Russia’s Oryol Oblast court convicted poet Alexander Byvshev to 330 hours of community work and banned him from teaching for three years.
The court said that Byvshev had been “inciting hatred” with his “On Ukraine’s Independence” seven-verse poem, but the 41-year-old poet defended his poetry as another form of expressing his opinion, Russian independent website Grani.ru reported on April 9.
The first verse of this poem reads:
“You wanted freedom! – Moscow cries. – You’re shit!
Your Maidan for the Kremlin is like a leukoma in Cyclops’ eye.”
Byvshev posted “On Ukraine’s Independence” on his page on Vkontakte social networking site in February 2015 condemning Russia’s aggression against Ukraine. He did not plead guilty in the courtroom on April 9 and claimed he had every right for self-expression, Grani.ru reported.
It is not the first time Byvshev has been punished for his work.
He is an energetic critic of Russian society and politics and his poems are sprinkled with blunt colloquialisms such as “vatnik,” an archetypical Russian who slavishly supports the Russian regime and disdains others, and “moskal,” an ethnic slur used by Ukrainians for Russians living in Russia.
In 2014, he wrote a poem “To Ukrainian Patriots” in which he disapproved Russian military actions in Crimea:
“To the attacks of moskal bands
Strike back in Bandera style, friends.
Let occupants choke on their own blood!”
The following year he was sentenced for the poem, also for “inciting hatred,” to 300 hours of community work which he served in full by cleaning streets and a local cemetery, Byvshev said in an interview to Meduza, a Russian independent website, on April 4.
He also lost his job at a school in Kromy town where he had taught German and French languages.
He told Meduza he could not stay indifferent to Russia’s annexation of Crimea because his mother was from eastern Ukraine where he spent his childhood.
Shortly after the first conviction, he was added to Russia’s list of extremists and terrorists for another poem, “Ukrainian Insurgents,” which described an imaginary fight between Russian and Ukrainian soldiers.
Last week Byvshev posted on his Facebook page that the authorities opened a new criminal case against him for two short poems in which he scoffed at Oryol city’s waste pollution (“My liberal nose has swollen. The stench makes me sick.”), and lack of culture of its citizens (“To litter a country like that! What kind of people live here, God knows!”)
Byvshev told Meduza that people in his hometown Kromy avoid him and try not to openly express their support. “People are afraid to shake my hand. Everyone is cowed,” he said. “It came to the point that when I come to a printing shop and ask to scan some documents, they refuse; they are afraid to become accomplices in my “crimes.”
He said that he is being denied jobs and that he lives with his elderly parents under a travel restriction.
