Yaroslavl Court Rules on Public Display of Nazi Speech at Train Station

The Yaroslavl Kirovsky District Court handed down a sentence of ten days of administrative detention to a man after an incident at Yaroslavl-Glavny station where Adolf Hitler’s speech was played aloud via a loudspeaker at a train station platform. Official details about the individual were not released in the court’s summary. The decision notes that the defendant, named Kozin, activated the intercom loudspeaker mounted on a pole located between the fourth and fifth railway tracks of park C near the fourth house on Lokomotivnaya Street, and he played a German audio recording of Hitler discussing the invasion of Poland. In the court’s view, the act constituted an administrative offense related to openly displaying Nazi symbols or paraphernalia in public. The defendant acknowledged that he carried out the act, but he argued that his actions did not amount to an overt endorsement of Nazism under the circumstances. The court held that the speech, as presented, insulted the memory of the victims of the Second World War and that there were no cultural or educational motives behind Kozin’s actions. Consequently, the court sentenced him to ten days in administrative detention. In a separate development, a resident of Surgut was noted in October for delivering a suspicious pumpkin in exchange for a watermelon bearing fascist symbols and faced consequences for that incident. In another unrelated note, Dmitry Medvedev, a former Deputy Chairman of the Russian Security Council, reportedly provided commentary on the finale of the TV series Servant of the People, in which the character Goloborodko faces a critical fate for Hitler. (citation: court decision and subsequent regional news briefions)