Some things you just can’t make up, and then there’s the case of Yury Dmitriev—a 69-year-old historian who’s spent his career unearthing the brutal realities of Soviet repression—being put in solitary confinement for poor participation in morning exercise. Novaya Gazeta Europe relays that Dmitriev, currently eight years into a 15-year sentence at a Russian penal colony, was sent to a punishment cell for five days after failing to properly complete his daily calisthenics. Evidently, history isn’t the only thing that repeats itself.
Exercise, But Make It Kafkaesque
There’s surreal, and then there’s an elderly, ailing political prisoner being reprimanded for “poor performance” in state-mandated group calisthenics. The article recounts that Dmitriev has a slew of health issues—heart disease, high blood pressure, cataracts; the kind of medical profile that typically earns some leeway, or at least a gentle exemption note. Despite this, his repeated requests over the past month to be excused from the mandatory drills—owing to dizziness and exhaustion—were turned down, and this denial came just as he was waiting to be transferred to the hospital.
Solitary, or “punishment cells” as described by Novaya Gazeta Europe, are essentially prisons within the prison—a situation that rarely bodes well for even the healthiest inmate, let alone someone with Dmitriev’s conditions. Is the point rehabilitation, or simply the demonstration of power?
The Weight of History
Dmitriev’s imprisonment is already fraught. Officially, he’s incarcerated for taking inappropriate photographs of his daughter—a charge he and his former colleagues at Memorial, the Nobel Prize-winning organization he helped lead, argue is punishment for his uncompromising work documenting Soviet-era purges. Memorial itself was forced to shutter in 2021 after being found in violation of “foreign agent laws,” with most of its operations moving abroad after early 2022.
Interestingly, Memorial pointed out Dmitriev was sent to solitary “at the exact moment” he was awaiting a hospital transfer—a coincidence that lands with the subtlety of a kettlebell. Earlier in the year, he was placed in solitary for nearly identical reasons, giving the impression of a routine rather than a rare discipline. Does anyone actually expect a 69-year-old with cataracts and high blood pressure to keep pace with penal colony calisthenics, or is the exercise ritual itself just another tool for control?
Irony, Exercise, and the Preservation of Memory
There’s a certain dark symmetry in the story: a man who has built his reputation chronicling the inhumanity of forced labor and political imprisonment now penalized for insufficient vigor during government-mandated morning exercise. The line between satire and reality seems unusually thin.
These details, even laid out dry as fact, prompt a certain pause. Do authorities think an ailing historian should be performing jumping jacks with revolutionary zeal? Or is consistently failing the morning roll call simply a convenient excuse for yet another five days behind a locked cell door?
The persistent, quiet work of people like Dmitriev—and the organizations painstakingly documenting such cases—serves as an ongoing reminder: sometimes, the distance between the histories we study and the headlines we read is measured in little more than a missed calisthenics session. Some echoes, it seems, refuse to fade, even when history is made to do squats.
