No End in Sight for Jailed Gulag Historian Yury Dmitriyev

PETROZAVODSK, RUSSIA - Thirty-five-year-old Katerina blinks away the start of tears and says she plans tomorrow to take to the jail warm clothing for winter to her father, Stalin-era historian Yury Dmitriyev.

His decades-long research to expose the scale of the late Communist leader’s terror have met with mounting criticism under Russian President Vladimir Putin and landed him in jail in the Karelian capital of Petrozavodsk in northwest Russia, on what his family and colleagues say are false charges leveled to silence him and to deter others from disrupting the rehabilitation of the late Soviet leader Joseph Stalin.

A slender woman with short-cropped dark hair, she agrees she is as obstinate as her 63-year-old father, a stubbornness softened in both their cases by a lively sense of humor. She laughs recalling the battles they have had over the years. “We have the same character,” she says. “He's a great father. And he's not just my father. He's a friend. And I miss him. He's my best friend.”

His importance in her life and the lives of her two children has become even greater in the wake of her husband’s death six years ago. She had to give up her work to campaign for her father and she visits him twice a month. She says he is holding up but feels the loss of access to serious books. “We aren’t allowed to take him any,” she says. “The prison authorities say we can donate books to the library, but then they add they don’t need any.”

Her obstinacy is crucial now — as is his — battling what Katerina and Dmitriyev’s colleagues say is a state effort to discredit him.