Press Release, 7.02.2022

Photo by wikimapia.org

Boris Vishnevsky, Deputy Chairman of Yabloko and an MP of the Legislative Assembly of St. Petersburg, sent an appeal to Natalia Putilovskaya, Chair of the St.Petersburg Committee on Education, with a request to conduct a check into the actions of Svetlana Lebedeva, Principal of School No. 168, who, according to teacher Serafima Saprykina, forced her to quit school in December 2021 for her reсiting to the students verses by Daniil Kharms and Alexander Vvedensky, the poets arrested and repressed in the Stalin’s period and labelled “enemies of the people” and tragically died in 1941.

School Prinicipal Lebedeva demanded that the teacher write a letter of resignation, and in case of refusal, she threatened to fire Serafima Saprykina under the article of the Labour Code “loss of confidence”. According to the teacher, the school principal said that school students should not study the works by Daniil Kharms and Alexander Vvedensky, since these poets had been “deservedly captured by the NKVD [the earlier name of the KGB] and tortured for their “crimes”, and the poems of these poets can only be discussed in narrow “bohemian” circles”.

In his appeal to the Education Committee, Boris Vishnevsky noted that the dismissal violates not only the law on education, but also the legislation on rehabilitation of victims of political repression of Stalin’s period.

“I am confident that the attempts to declare them “enemies of the people” and “accomplices of the fascists” are not only unacceptable for the state education system, but also directly contradict the Law of the Russian Federation “On the rehabilitation of victims of political repressions” and the Concept of State Policy to Perpetuate the Memory of Victims of Political Repressions. These documents condemn the terror and mass persecution of the people as incompatible with the idea of law and justice, and express deep sympathy for the victims of unjustified repressions, their families and friends,” the Vishnevsky noted.

Earlier, Boris Vishnevsky appealed to the Governor of St. Petersburg Alexander Beglov with a request to help preserve the mural with a portrait of Daniil Kharms, which became a city landmark, on the facade of the house in Mayakovsky Street, where the writer and poet lived from 1925 until his second arrest in 1941.