Former deputy of the Legislative Assembly of St. Petersburg Alexander Kobrinsky, who previously taught at two universities, lost a lawsuit filed in the Primorsky Court of the city against Sofya Volyanova, a journalist from the Kholod publication, against the Higher School of Economics, and also against Yana Linkova, associate professor at the HSE School of Philology. Kobrinsky's lawsuit concerned the article "The Brilliant Professor" , which was published in November 2020 in the publication "Cold". In the material, several students spoke about the systematic harassment by the professor.
Kobrinsky taught at the Herzen State Pedagogical University and the St. Petersburg Institute of Jewish Studies. Volyanova's material on Kholod describes in detail, with the testimonies of the victims, how, as a professor, Kobrinsky repeatedly invited students to visit, treated them to alcohol, and had sexual relations with them. Two girls stated that he allegedly forced them into BDSM sessions.
After the release of the material, Kobrinsky began to sue Volyanova, and then with the HSE and a teacher who helped collect evidence of harassment and stated that she did not recommend HSE students to attend the Summer School organized by Kobrinsky.
“There were two trials,” Sofya Volyanova explained to The Insider. “Kobrinsky first filed a lawsuit with the Petrogradsky District Court, it was filed against Kholod and against me personally. However, he could not find the legal entity of Kholod, so in the middle of the process he excluded the publication and sued me. We lost this process, as well as the appeal and cassation, announced the collection of money for a fine, collected the necessary 300 thousand rubles in a few hours and paid it. Now we intend to go to the Supreme Court.
Some time ago, he also filed a lawsuit with the Primorsky District Court against me, the HSE, and the third party was teacher Yana Sergeevna Linkova. She gave me quite detailed comments for this text: Linkova conducted a survey among female students with the help of another employee, and this anonymous survey revealed that at the Summer School of Philology, which Kobrinsky is still organizing, there were not student-teacher relations at all, there there were also, let's call it, "alarming" cases. Kobrinsky, both in the first and in this process, constantly clarified the claims. He asked to challenge one or the other, tried to challenge one paragraph of the text and a specific quote by Linkova. As a result, the court dismissed his claim in full. Today the decision was made, the reasoning part will be only in two months, so we do not yet know what the court relied on. To be honest, we didn't expect it. It was an absolute surprise after the first process. <In the course of the new process> there were refusals to my lawyer, so we thought that everything would not be thankful to God.
According to the lawsuit, which is in the possession of The Insider, Kobrinsky claims that one paragraph is not true:
“As one of the drafters of the appeal, Yana Linkova, told Kholod, she held a meeting with several students, at which the Summer School on Russian Literature was mentioned. After that, Linkova asked one of the students to collect feedback from the Summer School participants. She received seven negative reviews in total; six of them describe cases of unworthy behavior of Kobrinsky in relation to the participants of the school.
In a lawsuit against Volyanova, the Higher School of Economics and Linkova, Kobrinsky claims that the teacher, speaking about the six evidences of his misbehavior that she has, as well as the author of the material, are spreading "defamatory information that does not correspond to reality." In the lawsuit, Kobrinsky insists that Linkova spoke and made recommendations not to attend his Summer School as an HSE official and that this was not a personal opinion. In turn, the HSE did not refute the words of its employee, so it was also among the defendants in the professor's lawsuit.
He demanded that the author of the material, Sofya Volyanova, publish on her Facebook page the operative part of the trial, which he intended to win. He put forward the same requirement to the Higher School of Economics. With Volyanova, he demanded compensation for non-pecuniary damage in the amount of 30 rubles. With the Higher School of Economics and Linkova – 250 thousand rubles in solidarity.