Russian court fines anti-war protester for using Vladimir Mayakovsky’s avant-garde poetry to ‘discredit’ the military
A court in Yekaterinburg has found an anti-war protester guilty of using a poem by avant-garde poet Vladimir Mayakovsky to “discredit” the Russian military, the independent news outlet Sotavision reported on Tuesday.
Dmitry Rykov, a resident of Kirovgrad (another town in the Sverdlovsk region), was fined for carrying out a solo picket in Yekaterinburg on December 7. He carried a sign with a stanza from Mayakovsky’s poem “Down With It!” (“Doloy!”), which read:
War is a wind that reeks of a corpse.
War is a factory for producing beggars.
A grave immeasurable in depth and breadth,
Hunger, filth, typhus, and lice.
Judge Yekaterina Geiger of the Verkh-Isetsky District Court fined Rykov 49,000 rubles (about $600). Rykov pleaded not guilty, arguing that he was speaking out “not against a specific war, but any war.” He also said that he did not understand how this could have “discredited” the Russian army.
Rykov also faces another misdemeanor charge of “discrediting” the military for a solo protest he carried out in downtown Yekaterinburg on December 13. He was arrested for picketing with a sign quoting the popular Soviet children’s song “May There Always Be Sunshine.” Rykov told the local news outlet It’s My City that he was protesting against “lies and violence.”
Yekaterinburg authorities have arrested Dmitry Rykov for protesting multiple times. In September, he was detained for picketing in support of Darya Kozyreva, a 19-year-old anti-war activist arrested in February 2024 for taping a stanza from a poem by Ukrainian poet Taras Shevchenko to the Shevchenko monument in St. Petersburg. Kozyreva was later sentenced to nearly three years in prison on two counts of “discrediting” the Russian army. At the time of his arrest, Rykov was carrying a poster that said, “Freedom for Darya Kozyreva! Poetry is not a crime.” Local police later released him without charge.
A prominent figure of the Russian Futurist movement, Vladimir Mayakovsky wrote the anti-war poem “Down With It!” in 1929. He died by suicide in 1930.
