Russian poet is off the hook for saying Hitler would have won over more in the USSR if he'd dropped the Antisemitism

Anti-extremism police have determined that poet and writer Dmitry Bykov was within his civic rights last December, when he gave a lecture in St. Petersburg claiming that Adolf Hitler would have won over more Soviet anti-Communists, if the Nazi leader hadn’t sought the extermination of Jews and Roma.

Experts hired by the Interior Ministry say Bykov’s remarks do not constitute “obvious disrespect for society” or “profanity against Russia’s military glory.” Bykov is also off the hook for “rehabilitating Nazism,” disappointing critics who were convinced that the public intellectual had finally crossed a line.

In January, Bykov told the radio station Ekho Moskvy that he wasn't personally endorsing Nazism without Antisemitism, explaining that he believes the ideology would merely have appealed to more of Moscow's opponents in the 1930s and 1940s if Hitler's racism hadn't focused on Jewish and Roma minorities.