Stickers insulting the late Russian writer Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn appeared on a Moscow street named after the Nobel Prize-winning author a day before the unveiling of a plaque honoring his memory.
Large stickers posted on walls on December 10 carry a picture of Solzhenitsyn altered to show him wearing a Nazi military hat and the words: "Literary Vlasovtsy, get out of Moscow!"
"Vlasovtsy" refers to members of the so-called Russian Liberation Army, which fought under Nazi Germany's command during World War II. The unit was led by Andrei Vlasov, a Red Army general who switched sides.
The stickers also bore the logo of a group called the Revolutionary Communist Union of the Bolshevik Youth (RKSMB).
On its website, the group said the stickers were posted to protest the unveiling of the plaque on the apartment building where Solzhenitsyn lived in the 1970s.
The large metal plaque featuring Solzhenitsyn's face and head sculpted in relief was unveiled at a ceremony on December 11, the late writer's birthday.
His widow, Natalya Solzhenitsyna, said that those who put up the stickers were "intellectually and emotionally stunted."
"There is scum in every society at every time -- sometimes more, sometimes less," she said.
Solzhenitsyn, whose most famous works include One Day In The Life Of Ivan Denisovich and The Gulag Archipelago, spent many years in the Soviet gulag prison system.
He was expelled from the Soviet Union in 1974 and lived in the United States for decades before returning to Russia in 1994.
The 1970 Nobel literature laureate died in Moscow in 2008 at the age of 89.
In October 2016, the RKSMB hanged Solzhenitsyn's effigy in front of the gulag museum in Moscow.