The court in St. Petersburg banned Sartre’s quote “Every anti-communist is a bastard”

The court in St. Petersburg banned quoting in Russia the phrase of the French philosopher, Nobel laureate Jean-Paul Sartre “Every anti-communist is a bastard.” Signs of inciting hatred and enmity were found in the statement, the correspondent of Sever.Realii reports. The trial lasted about ten months.

An administrative case of inciting hatred and enmity due to the writer’s quote was filed back in September 2020 at the request of the district prosecutor’s office. This was the first case on the legality of quoting world classics in Russia.

Alexey Filippov, a member of the city committee of the Petersburg branch of the CPRF, was initially accused of it. The reason for drawing up the report was a repost of a communist in “VKontakte” with a photo of a “man in glasses” and the quote “Any anti-communist is a bastard…”. It was made in 2017.

The lawyers asked specialists to translate Sartre’s full statement to the court. It reads as follows: “The last links were broken, my vision changed: an anti-communist is a dog (a dog, a bastard), and I will never again renounce this point of view.”

The Communist’s defense insisted that “bastard” and “bastard” are synonymous words, so Filippov’s post is scientific citation. The prosecutor’s office in the decision of the case wrote that the authorship of the disputed phrase is only “attributed” to the philosopher.

As a result, in January last year, Filippov was fined 10,000 rubles. He did not admit his guilt. “This is a quote from a Nobel laureate. Why am I to blame here? We can go so far. We have different quotes from Marxists and Lenin. There are such quotes. If we will imprison or fine people for them, then you know. .. we can go far,” he said.

Back in 2020, the prosecutor’s office appealed to Center “E” with a request to identify all persons who published this Sartre quote on social networks. Employees of the Ministry of Internal Affairs discovered 28 people who placed it in Russia, and another 15 – abroad.

By the last court session, the number of defendants had decreased to six. This is due to the fact that most of the sites on which the quote was posted deleted it or were blocked by Roskomnadzor for other reasons.

Filippov himself was removed from the case by the court at the penultimate session. The communist deleted the post from his page, and the prosecutor’s office decided to withdraw claims against him.