no other people who have shed as much blood as the Jewish people have … no honest person can remain indifferent to the current mass murder of the Jews.” Arkadii Al’skii, like Dimanshtein a committed Bolshevik, refuted Kalinin’s argument, insisting that “Jewish communists fight under the banner of the Russian Communist Party against all enemies of the revolution, no matter who they are”; they approached the issue of antisemitism not as “Jewish national-Communists” but as “Communist Jews who have no connection with the Jewish bourgeoisie” (page 165). Kalinin, to the astonishment of the meeting, walked out. Would that Mandel’sberg and others had been able to adapt a slogan from the future: “Jewish lives matter.”

It is to McGeever’s credit that he has recovered these pioneering discussions on what we would today call the politics of anti-racism. The conversations were cut short. In the early 1920s, many of the most prominent Evsektsiia activists were dispersed, to work in Soviet departments or universities, or to continue their struggle in other countries.

By the time of the major post-civil-war state campaign against antisemitism, launched in 1926, the Soviet state had changed beyond recognition. In the run-up to the first five year plan and forced collectivisation, antisemites were added to an “ever-growing list of harmful enemies, alongside kulaks, priests, wreckers, speculators and hooligans”, McGeever writes (page 214). The campaign was motivated less by a desire to protect Jewish life than by the larger state project of targeting threats to the regime. Including much of the peasantry, it could be added.

Concluding comments

Antisemitism and the Russian Revolution is welcome because of the care with which McGeever examines the history of the revolution as an interaction between political forces – the Bolshevik party, and the Jewish socialists who fought alongside it – and society. The particular problem of antisemitic violence is abstracted from the general process of revolution and civil war, into which it has often been subsumed.

For communists, McGeever’s work is especially timely. We live at a strange conjuncture, when hero-worship of the Bolsheviks has been resurrected in the mythical construct of “ecological Leninism”.[4] Rather than yearning for 20th century heroes to resolve our 21st century problems, McGeever focuses soberly on how the Bolsheviks, and others, dealt with the life and death problems in front of them.

The internationalism with which the Russian revolution became associated, its function as a focus for anti-imperialist struggles throughout the twentieth century, now appears to be one of its most significant legacies. The Bolsheviks “can not claim exclusive credit for putting the struggle against colonialism on the political agenda of the 20th century”, Steve Smith concludes in his recent history of the revolution, but it was the Communist International (Comintern) that “popularised militant anti-imperialism” and served as a training ground for leaders of national liberation struggles.[5]

Without minimising the Soviet Union’s imperial dimension, Smith adds, the Soviet “commitment to affirmative action and empowerment programmes for ethnic minorities” looked forward to much that changed in the second half of the twentieth century elsewhere. Priyamvada Gopal, in her history of resistance in the British empire, argues that the overthrow of tsarism had “a galvanising influence on resistance to imperial rule in many parts of the world”; the Comintern “was a significant catalyst” to the process of resistance, even though its vacillations were sometimes part of the problem.[6]

Against this background, McGeever’s focus on the first and most immediate manifestation of national or racial oppression during the revolution – the frightful assault on Jews – seems especially relevant. His account of the overlap between the emancipatory hopes raised in millions of people by the revolution and the poison of antisemitism is compelling.

As for the socialist actors in his story, he shows how the Bolsheviks’ efforts to counter antisemitism were hamstrung not only by the dire circumstances, but by their narrow, ideologised understanding of how antisemitism worked. Kalinin’s implicit rejection of that approach, pushed by the Jewish socialists at the Evsektsiia meeting in June 1919, really stuck in my mind. In many ways the Jewish socialists’ struggles – alongside, and sometimes in sharp disputes with, the Bolsheviks – foreshadow the struggles that Gopal describes, by African, Indian and Caribbean socialists with their British and other counterparts later in the twentieth century. Working over the lessons of those struggles, notwithstanding the real human tragedies that surrounded them, is inspiring. / May 2021.

Download this article as a PDF

■ A review of Antisemitism and the Russian revolution, by Neil Rogall (RS21)

More on People & Nature about Russian history

■ The Kronshtadt revolt and the workers’ movement (March 2021)

■ Vasily Grossman’s Life and Fate: staring history in the face (May 2018)

■ Russia and Ukraine: history called up on national service (July 2015)

[1] See Hannah Arendt on “Leftist Antisemitism”, in The Origins of Totalitarianism (London: Penguin, 2017), pp 53-65

[2] A standard account of the civil war is Evan Mawdsley, The Russian Civil War (London: Allen & Unwin, 1987). Trotsky, when he arrived in Ukraine in May 1919, reported to the Bolshevik central committee that “the prevailing state of chaos, irresponsibility, laxity and separatism” exceeded the most pessimistic expectations. M. Meijer (ed.), The Trotsky Papers I (1917-1922) (The Hague: Mouton, 1964), p. 431.

[3] Trotsky, My Life, chapter 29 <https://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1930/mylife/&gt;; Valentina Vilkova, The Struggle for Power: Russia in 1923 (New York: Prometheus Books, 1997), pages 183-184

[4] On “ecological Leninism”, see for example Andreas Malm, Corona, Climate, Chronic Emergency: War Communism in the Twenty-First Century (London: Verso, 2020), and this reviewer’s comments in: S. Pirani, “The direct air capture road to socialism?”, Capitalism Nature Socialism, March 2021.

[5] S.A. Smith, Russia in Revolution: an empire in crisis 1890-1928 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017)

[6] Priyamvada Gopal, Insurgent Empire: anticolonial resistance and British dissent (London: Verso, 2020), p. 211

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The Russian Revolution ➖ How Emancipatory Hopes And Anti-Semitic Poison Overlapped

People And Nature ➨ On 22 July the city court in Petrozavodsk, north-west Russia, sentenced Yuri Dmitriev, a historian of Stalin-era repression, to three-and-a-half years in a penal colony.

Dmitriev was cleared of charges of creating pornographic material, possession of weapons and indecent acts, but found guilty of forced sexual activity with his underage adopted daughter. Taking into account time served, Dmitriev is expected to be freed in November.

Dmitriev has denied all the charges against him, and has been supported as a victim of political persecution by a broad international campaign.

The article below by Nikita Girin, published in the Russian newspaper Novaya Gazeta on 13 July, provides detail on the charges. It reflects the view of Russian human rights defenders and free speech advocates – that these charges were contrived, with a view to silencing Dmitriev’s authoritative, determined voice on Stalinist repression.

Dmitriev is a community historian and regional president of Memorial, the Russian association devoted to remembering the victims of Stalinism, in Karelia, the north-western province that borders Finland. He has for many years organised expeditions to uncover the sites of mass executions by Stalin’s security forces.

Thanks to the friend who has translated this text for readers of English. It shines light on the brutal and cynical methods used by the state to protect its Stalinist predecessors from Russians determined to understand their own history. Gabriel Levy - 24 July 2020.

===

[Novaya Gazeta’s introduction to the article.] The second case against Yuri Dmitriev, an investigator of Stalin-era repressions, has concluded in Petrozavodsk. In April 2018 the court had already found him not guilty of charges of making pornographic images of his underage daughter and indecent activity with her. But two months later the Supreme Court of Karelia annulled this verdict, and shortly afterwards Dmitriev was rearrested on a new charge – forced sexual activity with the same girl. The circumstances of his arrest (the historian had allegedly breached a bail condition of not leaving the city), and the more serious charges, might have put off many people who had previously sympathised with Dmitriev. However, as Novaya Gazeta has found out, behind the terrifying formulation of the new charges lie commonplace realities – just like three years earlier. Here Nikita Girin sets out how the second case against Dmitriev was put together, exactly what the historian is being accused of, and what his own explanation is.


Note from the editor: A disclaimer (specifically for Roskomnadzor [the Russian media regulator])

The law on Mass Media forbids disclosure of personal information of underage victims of illegal activity (Article 4). Therefore no personal data of Yuri Dmitriev’s adopted daughter will be disclosed here: neither her name, nor her date of birth, place of residence of place of study – out of consideration for the girl’s own safety.

However, the law forbids us from disclosing not only this data, but any “other information” that could lead to the child being indirectly identified. We understand that if the relevant authorities so choose, absolutely anything could be considered such “other information”. At the same time the law permits the publication of such information for the purposes of investigating a crime and uncovering the persons involved in committing a crime (Article 41).

We consider this to be just such a case. In our view the real crime against a child was committed by the instigators of the prosecution case, not by the accused.

We are certain that this publication will support close civic oversight of this case.

[Note. Roskomnadzor is the Federal Service for Supervision of Communications, Information Technology, and Mass Media.]

This investigation in brief

The historian Yuri Dmitriev is being accused of, on several occasions, touching his adopted daughter’s genital area
At the age of eight the girl suffered episodes of incontinence (enuresis)

  • Dmitriev touched the child’s genital area to check if her underwear was dry when he could smell urine, after which he took his daughter to have a wash
  • The diagnosis of enuresis is proven by hospital release notes
  • Three commission investigations have concluded that Dmitriev displays no sexually deviant behaviour
  • Linguistics experts from the Russian Language Institute at the Russian Academy of Sciences, who have analysed the texts of the girl’s questioning, attest to communicative pressure applied by the investigator. A professor at Moscow State University, who has analysed the texts of the girl’s conversations with a psychologist, believes that the nature of the girl’s statements concerning Dmitriev’s actions do not correspond to typical criteria of recollections of a traumatic experience
  • The success of prosecutions in the Dmitriev case corresponds to career moves by the former head of the Karelian Federal Security Service (FSB), Anatoly Seryshev.

I am writing up this text in Yuri Dmitriev’s flat, in the room that used to be his adopted daughter’s. The shelves still hold her books, several toys and exercise books. From the window you can see her school, sleepless seagulls shouting above it. Passing night trains seem to hoot back in reply.

Dmitriev himself is locked up in the former prison castle in the very centre of Petrozavodsk. The jail is surrounded by good restaurants and pleasant views. But the jail itself offers different forms entertainment. In mid-April 2019 two cellmates spent several days pressuring the historian to make a confession to his prosecutors. They threatened to “drop” him – i.e., to rape him. Dmitriev had to turn to the management. He explained that if he is targeted by violence, he will defend himself and will not be held accountable for the consequences. He was transferred to a different cell.

This incident says something about the quality of evidence in this case.

Dmitriev partly contributed to his own second arrest. After the not guilty verdict was annulled in June 2018, the Supreme Court of Karelia set a bail condition forbidding Dmitriev from leaving Petrozavodsk. However on 27 June the historian, together with his neighbour, wanted to the grave of an acquaintance in the village of New Vilga (a couple of kilometres outside the city boundary), and then to pray at the Alexandro-Svirsky monastery (in Leningrad region, 160 kilometres away).

The historian consulted his lawyer, who strictly forbade him to travel without the court’s permission. In May, the court had already allowed Dmitriev to travel to Moscow, to collect the Moscow Helsinki Group prize for a contribution by a historian to the defence of human rights and to the human rights movement. But Dmitriev is a stubborn and self-reliant man. He nodded and went anyway. He thought that a half-day trip out of town was no big deal, since had has already travelled to the capital for a few days.

The historian packed a clean set of clothes to get changed after tidying up at the cemetery, and to visit the monastery. Of course he was under observation, and got stopped on the way. State propaganda journalists from [the state-controlled national TV channel] NTV, who were the first to report Dmitriev’s arrest, decided that the change of clothes directly demonstrated that he intended to escape. According to them, for some reason he meant to escape to Poland. Never mind the fact that the historian has no passport for overseas travel, and Poland is more than 1500 km away – while it’s only 300km to Finland, which he knows well.

Yuri Dmitriev. Photo: Tomasz Kizny, Memorial

If only Dmitriev had stayed at home, his arrest might have been different, and he might be travelling to court now in a minibus. [Note. When the article was written, towards the end of Dmitriev’s second trial, he was in custody and travelling to court under guard.] But he still would not have avoided the second case: preparations for it were set in motion the day he was acquitted in the first.

How it all started

In order the better to assess the circumstances of the new case, you have to bear in mind some infamous details of the first, “pornography” case, and the whole context of Yuri Dmitriev’s presecution. Here they are.

In the 1990s and 2000s, Dmitriev, working alone and with colleagues, found the sites of mass executions of the Great Terror era: Sandarmokh (more than 7000 executions); Krasny Bor (1193 people executed by gunshot); the cemetery at the 8th lock of Belomorcanal (the exact number buried there is unknown, the area is around 10 hectares); the graves of the execution victims at Solovki; and others. He set up memorials at every site. He succeeded in making 5 August – the day Great Terror started – a [Karelian] republic-wide day of mourning.

The Sandarmokh killing field. Photo: Anna Artemyeva/Novaya Gazeta

In 2008, Dmitriev, who already had two grown-up children, and his wife Lyudmila, registered as guardians to a three-year-old girl. Dmitriev himself grew up in a children’s home. He calls the day he was taken in by a foster family the best day of his life.

In 2012, Yuri and Lyudmila divorced, and the girl stayed with her foster father. In all the years since, social services reported that the foster parent had created the necessary conditions for the child’s upbringing, welfare and education, and that the girl was comfortable in his care.

“You can only teach a child something through love. You can’t teach them by punishing and lecturing,” Dmitriev told Anna Yarovaya in a detailed interview about raising his daughter.

Dmitriev’s flat was always filled with guests: journalists, filmmakers, human rights activists — and they attest to the guardian’s equal and respectful treatment of the girl.

For the past ten years the historian has been working on a book about 126,000 specially resettled people, sent to Karelia to build socialism. [Note. In total there were at least 3 million specially resettled people in the Soviet Union. They were regarded by the Stalinist regime as “kulaks” (i.e. rich peasants), or social undesirables, and forced in the 1930s to move to “special settlements” in remote, inhospitable areas.]

Dmitriev is direct and doesn’t mince his words. He had some choice ones about the security services, and about the war in Ukraine. And he probably said too much.

July 2016. Petrozavodsk-based historian Yuri Kilin suggested that Sandarmokh could be the burial place of Soviet prisoners of war interred in Finnish POW camps. Shortly afterwards, this theory was voiced by another historian from Petrozavodsk, Sergei Verigin. He, like Dmitriev, was then a member of the regional commission on restoring the rights of rehabilitated victims of political repressions; Verigin is still a member.

5 August 2016. For the first time in 19 years, Karelian republic officials did not visit Sandarmokh on Memorial Day [for the victims of repression].

September 2016. At a meeting of the commission on restoring the rights of victims of repression, Dmitriev made a presentation about his future book about specially resettled people.

From Dmitriev’s Statement In Court In The First Case

A question arose about my field trips to Sandarmokh. I was told [at the meeting] that we will no longer go there, and that, as it turns out, the people buried there were 20,000 captured Red Army soldiers. I asked them to give me at least one surname of one Red Army soldier, although these days you can find where one died or was presumed missing, and from which regiment. They could not name a single one.
Then I suggested we invite Yuri Kilin to tell the commission out of what fear or from what sources he obtained his evidence. My own father had fought on the front lines.
I can’t believe that in the past 70 years, our state did not once remember 20,000 dead soldiers. I start to feel [after this] that I have become the focus of some heightened attention…

We shouldn’t overestimate the role of Kilin and Verigin in the Dmitriev’s case. The attempt to subvert the history of Sandarmokh is perfectly in keeping with the logic of the recent fight against memorials to the executed. This fight, as Anna Yarovaya noted in her report “Rewriting Sandarmokh”, began back in the Soviet era in Katyn in Smolensk region. And now, as philologist Nikolai Epple notes, the same fuss as around Sandarmokh is happening around the Mednoye memorial complex in Tver region.

Most likely, the state would destroy any guardian of Sandarmokh who, like Dmitriev, protested against this trend. But Kilin and Verigin undoubtedly contributed to the injustice committed against Dmitriev and his daughter.

29 November 2016. Dmitriev was visited at home by the local police officer Igor Markevich, who asked him to come to the station the following day.

From Dmitriev’s Statement In Court In The First Case

I never asked for them, I never called them. Usually when you need the police they never turn up. But here he came, under his own steam. Irina (the woman Dmitriev lived with at the time – Novaya Gazeta) was in bed in the adjacent room as she was on bed rest. And either Irina said something, or I mentioned that there was a lady in the house. The policeman went to meet her. He found out that she was on the waiting list for an operation, and started saying that he would definitely help us.
Do you understand what that means, a senior police lieutenant who is barely 25? I’ve lived in Karelia most of my life, I know all sorts of people, from a homeless man to a minister, and somehow these medical issues I can resolve at the highest level. I explained that we are simply waiting, on the waiting list.
He left, having left a summons [for 30 November]. Literally 20-30 minutes later, Irina gets a call from the manager of the clinic who invites her to come for an assessment. On that same day, at that exact same time. It becomes clear that they are trying to get us both out of the house. Irina and I discussed this matter and decided: if they asked us to go, we should go. But I had my own clever checks that allow me to determine if anyone had been in the house, opened a cupboard door or rifled through my papers. I taught Irina to do the same, and asked her to remember what things of hers she put where…

30 November 2016. Dmitriev went to the police station. On entry, his documents and phone were confiscated because “some training was in progress” at the police station.

From Dmitriev’s Statement In Court In The First Case

For an hour or an hour and a half I just sat in the precinct’s office. Then they talked to me about things that didn’t particularly concern me. Then they kept me there a bit longer with some conversations. In short, I got back home about 1.0 pm.
[My adoptive daughter] was still at school, and the first thing that caught my eye was that our front door was locked with four turns of the key. I checked my markers and noticed that someone had been in my cabinet. Half an hour later Irina came home. She said she had left her notebook on the table — now it was on her bed.
I asked her how many turns of the key it took her to lock the door, she said two. I see…

In the courtroom, [the police officer] Igor Markevich falsely testified that he had never visited Dmitriev that autumn. Novaya Gazeta has tried to get in touch with Markevich, but he ignored the questions sent to him via social media and hid his social media profile.

3 December 2016. Police received an anonymous letter: “I have discovered that Yuri Dmitriev photographs his daughter naked in his flat. I am not giving my name, as I fear that Yuri could, via his acquaintances, cause me harm”.

13 December 2016. Police arrested Dmitriev in his flat. They asked to access his computer.

From Yuri Dmitriev’s Court Statement In The First Case

Literally 20-30 seconds later someone exclaims: ‘Witnesses, come here!’ I turn my head, and the screen shows a picture of [adopted daughter], one of the welfare check photos. I rush to this chap, ask what he is doing, tell him these images are not for them, but for the medics.

Later, in court, this “chap” – a court expert named Dubkin – openly admitted that he found the photos so quickly because his colleague, the operative, who had taken part in examining Dmitriev’s computer, told him where to look. It looks like this directly shows who carried out the “operation” of luring Dmitriev and his girlfriend out of this flat on 30 November, in order to find material for the “anonymous” statement.

Dmitriev was accused of having taken nine photos of this adopted daughter naked, at the age of three, five and six. These photos were found on his computer among two hundred other protocol photos of his daughter undressed: from the front, the back and both sides. The prosecution has nothing against those.

Why did Dmitriev take them? To the historian the explanation seems straightforward. In the first place, this was to track the physical development of an ex-care home child with several illnesses. Secondly, so that social services would not remove the child on made up grounds, or wouldn’t blackmail him for money with threats to remove her. He knew of cases like this. And this was his means of protecting them both from known “social services’ fraud”.

From Yuri Dmitriev’s Statement, 13 December 2016

On one of the sites or training manuals that I had to read, I read that you have to have photographs that would track the child’s physical development. These photos would show the lack of or presence of any physical injuries….
At first I tried to take the photos once a month. In one sitting I would take several photos: front, from the side, from all sides, at least four. I regularly took photos of my adopted daughter without clothes for about a year and six months, after that I started to take photos of her her less frequently, because I realised that nobody had asked me for them. The last time I photographed her was about a year ago… In case of health problems, or if there were claims of physical violence or injuries to my adopted child, I could provide photos.

The nine “criminal” photos are not part of the “health diary”. In them, the girl sits in an armchair or lies on the sofa in a pose that shows her genitals.

This is how Yuri Dmitriev, used to taking many photographs on his field trips, explains these particular photos.

Four of the photos were taken when the family came back from a holiday in the south: the girl (she was three at the time) asked him to take pictures of her tan.

Dmitriev told the judge, Marina Nosova:

While Lyudmila was running her a bath [my daughter] came running to me, I am sitting, tired, and downloading our seaside photos from the camera. [The daughter] climbed into an armchair and started asking me: ‘Dad, do I look tanned?’ And she asks me to take a picture of how tanned she is. What’s it to me? The flash drive is freed up, so I took three of four shots of her.
Dmitriev took another four photos when the girl, then four, told him about pain in her genital area.

“[The daughter] was having a wash, while I was sitting and working. Suddenly there was a cry of pain. I ran over, asking her what’s hurting, did she hit herself or bump into something? She says she didn’t hit or bump into anything, but it hurts. I carried her into the room. Touched around her appendix, no pain there. She stretched out and straightened her leg, that doesn’t hurt. She doesn’t tell me anything, is just sobbing and crying.

Yuri Dmitriev after acquittal at his first trial. Photo: Anna Artemyeva/ Novaya Gazeta

The historian explained.

Naturally I am in shock. My wife wasn’t home. What was I supposed to do? It was already nine in the evening. Should I call a doctor? For what? There was no sharp pain in the abdomen, so discharge of any sort that would be worrying either. So I decided not to rush.
And so that the doctors wouldn’t say to me that I’d missed something, I took four photos like that. In the morning, when it’s time to go to the nursery [the daughter] tells us that she slipped in the bath, and her legs got pulled both ways…

He took the last “criminal” photo in similar circumstances: during the New Year holidays his daughter had been riding a pony and later once again felt a discomfort in her genital area. Dmitriev “snapped” her again, but when she was asleep, so that she wouldn’t be embarrassed, because by that time she was six.

The historian said:

[The daughter] and Lyudmila went to visit the in-laws, and on the way back they went horse-riding. She came to me and complained that something was hurting there. I had a look again: nothing was red, there was no discharge. Maybe she hit herself or maybe strained a leg muscle. Nothing critical or dangerous. And that’s exactly how this photo came about.
“If [the following day] something had hurt, we would have definitely gone to the doctor and [if] the doctor said that we had missed something, that there is a chronic illness developing, I would have told them to look at the photographs.

The well known Moscow-based paediatrician Fedor Katasonov confirmed in court that this has been a practice among parents for a long time, although officially the law in Russia about remote medical diagnosis was adopted only in 2018.

Those photos are my ‘insurance policy’ to show that the child is not beaten, that there are no cuts or bruises. I have had three or four episodes in my life where I had to photograph [my daughter] specifically because she was complaining about some pain I could not understand specifically in the lower abdomen area. She is a girl. With a boy everything is clear. With a girl, everything is harder because everything is inside. That’s all I can say about these pictures.

Only a person who has never changed a single nappy can see any pornography in this.

“To see some indecent act here is beyond any understanding,” Dmitriev told the judge.

“Dmitriev photographs everything. I mean every single thing,” Dmitry Bogush, a friend who has been helping Dmitriev with his IT, told Novaya Gazeta about the historian’s professional habits. “He takes pictures along the way, he snaps his family, relatives, friends. He takes, generally speaking, tens of photos every day. So in total he has tens of thousands of photos.”

26 December 2017. The second expert analysis of the photographs (carried out by an organisation proposed by the prosecutors) found no pornographic content in them. The experts stated that the accused did indeed use the photographs to track the child’s health. A month later, Dmitriev left prison on bail, on condition that he did not leave the city.

5 April 2018. Petrozavodsk city court judge Marina Nosova acquitted Yuri Dmitriev. And at that point the local authorities, that have been quiet for a year and a half, suddenly got worried about the welfare of his adopted daughter.

After the verdict was announced, I got the impression that the court had listened to the side that shouted about the breach of its rights louder than anyone. But the voice of the child – the real victim in this whole story – was not heard by anyone. 

This was the “expert” opinion of the speaker of the Petrozavodsk city council Gennady Bondarchuk, which he expressed on the very evening of 5 April.

Bondarchuk’s comments were published not somewhere on Facebook, but on the city council website, among the website’s more traditional announcements of an accelerated programme of replacing city elevators and the anniversaty of Petrozavodsk being declared a “City of Military Pride”.

Hard on Bondarchuk’s heels, Karelia’s children’s rights ombudsman Gennady Sarayev rushed to state his opinion: “Unfortunately, I did not see the human rights organisations’ position regarding safeguarding the rights of the child to privacy, the unlawful threat to their honour and reputation, or the representation of the child in the court process”, the ombudsman complained.

The acquittal made the head of the Petrozavodsk city council Irina Miroshnik surprised “just as a human being”. “Because of the special concern for all issues related to children and to safeguarding childhood”, she explained.

All these ladies and gentlemen, had they really been worried about the child’s health and safety, should have asked the psychiatrists who examined her during the investigation, about her living conditions at Dmitriev’s home, and in what circumstances she was placed after being separated from her guardian.

Not one of the officials worried that she was due to have regular medical appointments in Petrozavodsk, but that she was sent 600 km away to a remote village, to her natural grandmother who had sent her to the children’s home in the first place.

The child’s voice failed to be heard only by the speaker of the city council, Bondarchuk – but the court heard the girl’s statement about how she loved her adoptive father.

As for unlawful threats to privacy, ombudsman Sarayev did not, for some reason, try to sue [the state-controlled] Russia TV or REN TV channels for broadcasting the photos from the “health diary” to the entire country.

In short, officials voiced their request for continued persecution of Dmitriev. After that, nothing stood in the way of executing the readymade scenario.

What the victim says

The allegations of crime were written by the grandmother. During questioning, she explained how, after Dmitriev’s acquittal, she had read in the TVR-Panorama newspaper that the historian wanted the child back in his care. There was indeed such a report in TVR-Panorama. There is no quote from Dmitriev about the girl, but there is the author’s commentary: “As Dmitriev’s family says, this case will only end when the historian gets his adopted daughter back.”

The grandmother gave the article to her granddaughter to read, and claims that the girl said: “I want to write a statement about Dmitriev. If I tell all about him, they’ll jail him for 30 years!”

Important point: literally a week earlier, friends from the Moscow international film school exchange were in touch with Dmitriev’s adopted daughter, as usual. The film students are the historian’s old friends, they were the first to make a noise when he was arrested, they found him a lawyer and launched a campaign in his support. And it was through Dmitriev that his adopted daughter had made friends with students at the film school. One of them, Sasha Kononova, said that on that occasion too, the girl was warm and friendly. But in early April, straight after the acquittal, she sharply cut off contact.

According to the grandmother’s statement, the granddaughter allegedly confided in her that “Dmitriev touched her genitals with his hand” and that this “happened several times”.

“I asked [the granddaughter] why she didn’t say so earlier, during the criminal investigation into Dmitriev. [The granddaughter] said ‘but I loved him, I was protecting him, I hadn’t understood what he was doing’, the grandmother said at a preliminary interview.

The grandmother also said that her granddaughter has expressed suicidal thoughts. This is why she “found on the internet the work landline of the [Karelia] children’s ombudsman G.A. Sarayev”, “called the number and he picked up”. (The ombudsman’s number is indeed easy to find online, but this is the number of his reception. And the reception told Novaya Gazeta that Gennady Sarayev never picks up the phone himself).

The ombudsman sent a child psychologist, Yelena Rudenkova, director of the Karelia republic Diagnostics and Consultation Centre (incidentally, the place where Dmitriev did his fostering course, in preparation for becoming a guardian in 2007).

18 April 2018. The “initial consultation” took place. During the discussion, Rudenkova did not find the girl expressing any suicidal thoughts. What else she discussed with the child is unknown, but judging by what happened next, the psychologist didn’t waste her trip.

10 May 2018. Gennady Sarayev asked the then head of Karelia Investigative Committee [a police force for investigating crime], Yuri Boboido, to carry out an examination and a psychological-educational assessment of the girl.

15 May 2018. Boboido’s deputy Vladimir Ignatenkov turns for help to the very same Yelena Rudenkova. The Diagnostics and Consultation Centre is not an accredited expert institution, so Rudenkova only agrees to carry out a psychological assessment. At the Investigative Committee’s request, the interview is recorded on video. Here is an approximate, but representative fragment of the conversation between the psychologist and the teenage girl, faced with an impossible choice in the adults’ game.

— How long was this happening?

— I can’t remember.

— Tell me, did he touch you a long time?

— Well yes.

— He touched you for a long time, yes…

Here we need to recount the incident that Yuri Dmitriev relayed to the court in the first case. Once his ex-wife Lyudmila treated their adopted daughter with mustard plasters in the old fashioned way — applying them through a sheet of newspaper, to avoid skin burns. The next morning, Dmitriev recalled, Lyudmila got so busy she forgot to wash the girl’s back and sent her to the nursery as she was.

From Dmitriev’s Evidence To Court In The First Case

Around lunchtime I get a call from the nursery, and they tell me that a nursery nurse was getting the child for their afternoon nap, and saw large bruises on her back. They started shouting at me: what are you doing, how dare you, why are we beating this child?
I jumped into the car, drive there, tell them that I watched the child have a shower yesterday and there were no bruises on her… They already start to show me a pile of papers, reports and referral statements. … A paper, where a teacher, in the presence of the deputy head of someone, asks the child:

— What are these bruises?

— I don’t have any bruises.

— Do you have bruises on your back?

— Yes, I do.

— Who hit you?

— Nobody hit me.

— Did your daddy hit you?

— Yes, daddy did.

— What did he hit you with?

— Daddy didn’t hit me with anything.

— Did daddy hit you with a belt?

— Yes, daddy hit me with a belt.
Do you see, the child is four-and-a-half. She doesn’t know what a belt is. Imagine: here is this important paper that says the child admits that mummy or daddy hit them with a belt. All my hair stood on end. And I realise what this can lead to. They’ll take away your child, and you won’t be able to prove anything.

I told them that they should refer us for a check-up, to whomever and wherever they want. … The doctor said, let me check this, He takes a cotton ball dipped in surgical spirit and runs it across the “bruise” — the “bruise” is gone. He wrote out a note for me saying this is newsprint ink. But I had been so terrified. …

That case persuaded the historian even more that he needs to photograph his daughter as evidence of her physical health: “If anyone says again that, for example, half a year earlier I had beaten my child and the child was covered in bruises, how could I, without photos, show that here is the child: clear skin, happy in herself”, he asked during a hearing in the first case.

30 May 2018. Investigative Committee deputy chief Ignatenkov sent the evidence to the deputy head of process control, Gennady Verigin (the son of Verigin the historian, one of the authors of the hypothesis that Sandarmokh holds the remains of Soviet POWs). He, in turn, sent the evidence to the head of the city department of the Investigative Committee Dmitry Komissarov, and Komissarov sent it to inspector Maksim Zavatsky with a request to question the grandmother and her granddaughter.

6 June 2018. Zavatsky questioned the grandmother (the same day she makes the crime report) and takes a statement from the child. The psychologist Rudenkova took part in the interview. The statement was once again recorded.

The texts of these interviews show that the girl’s behaviour and speech (like actions of any child from a care home) are dictated by circumstances – by trauma witnessed long before she was taken into the Dmitriev family, just by a poor quality of life.

This is how, for example, the child described her relationship and communications with Dmitriev to the inspector and the psychologist in her grandmother’s presence:

— Did he take an interest in your schoolwork?

— No.

— And do you know what he was working on?

— He was writing a book about some burial site.

— Did you often communicate?

— No.

— When you came home from school, did you tell him about your studies?

— No.

But this is what the girl tells medical experts a month later, while her grandma waits outside the door:

She liked to spend time together, recalls how she went on the field trips, expeditions, and visited different towns in Russia. She describes Y.A. Dmitriev as constrained in his emotions, restrained (‘he’ll never give hugs first’), strict, erudite ‘he told me lots of interesting things’).

Also interesting to note is the transformation in the child’s evidence, between her statement to the inspector and the official interview.

Unlike the statement, the interview was not recorded on video (allegedly on grandmother’s request). And the girl’s speech noticeably changed. If talking to the inspector she could not remember either when the adopted father first touched her genital area, nor the number of such occasions (“no less than two, probably”), nor their duration (“it was quick”), not her emotions, not Dmitriev’s reactions, then during the official interrogation, the multiple instances of “can’t remember” and “don’t know” were turned into fully-formed sentences with subjunctive clauses.

“A few times” turns into “many times”. “Quick” turns into “no less than a minute, but no more than five minutes”.

During the initial interview, asked why she decide to tell all now, the girl said “I don’t know”. A month later, at the official interview, the child already said that she wants to give evidence against her former guardian because she hates him.

Meanwhile, the doctors of the Karelia republic Psychoneurological Clinic, just like two years earlier, did not find that the girl has any psychological abnormalities, or any symptoms of depression or neurosis. So the child has not suffered from Dmitriev’s alleged actions. But the experts stated that the girl is indecisive and has a tendency to conform.

Dmitry was assessed (for a third time) at the St Petersburg Psychiatric Hospital No. 6, and once again no signs of psychosexual deviancy or any abnormal sexual preferences are found, including no signs of paedophilia.


What Dmitriev says

From Dmitriev’s Statement To The Investigators In The Second Case

The child was very thin, we [my wife and I] tried to move her onto normal food, which caused vomiting and enuresis. … I also kept a health diary and inputted all the data into it: her height, weight, etc. When she started school, she weighed 18 kilos, this was extremely underweight. Also, at the age of six, she had an ultrasound scan of her hip area, and we were told that there were some anomalies there. 
Sometime after second grade, the child started to wet herself. During the holidays I decided to have a proper investigation at the [Karelian] republic hospital. The child was admitted to the hospital and had a full assessment and treatment, which helped, and after that the child only wet herself a few times a year.
As for the charges against me, I would like to explain, that I could have touched her clothes, and I could have touched under her clothes, if the clothes were wet – that is, then the child wet herself.
We had a tradition almost from day one; Before bed the child would come to us, and my wife and I will say goodnight to her, she used to run into my room, climb into my lap and we would discuss how the day went. She would tell me everything, who her new friends were, who she talked do, and I would tell her how my day went. We told each other we loved each other, and I would put her to bed.
After my wife left me, my interaction with my daughter continued in the same spirit. One of the days when [my daughter] came to me and as usual sat in my lap, I smelled urine, and realised that she had wet herself. Naturally, I felt her knickers at the front and the back in the genital area and could see that the child had wet herself, and I took her to have a wash. This happened several times a week until she was admitted to hospital for night-time enuresis.

Dmitriev asked to request evidence from hospital about his adopted daughter’s treatment. This information somewhat spoiled inspector Zavatsky’s almost readymade case.

The hospital release papers had to be requested, and — bother! — the papers turned up.

In the summer of 2013 the girl was indeed diagnosed with a number for illnesses including enuresis. However the hospital at the time did not have a neuro-urologist, so the investigation of bladder function was not carried out and the cause of the illness was not diagnosed.

Now the investigators needed to somehow, via suggestion if necessary, to turn the hospital documents in their favour. If enuresis could have been caused only by physiological but also by psychosomatic causes, why not employ a primitive manipulation and conclude that it was caused by Dmitriev’s actions? There is, of course, no proof, but, let an expert make this supposition, and the judge can figure out the rest.

Yuri Dmitriev with students from the Moscow international film school

In the role of this expert, inspector Zavatsky employed the regional Psychoneurological Clinic teenage psychiatrist Tatyana Multykova. Having discussed enuresis with her in general, along with psychological trauma, and how the understanding of gender differences is formed, the inspector asked: could sexual activity cause enuresis? Of course they could, as could any psychological trauma, the psychiatrist rightly replied. This concludes the evidence gathering stage of the second case.

Inspector Zavatsky must have been very pleased with this conclusion, as he attached these final pages to the case.

And so for the second time the prosecutors presented parental care – yes, maybe unceremonious and coarse – as a crime. And the closed nature of the court case, intended to protect the child, in this case protected the security services from scrutiny.

What the experts say

You don’t need to be a top psychologist to understand that it is very easy to manipulate a vulnerable teenager who has lived in a children’s home, who is prevented from keeping in touch with past friends, who has been isolated for three years under the control of her grandmother, and who has also almost certainly been terrorised by the authorities.

For the past year the defence, with the help of independent expert psychologists and linguists, have worked to prove that Dmitriev’s adopted daughter gave her evidence under pressure.

For example, linguistics experts Anna Dybo (fellow of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Doctor of Philology), Irina Levontina (senior researcher at the Russian Language Institute at the Russian Academy of Sciences), Aleksandr Moldovan (academician at the Russian Academy of Sciences, head of research at the Russian Language Institute) and Dr Alexei Shmelev (senior researcher at the Russian Language Institute), having studied the texts of the interview, concluded:

Most of the questions posed by the inspector and the psychologist already contain the information necessary for the answer.

Some of the questions are composed so that it would be impossible to answer “yes” or “no”. More than that, the inspector and the psychologist frequently complete the girl’s answers, adding substantial meaning that was not originally there, and that gives the statements “additional weight”.

“The underage child, in a dialogue with two adults, who clearly and insistently demonstrate what answers they expect, finds herself in a situation of communicative pressure.

If the answer does not match the expectation, the inspector asks the question again and again,

so that the girl ends up choosing the most neutral answer that would not be her own answer”, the experts conclude.

In a separate expert statement, Moscow State University professor Veronika Nurkova, a doctor of psychology, notes that, judging by the texts of the psychologist Yelena Rudenkova’s interviews with Dmitriev’s adopted daughter, Rudenkova “started with a presumption of reliability of the information communicated [by the child]” which “represents a case of a falsely assumed purpose by the psychologist to gather evidence in proof of an existing hypothesis”.

Nurkova also concluded that the girl’s evidence did not correspond to the typical criteria of recollecting a traumatic experience, i.e. these are not the child’s own recollections, but were introduced artificially and externally.

What the lawyer says (spoiler: nothing!)

Defence lawyer Viktor Anufriev’s work on this case deserves a separate story or at least a couple of paragraphs. From a journalist’s viewpoint Anufriev has been all these years an insufferable lawyer: reserved; noncommittal; excessively, as it seemed, cautious. And also in denial of political motives for Dmitriev’s case.

But from Yuri Dmitriev’s perspective, Anufriev is certainly an outstanding lawyer. How many political cases do we know that resulted in acquittal? Yes, the verdict in the first case was reached against the background of a wide-reaching civil campaign in support of the historian. But

In Russia you can write a guilty verdict without any evidence, but an acquittal requires a legally flawless case.

In this sense Viktor Anufriev, who (not without help from organised supporters) sought the best experts and medics in Moscow to back up every word he said in court – and who persuaded them to travel, more the once, to Petrozavodsk – in this sense, Anufriev did everything with cut-diamond precision.

But even now, the defence lawyer categorically refuses to comment on the case, citing “the final aim of the defence” – “to hear a just and fair verdict”. Anufriev has let it be known that he is certain not only that the historian is innocent, but also that the Russian legal system is capable of reaching such a verdict.

The unknown

Really only one thing is unknown: who needed to persecute Yuri Dmitriev for so long, and despite all the reputational cost for the investigators, the prosecutors, the judges and in general for the republic’s authorities? And why?

Before 2016 only enthusiasts had heard of Sandarmokh [the main burial site studied by Dmitriev], let alone Dmitriev. Today even Vladimir Putin is getting pestered with questions about this upstart historian. The case is being discussed at the Council of Europe. Nobel laureates speak up to defend the historian. In September 2019, twenty foreign ambassadors visited Sandarmokh: never had the place seen so many diplomats before.

Yuri Dmitriev in 2004, working on excavations on Sekirnaya hill, the site
of penal detention sector of the Solovetsky special security camp.

From the outset, Yuri Dmitriev’s supporters had a suspicion, of which for the past three years they had never received direct documentary proof. But it’s worth talking about it directly.

On 6 December 2016, a week after the break-in at Dmitriev’s flat, and three days after the police received the anonymous report, a new head of the Federal Security Service (FSB) of Karelia was appointed. Major-general Anatoly Seryshev, who had been head of Karelia FSB departments from 2011, was transferred to Moscow and appointed deputy head of the federal customs service.

Seryshev’s five-year tenure in Karelia was marked by politically-motovated cases against businessmen who had “run” the region before his appointment, and against opposition politicians from the Yabloko party.

In October 2014 the newswire Capital on the Onego published a letter by one of the persecuted members of the [Karelian] republican Assembly, Devlet Alikhanov. At the time, he was known as the eminence grise of Petrozavodsk, and was suspected of fraud involving municipal property. Alikhanov’s friends and partners had already spent a year under arrest. But in this case what matters is not his case but the way that he, addressing Seryshev, described the mechanisms the latter had built for controlling the judiciary. (I’ve kept the orthography of the original).

From Karelia Assembly Deputy Devled Alikhanov To The Head Of Karelia Fsb Department Anatoly Seryshev (2014)

The level of your co-operation with the judiciary became obvious only recently. Perhaps you can be proud of such all-encompassing power of the structure under your control, but I, as deputy, do not consider it normal that your colleagues announce the contents of a court’s verdict two or three days before it is reached. That they say with certainty what prison time this accused or another will be sentenced to serve. That they use every means to stop the accused from obtaining evidence proving their innocence, and that they hold “discussions” with every institution that could in one way or another assist the accused in their defence.
…What is your goal? Perhaps you need something from me personally? I cannot understand what your desired outcome is? Why would you ruin not only people’ lives, but also functioning enterprises and investment projects, especially such a difficult time for the country?

Six months after writing this letter, Alikhanov himself was arrested, and in 2017 he was sentenced to six years in jail. In December 2018 the judges of the Supreme Court completely cleared Alikhanov of all charges and granted him the right to rehabilitation, but, less than a month later, the impossible happened. The Supreme Court, with the same presiding judges, annulled its own decision, and the businessman was once again detained.

Read this again: the same judges, who a month earlier had cleared a man of all charges, for some reason had a change of heart, and decided that he is guilty as charged.

Anatoly Seryshev meanwhile soared even higher. In the summer of 2018 he joined a number of presidential commissions and even headed some of them – specifically, the commission on state awards, on citizenship, and on the staffing of the Ministry of the Interior.

By early autumn of 2018, Petrozavodsk prosecutor Yelena Askerova, who had worked on the first Dmitriev case and who gave the go-ahead to the prosecution in the second, had unexpectedly stepped down. Askerova told journalists that she wanted to completely change her life, and hadn’t expected this herself. (I spoke with Yelena Askerova a year after her dismissal, and she insisted that she was genuinely convinced that the historian was guilty).

And in November, the presidential commission for preliminary selection of federal judge candidacies (Seryshev is not officially a member) refused the application by judge Maria Nosov, who had acquitted Dmitriev, for a transfer from Petrozavodsk city court to the Supreme Court of Karelia. The regional qualification collegiate had already approved her candidacy, but Nosova did not get the approval at the Kremlin commission level. The Vesti Karelii internet portal reported that this might have happened because her daughter was living in France.

A Memorial Day demonstration for Stalin’s victims on
5 August (an event initiated by Yuri Dmitriev)

According to one of Novaya Gazeta’s sources, familiar with the candidate selection procedure, formally, the commission is only guided by the law On the Status of Judges. However the text of this law makes no mention of such a barrier to a candidate for a judge’s post as an adult child’s residency abroad. The law only precludes the spouses and underage children of Russian judges from having accounts in overseas banks.

Bullets from a Browning revolver in Yuri Dmitriev’s hands, which were found in
the remains of 26 people executed at Sekirny hill (Solovki). Photo: Anna Artemyeva/Novaya Gazeta

A second Novaya Gazeta source reported that the candidates’ details are sent to the commission members several weeks in advance, they study them, make their decision and only vote at the commission meeting. The source said that he never saw Anatoly Seryshev at any of the commission meetings. Another matter however is how the candidate’s “reference card” is formulated, what becomes the deciding factor, and who can influence this. No judge is appointed without the FSB’s approval.

Seryshev’s career moves peculiarly correlate to developments in the Dmitriev case. The case began on Seryshev’s watch. While he focused on his job at federal customs and lost his direct influence in Karelia, Yuri Dmitriev was acquitted. As soon as Seryshev made it into the upper echelons of power, the prosecutor resigned, the judge was refused a promotion, and a new case was launched against the historian himself.

The situation looks schizophrenic, just like the first time.

2017. Yuri Dmitriev is kept in jail on absurd charges, while Vladimir Putin opens the “Wall of Sorrow” in Moscow, in memory of the victims of political repression.

2020. Yuri Dmitriev is back in jail on equally absurd charges. The Russian military history society, at the request of Karelia’s Ministry of Culture, has dug over Sandarmokh in order to deny that the people buried there were political prisoners, claiming that this fact “cements in citizens’ minds an unjustified sense of guilt in relation to alleged [!!! – Novaya] foreign victims of repressions”. Dmitriev is being intimidated in the Petrozavodsk jail. Meanwhile the president appoints [the federal archive authority] Rosarkhiv, the FSB, the Ministry of the Interior and the State Penal Service to conduct research into creating a single database of the victims of political repressions – the very job that Yuri Dmitriev had been performing for the previous 30 years, within the scope of the Karelian republic. And if such a database were to be created, it would contain the evidence he uncovered.

Looks like Karelia doesn’t quite share the president’s position that “the terrible past can not be erased from the national memory” and that “our duty is not to allow the past to be forgotten”.

***

This may be a stylistic excess, but like dozens of other journalists and activists, I have been working on Dmitriev’s case for three years, and I would like to allow myself to look at this story from another angle that is important to me.

Everyday, commonplace violence against women and girls, including what is not even considered violence in many countries, including ours, is called by the UN the most large-scale human rights problem of our times. An absolute majority of men perceive women to be an object, from childhood. She can be touched, with no regard for how she feels, while she herself always has to mind the feelings of the men around her.

This is also probably fair to say about Dmitriev, a simple and elderly man from another era. But it is important to notice how it is the security services, not Dmitriev himself, that perpetuate this situation with this fabricated case. Just think how crazy we must have become, how used to seeing the female body as solely a sexualized object, if a photo of an unclothed three year old girl, taken by her own father, is already considered pornography. And if touching her private parts to wash them is a sexual act.

We can think again: would this even be a case, if the girl was being brought up by an adoptive mother, not an adoptive father? What then are single fathers to do? Are they all, in the eyes of the Investigative Committee, potential perverts?

Or are perverts only those who oppose the current regime?

Karelia’s “law enforcement” used this stereotypical attitude to destroy a historian’s reputation.

Did Dmitriev touch his adopted daughter’s genital area? Yes. Did he do it because of a paedophile tendency, or out of some criminal motive? No, he did it to check if her underwear was dry when he could smell urine, as is proved by three expert analyses of Dmitriev himself, and the hospital discharge notes on the girl’s enuresis. Should Dmitriev have checked the dryness of her underwear in some other way, rather than this crude method? He probably should have, especially since at the age of eight a child could already feel discomfort at having their personal boundaries crossed. But was there anything criminal in Dmitriev’s motives or actions? In my opinion, evidently not. (Incidentally, in the second prosecution case the whole issue of a motive was dropped altogether. Maybe, in inspector Zavatsky’s view, Yuri Dmitriev just touched his daughter for fun.)

At the 7 July sitting, the prosecution requested a 15-year jail sentence for Dmitriev, considering him to be guilty on all charges: making pornography, indecent acts, forced sexual activity and weapons possession. (Among all his junk. Dmitriev did indeed have a sawn-off section of a rifle barrel that can’t be used for shooting. He had taken it off some boys who were playing with the metal bit in the yard.)

The defence attorney has once again asked for the historian to be acquitted on all the vile charges, and to be freed from detention in the courtroom.

The verdict and the sentence will be announced on 22 July.

No matter what they are, on 5 August there will be a Memorial Day at Sandarmokh.

More about the Dmitriev case:

■ The Dmitriev affair web site and the “Free Yuri Dmitriev” facebook page (in English)

■ About Yuri Dmitriev on the Russian Reader

■ The historian who dug too deep, on Open Democracy. And an interview with Yuri Dmitriev

■ Human Rights Watch statement


The Russian State’s Case Against Yuri Dmitriev, Excavated

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