In St. Petersburg, the Primorsky District Court fined Communist Party member Alexei Filippov for “inciting hatred” for reposting a post on VKontakte with a quote from philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre for 10,000 rubles.
Tatyana Dyachkova, a lawyer, told Znak.com about this.
A case was opened against Filippov under Article 20.3.1 of the Code of Administrative Offenses of the Russian Federation for a picture on a social network with Sartre’s words “Any anti-communist is a bastard” on the basis of ideological or political hatred, but in the process they changed the version to inciting hostility or hatred towards a social group.
“As a lawyer, I would be interested to know what the Supreme Court thinks about this case. If the case stands there, then what does the Constitutional Court think about it. The situation is outrageous because it is a quote from the great French philosopher Sartre. It was translated by Professor and Doctor of Philology Sergey Leonidovich Fokin. At the time when he published his book with a quote, he was a teacher at St. Petersburg State University. This result [суда] outrageous because it was a scientific quote until today. In our country, scientific discussion is still allowed. We don’t have Ukraine,” Tatyana Dyachkova, a lawyer from the St. Petersburg branch of the Communist Party of the Russian Federation, commented on the court’s decision.
The representative of Filippov does not agree with the decision of the court and plans to appeal it “to the very last instance.”
Recall that Jean-Paul Sartre, a left-wing French philosopher of the 20th century, leaned towards Marxism in the first half of the 50s. In 1964, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature “for creativity rich in ideas, imbued with the spirit of freedom and the search for truth,” but he refused to accept the award because he did not want to be indebted to any social institution, did not want to question his independence.
