Press Release, 20.11.2025

Photo: Boris Vishnevsky / Photo by the Yabloko Press Service

St. Petersburg City Court on 20 November 2025 recognised the collection “Chronicles of Reborn Arkanar”, published in September 2015, as “extremist material”. The book is a collection of articles by Yabloko Deputy Chairman Boris Vishnevsky. It was “written by a true patriot of Russia,” famous actor and Honorary Citizen of St. Petersburg Oleg Basilashvili noted in his review when the book was published.

It should be noted that the St.Petersburg Public Prosecutor’s Office filed an administrative lawsuit demanding recognition of Vishnevsky’s collection of articles as “extremist material” on 30 September. In the lawsuit, the prosecutor cited an examination the substantive part of which comprises less than two pages, whilst the document itself represents a subjective and biased interpretation of the book’s content. The authors of the “study” — a Master of Religious Studies and a practical psychologist of the public education system — assess the presence of unlawful actions in the book and reflect on the constitutional order. They then reach a conclusion about calls to violence in the phrase “return to the civilised world” and call Vishnevsky’s “invectives” about the church potentially having “earthly goals” offensive. Moreover, the “experts”, assessing a book published more than ten years ago, cite Criminal Code provisions of the 2024 edition.

Boris Vishnevsky’s defence in court is provided by lawyers Mikhail Biryukov and Andrei Chertkov. During court proceedings, they presented to the court alternative conclusions by specialists completely refuting the findings of the “examination” commissioned by the public prosecutor’s office. For example, philologist and member of the Guild of Expert Linguists on Information and Documentation Disputes Svetlana Drugoveyko-Dolzhanskaya presented her review of the prosecution’s “examination”. In material devoted to one of the court hearings, the Fontanka newspaper noted that Svetlana Drugoveyko-Dolzhanskaya’s experience in the field of forensic linguistic examination comprises approximately 30 years and exceeds the experience of the authors of the document used in the public prosecutor’s office lawsuit.

“In my life I have read more than a hundred expert conclusions, but I have never seen such a ‘masterpiece’. This ‘masterpiece’ was written by a person who has not the slightest idea about linguistic examination and cannot even express their thoughts,” Drugoveyko-Dolzhanskaya said (quote from “Fontanka” material). Moreover, she pointed out to the court “schoolboy errors” in the work of the authors of the “study” from the public prosecutor’s office side and the absence in one of these authors of the linguistic education necessary in this case.

Speaking in debate, lawyer Andrei Chertkov indicated that Boris Vishnevsky is Yabloko Deputy Chairman, whilst the party itself “has for many years opposed such manifestations as incitement of political, social, national hatred and enmity, propaganda of exclusiveness, nationalism, anti-Semitism, and fascism”. Boris Vishnevsky’s own intransigence towards such negative phenomena was noted in the character reference presented to the court.

This administrative case, the lawyer noted, “does not smell very good”, which is perfectly understood by Vishnevsky’s opponents, “fulfilling a dubious social order”:

“It is no accident that the public prosecutor’s office’s suddenly arising concern about the content of a collection of journalistic articles written in 2008–2014 and published ten years ago is motivated by the need to consider an appeal from ‘concerned citizens’ — a certain hardly known public association whose representatives quite ‘accidentally’ acquired the disputed book somewhere on Ozon.ru and were struck by its malicious and provocative content.”

The public prosecutor’s office’s reaction to the ‘citizens’ appeal’ appears rather strange in this sense, the defence indicated, — the fact is that at one of the court hearings, the prosecution literally struggled to answer: how, by whom, when and in what manner was this appeal considered and what decision was made on it. Then in court, representatives of the Expert Centre of Herzen State Pedagogical University of Russia appeared for the public prosecutor’s office side, and they voiced the text of the “expert study” of Vishnevsky’s book. All this indicates only that the persecution initiated by the public prosecutor’s office is not a reaction to the ‘appeal of concerned citizens’, but rather the supervisory authority’s own initiative.

Also in debate, the defence side once again examined in detail the errors of the “experts” who conducted the “study” of the book’s text — stylistic, logical and even orthographic.

“The administrative plaintiff’s side, in violation of the requirements of Article 62 of the Code of Administrative Proceedings of the Russian Federation, has not presented relevant, admissible, reliable and unambiguous evidence confirming conclusions about the harmful and extremist nature of Boris Vishnevsky’s book,” Andrei Chertkov emphasised in his speech. “We are talking about assumptions having at the same time an obviously politically motivated character, which by no means enhances the supervisory authority. Taking this into account, the very filing of this administrative lawsuit should be viewed as an encroachment on the ‘ideological diversity’ guaranteed by the Constitution of the Russian Federation, its Article 13, as well as on freedom of speech and thought enshrined in Article 29 of the Basic Law.”

Nevertheless, the court ignored all arguments of genuine experts and the defence side, deciding to include Boris Vishnevsky’s book in the list of “extremist materials”.

The court’s decision will be appealed.