From the website of the MGIMO journal “Concept: Philosophy, Religion, Culture”, the scientific article “How many books did F. Skaryna publish in Prague” was removed, in which Russian scientist Ilya Lemeshkin encrypted the phrases “Die, Putler. No war». SOTA drew attention to this.
As the publication notes, the publication was available in the morning, its copy was preserved in the web archive. At the same time, the scientific article was posted back in June of this year, that is, it was on the site for about three months.
Associate Professor at Charles University in the Czech Republic Ilya Lemeshkin told the Belarusian publication Salidarnasts yesterday about the encrypted message. He wrote an article dedicated to the Renaissance figure Francis Skorina, who was born on the territory of modern Belarus, in December 2022.
There is an acrostic in the text — if you combine the first letters of all paragraphs in order, you get the phrase “Die, Putler. No to war,” the last paragraphs begin with the letters “I” and “L,” these are the author’s initials. The entire material consists of 22 paragraphs, which refers to the year the war began in Ukraine. The editors of the magazine received the material on February 24, 2023.
According to Lemeshkin, he had no difficulties developing the acrostic. “It was much more difficult to write a text that would not arouse suspicion and the desire to edit. Of course, I was afraid that there would be edits, then the idea with the acrostic might fall apart,” he said. In addition, when editing, the scientist asked to shorten or shift paragraphs so that the code could be easily read graphically.
The author of the article added: “All my requests were satisfied: on one spread, “died,” on the second, “no.” . putler”, on the third — “no war”, on the fourth “I.L”. Nobody noticed anything.» According to Lemeshkin, a reader from Russia responded to the acrostic by thanking him. The scientist decided to tell everyone about the encrypted phrase when copies of the magazine with its text were sent to libraries.
Corrected on September 20 at 7:43. The news mistakenly stated that Lemeshkin was from Belarus. In fact, he is a Russian citizen.