From Democracy Digest:

An amateur but very determined historian, Yuri Dmitriev, finally found the gruesome prize he had long been searching for — burial mounds containing the remains of political prisoners executed by Stalin’s secret police. He is now in jail, awaiting trial on what his family, friends and supporters dismiss as blatantly fabricated charges of pedophilia, an accusation that has frequently been used to discredit and silence voices the Russian authorities do not like, the New York Times reports:

At the time of his initial arrest, Mr. Dmitriev was chairman of the Karelia branch of Memorial, a group that has infuriated Russian nationalists by focusing on the suffering visited on Russians, Ukrainians and others by the secret police instead of by foreigners. The Russian authorities branded Memorial a “foreign agent” in 2012, and the group has been demonized since by the state-controlled news media as a Western-backed nest of depraved traitors…..With the approaching 75th anniversary on May 9 of the Red Army’s victory over Nazi Germany and its allies like Finland, the suffering inflicted on Russia by its own rulers in the Kremlin has become an unwanted distraction from memories of the country’s immense wartime sacrifice against foreign enemies. RTWT

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