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Can reciting a poem lead to prison in Russia?
Summary
A retrospective on a Tver Oblast court ruling against a poet and on a car bombing that wounded a Russian nationalist writer.
Can reciting a poem land a person behind bars? On 10 May 2023, a court in Tver Oblast, Russia, answered yes. It sentenced a poet to four years in prison for reciting verse critical of the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
The ruling was a case of censorship in Russia, applied to spoken poetry. The sentence was handed down for words alone, and the court's decision placed a custodial term on a public reading.
Four days earlier, on 6 May 2023, the Russian nationalist writer Zakhar Prilepin was wounded when a booby-trapped car exploded in Nizhny Novgorod Oblast. His driver was killed in the blast.
The two events were separate, and the reports from the time did not link them. Together they marked a week in which the war's effects were visible inside Russia itself: in a courtroom in Tver Oblast, and on a road in Nizhny Novgorod Oblast.
