“Last call” will no longer sound – Newspaper Kommersant No. 199 (7400) of 10/26/2022

The Zamoskvoretsky Court of Moscow on Tuesday recognized the text of the song “Last Call” by rapper Oxxxymiron (Miron Fedorov, entered in the register of foreign agents) as extremist material. She saw the light 13 years ago, entering the first album of Miron Fedorov. In it, the musician tells the story of an 11th grade student who comes to graduation with a weapon and shoots his classmates in the first person. For the first time, the track was proposed to be banned back in 2018 – activist Yevgenia Chudnovets said that the “Last Call” could cause a massacre at the Kerch Polytechnic College. At the same time, Roskomnadzor demanded that VKontakte and YouTube block several fan clips for the song (there is no official video for Last Call). One of them, according to Afisha, was made up of footage from the Estonian film Class in 2007, which is not banned in Russia.

In August 2022, Sergei Savenkov, acting prosecutor of Moscow, returned to the issue of banning the song itself. It was he, according to the case card on the court website, who filed a lawsuit to recognize the “Last Call” as extremist. The court failed to consider the claim the first time: the meeting in September did not take place due to the lack of information from the court about the receipt of a court summons by Miron Fedorov. On October 25, prosecutor Yulia Pavlova pointed out that “the presence of the named material on the Internet creates a threat of undermining the foundations of the constitution of the system.” “According to the act of a comprehensive psychological and linguistic research, the text of one of the performer’s musical works contains signs of a public justification of violent actions and an ideology of violence,” the position of the prosecutor’s office said. Roskomnadzor employee Abram Sardaryan agreed with these arguments. Neither the musician nor his representatives were present at the meeting. The whole process took less than an hour. The court satisfied the claims for the inclusion of the song in the list of extremist materials and the ban on the territory of the Russian Federation “in full”. Now the track “Last Call” should be removed from all Internet sites, including YouTube video hosting.

Previously, the song “Kill the Beggars!” was recognized as extremist. group “Pornofilmy” – in 2021, such a decision was made by the Dzerzhinsky Court of Volgograd. In February 2022, the lawyers for the Network Freedoms project challenged this decision, citing the opinions of linguists and musicologists, and won the case. After a repeated linguistic examination, which confirmed the lawyers’ position that “neither the prosecutor’s office nor the court understood the meaning of the song”, and did not establish signs of extremism in the musical work, the case was reviewed. The Dzerzhinsky Court of Volgograd nevertheless re-recognized the song as extremist material, critics of this decision associated it with a social satire in which the president’s name was mentioned.

Maria Starikova, Alexey Sviridov