Meet Alexander Byvshev. He used to teach French and German in the Oryol region. Photo from Byvshev’s Facebook page

For his first poem about Crimea, Alexander Byvshev was sentenced to 300 hours community service and a lifetime ban on working as a teacher.

In early March 2014, Aleksandr Byvshev, then a 41-year-old German and French teacher at a secondary school in the town of Kromy (in Russia’s Oryol region), logged into his Vkontakte page and shared a poem, titled “To Ukrainian Patriots,” where he criticized Russia’s invasion of Crimea. Byvshev told Meduza that he felt compelled to respond to the annexation because his mother is from eastern Ukraine and he spent his childhood there. “I’m not just a teacher — I’m also a citizen. I have my own position, and I expressed it in a poem on my social network page,” Byvshev says.

In May 2014, the local district attorney opened a criminal case against Byvshev, charging him with illegal hate speech. Prosecutors summoned two of his own students to testify against him. “In class, I told the kids how children speak with respect to their parents in Ukraine, and I encouraged them to learn to respect their elders,” Byvshev says. “But in court the judge interpreted these lessons to be my attempts to play Russians and Ukrainians against each other.”

A linguistic evaluation carried out on investigators’ orders found evidence of “extremism” in the poem “To Ukrainian Patriots.” The court then ordered another study by the Moscow Guild of Expert Linguists for Documentary and Informational Disputes. Mikhail Gorbanevsky, a specialist working with this group, told Meduza that he and his colleagues could find at least four interpretations of Byvshev's poem, none of which characterized the text as extremist.

The court nevertheless convicted Byvshev and sentenced him to 300 hours of community service. The judge also barred him from teaching again for two years. Byvshev says he served out his punishment by tidying up at the local cemetery and cleaning the streets on the city’s outskirts. In 2015, lawmakers amended Article 331 of the Federal Labor Code, making it illegal for anyone convicted of extremism to work as a teacher, effectively escalating his two-year ban to a lifetime prohibition.

Byvshev is currently trying to appeal his sentence in the European Court of Human Rights.

Investigators couldn’t find anything criminal about a second poem by Byvshev, but the authorities added his name to the federal list of terrorists and extremists, regardless.

In June 2014, Byvshev shared another poem, this one called “Ukrainian Insurgents,” where he describes an abstract battle between Russian and Ukrainian soldiers, sympathizing more with the latter group.

This poem led to more hate-crime charges by the district attorney. Police even confiscated Byvshev’s laptop as a “preventative” measure. The district court, however, rejected the case, saying the poem showed no signs of extremism, and even compensated Byvshev 5,000 rubles (about $90) for the trouble. Unfortunately for Byvshev, he can’t actually withdraw the money from his bank account.

On September 29, 2015, the Federal Financial Monitoring Service added his name to Russia’s registry of extremists and terrorists (he’s 1,754th on the list). Anyone accused of extremist crimes in Russia is added to this list. Byvshev’s bank account should have been unfrozen after he made amends for “To Ukrainian Patriots,” but the Financial Monitoring Service didn’t manage this before he was hit with the new charges.

For a third poem, prosecutors charged Byvshev with hate speech. And then with obstruction of justice.

On January 17, 2017, regional investigators opened another hate-speech case against Byvshev, this time because of a poem called “To the Independence of Ukraine," which he shared on Vkontakte in 2015. This case is still ongoing.

In February 2018, police launched a fourth case, this time accusing Byvshev under Criminal Code Article 294 of obstructing justice. His attorney, Vladimir Suchkov, says he thinks these charges are based on Byvshev’s posts on social media, where he’s described several court hearings, and his interviews with reporters.

Byvshev told Meduza that Federal Security Service officers have visited him and his neighbors without warning “just to chat.” He’s recorded some of these conversations and shared them on YouTube.

Byvshev is being tried for hate speech in a fifth case for another two poems.

On April 2, 2018, regional investigators announced yet another criminal case. According to the Oryol Investigative Committee, Byvshev posted two poems on a local web portal that contained “derogatory remarks about a certain nation.” The texts in question, it was later revealed, are “Russian Spirit” and “Mighty Handful” — two poems Byvshev wrote about Russia’s environmental problems.

Byvshev says he learned about the investigators’ announcement on April 3, but he still hasn’t been charged formally in this case.

He told Meduza that people in his town now actively avoid him and are careful not to express any support for him openly (“in the presence of witnesses”). “People are afraid even to shake hands with me. Everybody is running scared. It's reached the point where I’m turned away, when I go to the copy store and ask for photocopies. They're afraid they’ll be labeled accessories to my ‘crimes,’” Byvshev says, adding that no one in town will hire him for anything.

He can’t leave the area, either, thanks to travel restrictions and his elderly parents, who need his help at home. Byvshev has even been reduced to relying on his parents’ pensions to survive.

Story by Irina Kravtsova, translation by Peter Marshall