Well-known poet Rubinstein dead
Kremlin critic run over by car in Moscow
January 14, 2024, 12:53 p.m
Is it all just an accident again? A few days ago a car hit the Russian war opponent Rubinstein. Now the well-known poet succumbs to his injuries. Rubinstein dared to call the attack on Ukraine a “criminal war” and criticize the Kremlin.
The Russian poet and Kremlin critic Lev Rubinstein is dead. The 76-year-old died this Sunday, six days after he was hit by a car in Moscow and seriously injured, his daughter Maria Rubinstein said in her blog on the website “Live Journal”.
Rubinstein was hit while crossing a street in the capital on January 8th and was taken to hospital in critical condition. According to the Moscow Transport Authority, the driver, who had already been involved in several traffic violations, did not slow down in front of the zebra crossing.
Born in Moscow in 1947, Rubinstein was a trained librarian and one of the big names in the Soviet underground literary scene of the 1970s and 1980s. He was a co-founder of Moscow Conceptualism, which rejected and ridiculed Socialist Realism. With his “index card poetry,” Rubinstein created his own genre that combined theater and poetry: the poet read out short sentences on stage that were written on index cards.
After the collapse of the Soviet Union, Rubinstein became increasingly well-known in Russia. His works have been published by renowned publishers and translated into several languages. Rubinstein also worked as a journalist.
Open criticism of Putin
Rubinstein never made a secret of his opposition to the government of Russian President Vladimir Putin. He took part in opposition demonstrations and denounced oppression and human rights violations.
In March 2022, he joined other Russian writers in signing an open letter calling the Russian army’s attack on Ukraine a “criminal war.” In an essay from that year, he criticized the Russian leadership, which denounced any criticism of it as hostility towards the entire country, as Russophobia.
“Rubinstein was not arrested or tortured, he was not poisoned or persecuted in Russia during the war in Ukraine,” writes the Russian NGO Memorial on X. “But his tragic death in January 2024, just before the two-year anniversary of the disaster , has a bitter symbolic power.” Today’s Russia has “no place for free citizens and independent poets. It speeds past them and doesn’t even stop at the red light to watch them cross the street. The poet, who had often outlived himself, could Putin’s Russia will not survive.”
Over the past two decades, a striking number of politicians, journalists and managers critical of the Kremlin have died strange deaths in Russia. Recently alone, many oligarchs and managers from the oil and gas sector have died. In the summer of 2023, mercenary boss Yevgeny Prigozhin, a renegade associate of Putin, also died in a plane crash a few months after his march on Moscow.