A member of the Communist Party of the Russian Federation from St. Petersburg was fined 10 thousand rubles because of Sartre’s quote “Any anti-communist is a bastard”

The Primorsky District Court of St. Petersburg fined Communist Party member Alexei Filippov 10,000 rubles on charges of inciting hatred or enmity (Article 20.3.1 of the Code of Administrative Offenses). This was reported by the joint press service of the courts of St. Petersburg.

The report on Filippov was drawn up in January. The reason was that in 2017 he reposted on VKontakte a picture with the quote “Any anti-communist is a bastard…”, “whose authorship is attributed to French citizen Jean-Paul Sartre, philosopher and writer,” the protocol said.

Employees of the St Petersburg University Center for Expertise considered that this publication “contains signs of humiliation of human dignity based on political, ideological hatred or enmity.”

The lawyer of the St. Petersburg branch of the Communist Party of the Russian Federation Tatyana Dyachkova, who represented the interests of Filippov, told the Rotunda telegram channel that she would appeal against the fine imposed on him.

“The situation is outrageous because it is a quote from the great French philosopher Sartre. It was translated by Professor and Doctor of Philology Sergey Leonidovich Fokin. At the time he published his book with the quote, he was a professor at St Petersburg University,” Dyachkova told Znak.com, adding that “it was a scientific quote until today.”