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."
The school's deputy principal, Tatyana Sudakova-Gollerbakh, denied Saprykina's version of events telling the Novaya gazeta newspaper that Saprykina worked at the school for several months and left her job after "she found a new employment opportunity."
Russian Education Minister Sergei Kravtsov said on February 7 that Saprykina's rights must be respected, and she must be reinstated, adding that the ministry will investigate the teacher’s situation.
Hours earlier, St. Petersburg municipal lawmaker Boris Vishnevsky urged the city's education committee to look into the situation.
Playwright and poet Aleksandr Vvedensky who founded the Union of Literary Arts in St. Petersburg, then Leningrad, was arrested by Soviet authorities in 1941 and charged with counterrevolutionary propaganda. He died in 1941 while being transferred from a detention center in the city of Kharkiv in eastern Ukraine to the capital of Tatarstan, Kazan.
Vvedensky's close friend, Daniil Kharms, was also arrested in 1941 for alleged anti-Soviet propaganda, and died a year later in a psychiatric ward of the Kresty detention center in Leningrad.
The two authors’ works stopped being published at that time and didn't become fully accessible for Soviet readers until the late 1980s in the wake of reforms brought about by Mikhail Gorbachev.