The Russian poet Lev Rubinstein, a dissident intellectual during the Soviet era and highly critical of Vladimir Putin, died on Sunday at the age of 76, a few days after being run over in Moscow, his daughter announced.
“My dad, Lev Rubinstein, died,” Maria Rubinstein wrote in her blog on the Live Journal website, cited by Russian media.
On January 8, the poet was hit by a car while crossing a street in the capital and had to be hospitalized in very serious condition.
According to the Moscow Department of Transport, the car’s owner had been involved in 19 traffic code violations in the past 12 months.
Rubinstein, born in 1947 in Moscow, studied as a librarian and was one of the figures of the Soviet underground literary scene of the 1970s and 1980s.
He is considered one of the founders of the “conceptualist” movement, which mocked the official doctrine of socialist realism.
After the disintegration of the Soviet Union, his notoriety grew, he published in several renowned publishing houses and worked as a journalist, without hiding his criticism of Russian President Vladimir Putin.
In March 2022, together with other Russian writers, he signed an open letter calling the Russian army’s offensive in Ukraine a “criminal war” and criticizing the Kremlin’s “lies.”
The Russian NGO Memorial, specialized in the defense of human rights and the preservation of the memory of the victims of Soviet repression, praised it as “an incisive descriptor of various eras of Russia.”