Karelian historian Sergei Koltyrin, released from punishment due to illness, died in a prison hospital

Sergei Koltyrin, former superintendent of Sandarmokh and director of the museum of local lore, died in Republican Hospital No. 2 of the UFSIN in Karelian Medvezhyegorsk. This is reported by the publication Karelia News.

The cause of death was an oncological disease, the Memorial Human Rights Center told Dozhd, citing the historian's brother.

A month ago, the Medvezhyegorsk court released Koltyrin from punishment in his criminal case of pedophilia. The court made such a decision in connection with the grave state of health of Koltyrin. However, the prosecutor's office appealed the court's decision, and the historian waited for the appeal in the prison hospital.

At the end of May 2019, the Medvezhyegorsk court sentenced Sergei Koltyrin to 9 years in a penal colony. He was found guilty of depraved acts and sexual intercourse with a person who has reached the age of 12, but has not reached the age of 14, committed by a group of persons by prior agreement. He was also accused of illegal arms trafficking (Article 222 of the Criminal Code).

According to investigators, Koltyrin and his friend Yevgeny Nosov repeatedly raped a distant relative of the latter in 2018, when he was only 12 years old. Koltyrin pleaded not guilty, but Interfax, citing the Investigative Committee, reported the opposite. Nosov was sentenced to eleven years in prison.

• Sergei Koltyrin is the former director of the Medvezhyegorsk Regional Museum, which manages the Sandarmokh memorial. In August 2018, he was appointed curator of the excavations at Sandarmokh, which was carried out by the Russian Military Historical Society.
• According to 7×7, Koltyrin criticized the hypothesis of Karelian historians that there could be burials of victims of the Finnish occupation of 1941-1944 in Sandarmokh - the director of the museum insisted that the memorial contained only execution pits of political prisoners.
• The head of the Karelian "Memorial" Yury Dmitriev - one of the pioneers of the execution pits in Sandarmokh - was accused of producing child pornography. The case was opened because of the pictures of the naked daughter - in fact, he recorded the physical development of the adopted child. The court eventually acquitted the historian, but later he was accused of violent acts of a sexual nature against his adopted daughter (clause “b” part 4 of article 132 of the Criminal Code). Dmitriev is in jail.