A RUSSIAN court increased a prison sentence for prominent Gulag historian Yury Dmitriyev today to a total of 15 years on charges his supporters say are punishment for his work.

Supporters insist the 65-year-old is being targeted because of his efforts to expose the horrors of the Soviet era.

Dmitriyev also serves as a local head of rights group Memorial, the country’s most prominent rights group, which may be shut down by the courts this week.

Last year, a court in northwestern Russia sentenced Dmitriyev to 13 years in prison on a controversial child sex charge. In December, prosecutors requested that the sentence be extended by two years.

Today, a court in the northwestern city of Petrozavodsk extended the historian’s sentence following the prosecutors’ request.

“Fifteen years to Yury Dmitriyev,” Memorial said on Twitter.

Dmitriyev spent decades locating and exhuming mass graves of people killed under Joseph Stalin’s rule and set up a memorial to them in Karelia region in Russia’s northwest.

Over the past few years, he has faced a series of trials on a number of charges including sexually abusing his adopted daughter. He has pleaded not guilty.

He was initially arrested in 2016 and charged with child pornography over several nude photos of his adopted daughter that he said he took to monitor her growth. A court acquitted him in 2018.

In a stunning turnaround, the not-guilty verdict was later overturned by a higher court and Dmitriyev was put back on trial on a new charge of forced sexual acts involving a child.

He was sentenced to 3.5 years in jail in July 2020, most of which he had already spent in pre-trial detention.

Prosecutors appealed against the verdict, asking for a harsher sentence.

As a result, the supreme court in Karelia issued a new sentence in September 2020, sending him to a high-security penal colony for 13 years.

Memorial rights group has declared Dmitriyev a political prisoner and says the real reason for his prosecution appears to be “his activity in preserving the memory of political repressions”.

Memorial, which investigates Soviet-era persecution of political prisoners and also campaigns against present-day rights abuses, says it could be shut by the year’s end. – AFP, December 27, 2021.