Sergey Koltyrin, former director of the Medvezhyegorsk Museum and attendant of the Sandarmokh Memorial Complex for victims of political repressions, died in the Republican Hospital №2 of the Federal Penal Service of Karelia at the age of 66. Newspaper Sever.Realii reported this on April 2 with reference to his brother Vladimir Koltyrin.
In May 2019, Karelian researcher Sergey Koltyrin was sentenced to nine years in prison for pedophilia and possession of weapons. In early March, the court decided to release him because of a terminal incurable disease, but the Prosecutor's Office appealed this decision, and Koltyrin was in custody until the appeal was considered. He died before being released.
Sergey Koltyrin, the director of the Medvezhyegorsk Museum and the attendant of the Sandarmokh, was detained in October 2018 on suspicion of complex sexual abuse of a minor. In May 2019, he was sentenced to nine years in prison. As the court found, Koltyrin and his friend seduced a child. The charge was based on a video recording of the crime scene.
Koltyrin opposed the supposition of Petrozavodsk historians that mass graves could belong to Soviet soldiers who died in Finnish concentration camps, but not to repressed Soviet citizens. At the same time, in 2018, the city administration appointed him executive officer for the excavation of the RMHS in Sandarmokh that was supposed to confirm the theory. Back then, he was already afraid that he would suffer the same fate as Yuri Dmitriev — a Karelian local history expert accused of pedophilia and having discovered Sandarmokh.
