Grigory Yavlinsky’s web-site, 18.02.2021

Photo: Session of the Third Court of Cassation considering the case of Yuri Dmitriyev, 16 February, 2021

“Here, in the Sandarmokh area, a place of mass executions, over 7,000 innocent people were killed from 1934 to 1941 by the NKVD executioners: residents of Karelia, prisoners and special settlers of the White Sea – Baltic Sea labour camp, prisoners of the Solovetsky prison. Remember us, people! Don’t kill each other! ”

This inscription was to be carved on the monument to victims of political repression in Sandarmokh, Karelia. But before the opening of the monument, the words “NKVD executioners” disappeared from the text. The thing is that the heirs of those same NKVD [People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs in 1934 – 1943, engaged above other things in political reprisals and executions] executioners are now in power in our country. And, as the investigation of the Project has shown, these heirs are not only ideological, but sometimes biological.

This week the cassation court upheld the verdict to the historian Yuri Dmitriyev. A verdict in a completely falsified case. The verdict, according to which the 65-year-old head of the Karelian Memorial [human rights society] was sent to a strict regime penal colony for 13 years. This is a Stalinist massacre not only over a definite person, it is an attempt to repress the memory, the history of our country, this is a crime against the people.

All his life Yuri Dmitriyev fought for the historical truth, spoke about the crimes of the Stalin’s regime, the murders of innocent people. It was Dmitriyev, together with his colleagues, who found the places of mass executions during the Great Terror [the period of the greatest number of Stalin’s political reprisals and executions in 1937-1938] in Karelia and the Arkhangelsk region.

But the modern Russian authorities do not need exposure of the crimes of their predecessors. Today in Russia they shoot heroic films about the “executioners of the NKVD”, and install memorial plaques with their names. Meanwhile, the archives of the Cheka-NKVD-KGB remain classified until 2044. The heirs have something to hide.

All of this indicates that Putin’s system has virtually legitimised the presence of “NKVD executioners” in all branches of government and at all levels. Regional departments of the FSB [the Federal Security Service], the Investigative Committee and the Ministry of Internal Affairs are engaged in falsification of criminal cases against those undesirable [for the regime]. The courts of absolutely all instances pass convictions on a telephone call. Everyone has their own motives: either they did not bring money somewhere, or they need to eliminate a competitor somewhere, or they want just to shut the mouths somewhere. In each such fabricated case, “success” (i.e., a maximum term of imprisonment) depends on the rank of the patron in the vertical of power. Someone is sanctioned for a case at the district level, someone at the regional level, someone right in the Kremlin. This is how the vertical of executioners works.

This is exactly how the case against Yuri Dmitriyev was fabricated: the regional department of the Federal Security Service, patronage at the top, and propaganda support in the media as a bonus.

By the way, the latest investigations by Bellingcat and The Insider point to the existence of real “death squads” in Russia consisting of active FSB officers who are engaged in the elimination of political opponents of the regime.

Thus, the case of the “NKVD executioners” is alive and well in modern Russia. Only by completely rooting out this Bolshevik-Stalinist vertical from the system of state administration will people be able to live without fear that tomorrow they will be arrested, imprisoned, poisoned, killed. And the first step towards this should be a comprehensive state’s legal assessment of the Bolshevik-Stalinist system, its practices and the most serious crimes. This will inevitably lead to the assessment of the events of [the Bolsheviks’ coup d’etat in] 1917, and recognition of the illegality of the dispersal of the Constituent Assembly, which led to a national tragedy and a terrible civil war, and an assessment of decades of state terror and political repression, and a statement of the absolute unacceptability of the use of terror, lies and violence in public policy. Movement towards a new free Russia is impossible without this.

Freedom to Yuri Dmitriyev! Freedom for political prisoners!

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