Yury Dmitriev is a local historian and activist in Karelia (Northwest Russia). Since the early 1990s, he has worked to locate the execution sites of Stalin's Great Terror in Karelia and, through work in the archives, to identify as many as possible of the buried victims they contain. He has worked continually since the late 1980s to compile "Books of Remembrance" for Karelia, listing all the names of those executed there.

Dmitriev was arrested and charged with making pornographic images of his foster daughter, Natasha, who was 11 at the time. From the outset, Dmitriev's colleagues declared the charges to be baseless and motivated by a determination to discredit the historian and his work. The closed trial attracted national and international attention and criticism. A second assessment by a court-appointed body of the photographs of his foster daughter concluded that they contained no element of pornography and had been taken, as the accused insisted, to monitor the health of a sickly child. The girl was sickly and weak, with a severe delay in her physical development, as confirmed by medical records. Restoring his daughter's health and strengthening her physical condition was one of Dmitriev's main concerns.

During the eight years that the girl lived with the Dmitriev family, the guardianship authorities monitored her living conditions, upbringing, maintenance and respect for her rights. According to Yuri Dmitriev, he regularly photographed the girl naked in order to protect the family from allegations of mistreatment. At a course for foster parents, Dmitriev was told that it was necessary to closely monitor the girl's development, keep diaries and record her progress. Sergei Krivenko, a member of the board of the International Memorial Society, who knows Dmitriev well, said: 'This attitude was superimposed on his character as a searcher. He takes all such cases that require fixation very seriously. That's why he decided to keep a diary with photos of the girl's growth.

On 5 April 2018, Dmitriev was acquitted of all but one minor offence. Within two months he was arrested and soon put on trial again. Given a short sentence at the end of his second trial in July 2020, the verdict was overruled by the High Court of Karelia and the charges returned for an unprecedented third judicial examination. Dmitriev and his lawyer Victor Anufriev battled through the courts in Petrozavodsk, St Petersburg and Moscow to have their appeal against the verdict and sentence heard. In October 2021, the case finally reached the Supreme Court of the Russian Federation. But on December 27 his sentence was increased to 15 years.

Yury Dmitriev spent his first year of life in a Soviet orphanage. In 1957, he was adopted by a childless army officer and his wife. He found out that he was not their child at the age of 14. His father was posted to East Germany, and Yury spent part of his childhood in Dresden.

He began but did not finish a course at the Northwest Health Department of the Leningrad Medical College. During the Gorbachev years, Dmitriev was a member of the Karelian People's Front, and served between 1988 and 1991 as an aide to USSR People's Deputy Mikhail Zenko. It was back then that he first encountered mass graves of those shot in the 1930s.

Dmitriev is known for his role in the discovery and investigation of two major burial sites, Sandarmokh and Krasny Bor, and their subsequent transformation into "informal" memorial complexes.

From 1998 to 2009, Dmitriev headed the Academy for the Defence of Socio-Legal Rights, a Karelian human rights NGO. For his efforts and activism he has been repeatedly honoured with Russian and international awards.