Russian Teacher ’Forced To Quit Job’ For Reading Poems By Authors Persecuted Under Stalin
▻https://www.rferl.org/a/russia-teacher-kharms-vvedensky-stalin/31691331.html
ST. PETERSBURG — A Russian teacher says she was forced to quit her job at a school in the city of St. Petersburg after she read poems to her class by two authors who had been persecuted during Soviet dictator Josef Stalin’s purge in the 1930s and 1940s.
Serafima Saprykina wrote on Facebook on February 6 that the school’s principal forced her to leave her job after she read poems by Daniil Kharms and Aleksandr Vvedensky during one of her lessons with 10th graders, even though the school’s deputy principal had approved the lesson.
According to Saprykina, the principal called the two poets “enemies of the people” who “were properly captured by the NKVD (Soviet Interior Ministry) and tortured for their crimes,” and “whose verses can be only discussed in your Bohemian kitchens.”
