The final statement
‘For some reason, it is now customary to take pride only in military successes. Excuse me, but the motherland is like a mother. Mothers sometimes get sick, and sometimes things don’t work out for them. Does that mean we stop loving them? No.’
Your Honor! This is the second time I have spoken in this endless trial with my last word. And I would like to clarify my position-if it is not yet clear to the court-about why I am the way I am, why I act the way I do, and why I ended up in this cage.
Your Honor, I have already reported to the court that I may not be a completely normal person, not like everyone else. That is, I was born a normal, ordinary person, but I do not know who my biological parents are, where they are from, what nationality they are, what religion they are, and what culture they are from. And this greatly motivates me to search for my roots. I have been trying to do this for more than 30 years, without much success so far, but I think that someday I will be able to get to the bottom of this truth-what blood runs through my veins and what genes I have. That is why, as a child who was adopted at the age of one and a half, the topic of orphanhood is close to my heart, and I experience it from within.
Yes, there is this urge to find out about your roots. Why do this? To know which culture you belong to. I don’t want to say that I am of some royal lineage. It is important for me to realize which nation I am a son of. Because humans differ from insects-from butterflies or Colorado beetles-in that they have memory. And this memory of one’s ancestors, preferably going back seven or more generations, makes a person more independent in their judgments and allows them to draw more accurate conclusions because the memory of generations is concentrated within them. Unfortunately, I do not have this knowledge, so I strive to find it.
Why am I telling you this? So that you, Your Honor, can understand the motives that guided my actions in taking into my family a child like this, who is deprived of parental care and guardianship. Therefore, any obstacles along the way, especially those arising out of nowhere and at the whim of one or two officials in the administration, were not an insurmountable barrier to my wife and I taking the child into our family. The court knows what actions were taken; this is set out in the case file. We will not dwell on this now and will limit ourselves to saying that winning the custody battle has prompted me to pay closer attention to everything related to the child’s presence in our family.
Here [in the court], the prosecution said that we did not monitor [our daughter’s] health properly. This is the second paragraph of the agreement on creating a family: I am obliged to monitor her physical health. And so, as you have seen, Your Honor, all of this is documented. I may have been ahead of the curve, but I adopted the recommendations that were made by the high government tribune even before the law on telemedicine came into force.
Our dear prosecutor’s office says that there is no law on telemedicine. Our dear Karelian doctors insist that there is no order from the Ministry of Health. At the same time, this order is known in Moscow, and it has been in use there for two years. Not only that, but I can tell you that back in 2008, a telemedicine laboratory was set up at our medical institute based on one of these orders. It exists, there are founding documents, and there is a reference to the order. And if our respected Karelian doctors say that it is impossible to make a diagnosis based on an image or photograph… Perhaps it is impossible, but a professional can assume the presence of a certain disease and refer the child to the appropriate specialist.
She came here and acted as a specialist… I can’t say exactly what her position was, I don’t have the minutes of the meeting. So she determined the presence of a disease in the child based on some kind of photograph. When a person has fractures, a laceration-then I can see it, I can take some action: bandage it, apply a splint, apply cold. But what if I don’t understand what’s going on inside the child?
That’s why I repeatedly raised the alarm about [my daughter’s] underweight. When we took the child in at three and a half years old, she weighed 12 kilograms. At 11, when she was taken from our family, she weighed 24 kilograms. That’s the weight of a first grader, and [my daughter] was already in fifth grade. Her weight deficit was constantly between 25 and 30 percent, and that really worried me.
She was first sent to an endocrinologist at the age of six, in kindergarten. The specialists at the clinic examined her neck, thyroid gland, and lower abdomen, i.e., her pelvic organs, thoroughly and at length. Other children would go into that office for seven, eight, ten minutes. We spent 30 to 40 minutes in that office. ‘Nothing seems to be wrong, but there is something.’ ‘Let’s wait until next time, then maybe it will become clearer.’
The girl was quite active in sports. She ate well: but we had meat seven days a week. Beef, lamb, chicken, and a nice sausage with a side dish for breakfast. We didn’t economize on food, thank God, we had enough money. And [still] the child was thin and skinny. So this really bothered me.
Finally, in 2016, our fellow doctors managed to see something, and we were sent first to the City Children’s Hospital for a more detailed examination and then offered to undergo an examination at the republican children’s Hospital. Whether she [my daughter] underwent it or not, I unfortunately do not know, because literally a month before that, on December 13, I was taken into custody.
We also saw all the other specialists. At the last medical examination, the ophthalmologist said that her vision had deteriorated slightly because the child played a lot on her phone. Well, I made a strong decision-I replaced the child’s phone with a regular one that doesn’t have games that would impair her vision. I said, ‘Wait, we’ll see if your vision recovers by New Year’s, and then I’ll give you your phone back.’ By the way, I promised her that if she finished the quarter without any failing grades, I would buy her a new tablet for New Year’s… She has already broken two tablets of mine.
Your Honor, I want to say once again that I did not commit any vile acts against [my daughter]. What they are trying to pass off as some kind of erotic touching is nothing more than an interpretation of parental care. I did not climb on her, examine her, touch her, grope her, caress her, or anything of the sort! Everything that has been made up by the investigator and eagerly repeated by our beloved prosecutor’s office is untrue.
Now let’s talk about why I took [the child]. I have already explained why. I have also explained how it happened and how I looked after her health. And now-why I took the child into my family.
You see, I am eternally grateful to my parents, the ones who raised me. They are Alexei Filippovich Dmitriev, a career military man, an officer, and a front-line soldier. And my mother, Nadezhda Dimina. They come from simple peasant families. My father is from Siberia, from the Tyumen region, and my mother is from Vologda, from some remote village. They met during the war and married in 1946. My father was wounded three times: once by a bullet, once by shrapnel, and once by a bayonet, which left a scar under his heart. They stabbed him, but they didn’t succeed-they shot the German.
When they realized that God would not give them children (obviously because of the hardships and suffering they had endured during the war), they did what I consider to be a civic duty. They took me from the orphanage. They nursed me back to health, raised me, and brought me up in such a way that now, standing in this cage, I am not ashamed to look them in the eye. Not ashamed (Dmitriev’s parents died in 2000, five days apart-note from Meduza).
Following their example and remembering that they gave me life, my wife and I also decided to take in a child and raise her according to the principles on which we were raised. All the actions we took to welcome [the girl] into our family and to ensure that she grew up healthy, active, and so on, are regulated by the laws of the Russian Federation: the Family Code and all other laws.
I believe-and the Constitution of the Russian Federation supports me in this-that the strength of the state does not lie in tanks and guns, nuclear missiles, or the ability to send everyone to hell. No, the strength of the state lies in its people. How people behave in this state will determine how it develops, prospers, and becomes smarter. That is why, in accordance with the wishes of our Constitution, we wanted to raise a girl-well, a little girl at first, then a teenager, then a young woman-so that she would be a valuable member of our society.
We never forced any values on our child. We didn’t say that she had to love her dad because he was her dad. We didn’t say that she had to love her mom because she was her mom. A child has to do that herself in response to our love. We didn’t say that she had to love the state. A person does that herself when she feels the care of that state. Actually, that’s why I baptized her-or rather, allowed her to be baptized-so late.
She first mentioned the possibility of wearing a cross around her neck back in kindergarten, when she saw one of the other children wearing one: ‘Dad, I want one too.’ Well, dad explained to her that it wasn’t just a decoration. He explained that when she grew up and wanted to believe in God, she could choose something she liked better-then she could be baptized if she wanted to. That’s why we baptized [our daughter] so late, at the age of nine. At the age of eight, she expressed a desire to be baptized, so I sent her to Sunday school for a year so that she could learn what faith is so that knowledgeable people could explain to her what it means and teach her how to do everything correctly if she wanted to be baptized. At the end of Sunday school, I asked her again if she wanted to be baptized. She said, ‘I want to, and I know why.’ No one forced her, urged her, or tempted her with gifts.
And then, somehow, God granted her the honor of being baptized on Solovki. It is a very ancient, holy monastery. In addition to being ancient and holy, it is also, from the point of view of our recent history, a terrible place, the Solovetsky Special Purpose Camp, the infamous SLON.
[My daughter] was baptized in the Holy Ascension Church on Sekirnaya Mountain. In the 200 years of this monastery’s existence, you can count on one hand the number of people who have been baptized there. It is a very strict monastery, a very holy and tragic place. In the old days, women were not allowed on Sekirnaya Mountain at all. Now you can come, but no young lady has ever been baptized there. [My daughter] is the first and only one. And I thank God that he allowed [my daughter] to be baptized there.
During the Soviet era, in the 1920s and 1930s, it was a penal colony, where hundreds of people were held in unimaginable conditions, where those sentenced to death were held before their execution. Literally 30-40 meters from this church, they were shot. This is one of the first cemeteries on Solovki, which I also discovered.
And somehow the abbot of this skete, and the abbot of the entire monastery, did not object to [my daughter] being baptized according to the monastic rite on Sekirnaya Mountain. And when this sacrament took place, I honestly warned [my daughter]: now you will face great trials, because once a person is given a lot, once he is baptized in such a place, then the Lord will test his strength.
At home, she, without my participation (I saw it as I was passing by), sometimes prayed. And now, when I asked her grandmother in your presence, Your Honor, whether [my daughter] attends church, and heard that she does not, I understood why I do not feel a connection with [my daughter]. After all, for the first seven or eight months, I knew, I felt inside myself — I had the same feelings as [my daughter]. That’s how we are. That’s how we are attuned to each other. If the child is scared, I feel it. If the child is cold, I feel cold too. If the child is hot, I know it. If the child makes a successful or unsuccessful throw during training, I feel it too.
Nowadays, talking about patriotism is trendy, right? Well, excuse me, but patriotism is not just about talking. Who is a patriot? A patriot is a person who loves their homeland. For some reason, it is now customary to be proud only of military successes. Excuse me, but one’s motherland is like a mother. Mothers sometimes get sick, and sometimes things don’t work out for them. Does that mean we stop loving them? No. And-I don’t know if it’s for better or for worse-my path, my road, is to bring back from oblivion those people who disappeared through the fault of our native state, having been unjustly accused, shot, and buried in the woods like stray animals. There is no mound, no mention that people are buried here. God may have given me this cross to bear, but God also gave me this knowledge. I manage-not often, but sometimes-to find places of mass human tragedies. I connect them with names and try to make a place of remembrance in this place because memory is what makes a person human.
I can say the following about ‘military patriotism.’ My father was a front-line soldier, and we celebrated May 9 at home long before it became a public holiday. I remember it was in 1965, and we [celebrated] even before 1965.
My mother had six sisters. All of their husbands fought on the front lines of the war. So, these people talked least of all about victories at the table. Because for them, war is a tragedy and pain. And there were no flags. Victory is, above all, mourning and remembrance of those who died.
I completely agree with our country that we must remember those who died in the war because they are part of our memory. But we must also remember those people who died because of the evil will of our country’s leaders. And that, I believe, is patriotism. I taught this to my adopted daughter, and my own children, Yegor and Katya, know it too. My grandchildren know it, and the schoolchildren and students I have worked with know it. Probably all civilized people know and understand it. That is why, Your Honor, I believe that this case, which we have been examining and considering for a long, long time, three and a half years, was deliberately created to discredit my good name and at the same time cast a shadow on the graves and cemeteries of the victims of Stalin’s repressions, which I managed to uncover and to which people now come.
I do not know for what purpose this case was initiated. To erase people’s memories? These actions will not succeed. To deprive me of the opportunity to participate in this case? I have not participated in this case for three years, but it has not died down.
That is why, Your Honor, I ask you, when you retire to the deliberation room, to carefully review and verify everything once again. I did not commit the bad deeds that are described in many volumes here. I tried to raise my child to be a decent citizen and, I am not afraid to say it, a patriot of our country, and I did everything to make that happen. Perhaps even more than schools, after-school clubs, and all that.
That is all I have to say. Thank you.
Petrozavodsk City Court, Republic of Karelia, Russia
22 July 2020
Source: Meduza
More information about the case: Memorial
Photo: Vladimir Larionov / Reuters / Scanpix / LETA.