Journalists who came to a meeting to select a preventive measure for the creator of the St. Petersburg public page “Pre-Revolutionary Adviser,” poet Vyacheslav Malakhov, were expelled from the Golovinsky District Court of Moscow. This was reported by a Mediazona correspondent from the courtroom.
According to the bailiffs and the press secretary, the chairman of the court, Elena Averchenko, ordered the expulsion of the journalists — under the pretext that on Fridays the court is open until 16:45.
The investigation asks to send Malakhov to a pre-trial detention center until March 17. The poet is accused of repeatedly “discrediting” the army (Part 1 of Article 280.3 of the Criminal Code). The criminal case became known on January 31, when security forces conducted a search at his location in Moscow. Later he was detained for 48 hours until a preventive measure was chosen.
The publication MSK1, with reference to the case materials, writes that the investigation justified the need to arrest Malakhov by the fact that he did not give the laptop passwords to the security forces and did not admit guilt. In addition, the detainee “did not take the path of correction and did not draw any conclusions,” despite the fact that he had previously been brought to administrative responsibility for “discrediting” the army.
The investigation characterizes Malakhov as a person who has an “illegal life position,” including because he is a native of Ukraine.
As OVD-Info reported, the reason for the persecution was an anti-war post posted on Malakhov’s Telegram channel on September 8. The publication begins with the words “Nobody wants to fuck you in your withered ass, grandpa, relax.”
He criticized the Russian government for starting the war in Ukraine and its repressive policies: “That is, you violated ALL the Orthodox commandments with this war, oh, sorry, the SVO. But anything is better than knowing that those two over there are harmlessly fucking in the asses. This hurts my own unbearably. Apparently out of envy.”
On August 10, the Savyolovsky District Court of Moscow fined Malakhov 30 thousand rubles in an administrative case about “discrediting” the army (Part 1 of Article 20.3.3 of the Administrative Code). Then the reason for the case was anti-war publications on VKontakte.
In August, the poet told human rights activists that the police took him off the train and forcibly placed him in a psychiatric hospital for a month. There, the man was injected with unknown drugs, and hospital staff and security forces also used force on him. He was later diagnosed with a rib fracture.
Malakhov was one of the authors of the “Pre-Revolutionary Soviet” public page on VKontakte. Since the summer of 2011, memes in pre-revolutionary spelling have been published there, and later also parody poems and covers of modern songs, stylized in pre-revolutionary language. Now there are 68 thousand subscribers. The public page is now accessible, but Malakhov’s own page was blocked in Russia at the request of the Prosecutor General’s Office in 2023.