Press Release, 8.09.2026

Photo: Dmitry Smirnov / Photo from a personal archive

 On 8 September, the Nizhny Novgorod Regional Court granted a claim filed by Alexei Rizovatov, a candidate from the Party of Pensioners, and revoked the registration of Dmitry Smirnov, Yabloko’s candidate for Avtozavodsky single-mandate constituency No. 133. The court’s ruling will be appealed. A few hours after the hearing, Smirnov received a text message notifying him of another hearing — on an administrative case under Article 20.3 of the Code of Administrative Offences of the Russian Federation, on “displaying extremist symbols” — 33 minutes before it was due to start.

The claim was prompted by a photograph of Lemmy Kilmister, founder and frontman of the British rock band Motörhead, which Smirnov had posted on VKontakte on 29 December 2015, after the musician’s death. In the photograph, Kilmister is wearing a German cross around his neck.

Photo: Screenshot from the case file (the cross that prompted the case against Smirnov has been blurred)

The central question in the hearing was whether the cross shown in the photograph constituted Nazi symbolism.

Smirnov maintained that the photograph showed an old German military decoration whose history goes back to 1813. The cross bears no swastika, which was added to the decoration in Nazi Germany only in 1939.

The expert cited in the case stated that the emblem was “confusingly similar to a Nazi decoration” and was associated with Nazi symbolism in public perception. Smirnov’s side countered that “popular consciousness and perception” have no standing as a source of law in jurisprudence.

Smirnov himself pointed out that Kilmister had collected antique military memorabilia but was not a neo-Nazi and did not promote such ideas. Motörhead toured Russia on numerous occasions and performed at major concert venues in Moscow and St. Petersburg.

Dmitry Smirnov is a well-known Nizhny Novgorod rock musician and co-founder of one of the region’s oldest rock bands, Posledny Priyut.

It should be noted that a couple of hours after the hearing on Smirnov’s registration as a candidate, Dmitry received a text message about a court hearing on the administrative case under Article 20.3 of the Code of Administrative Offences of the Russian Federation, on “displaying extremist symbols”. The message arrived 33 minutes before the hearing was due to start: Smirnov received the text from the court system at 15:27 on 8 September. The hearing at the Nizhegorodsky District Court of Nizhny Novgorod was scheduled for 16:00, according to the message.

Given the court’s haste, Smirnov was unable to attend the hearing.

It should be noted that on the same day, the Chelyabinsk Regional Court removed Yaroslav Shcherbakov, Chairman of Chelyabinsk Yabloko, from the State Duma elections. The court granted a claim filed by Artyom Kungurtsev, a candidate from the Greens party. The claim was based on allegations of unlawful campaigning and copyright infringement over the use, in Shcherbakov’s campaign video, of Banksy’s work “Girl with Balloon”, an image of Andrei Sakharov with the quote “The disunity of mankind threatens it with destruction”, and the words of Soviet diplomat Andrei Gromyko: “Ten years of negotiations are better than one day of war”.

Courts had already removed three other Yabloko candidates from the elections on 31 August: Alexei Akimenko  in Bashkortostan (constituency No. 6), Ayrat Gumerbaev in Tatarstan (constituency No. 34), and Anton Paramonov in the Tula Region (constituency No. 181).