Is it true that Pushkin is the author of the poem “The Eternal Lackeys of Europe...”?

In recent years, a poem has been circulating on social media that criticizes kowtowing to the West. Its author is often called Alexander Sergeevich Pushkin. We checked if this is true.

Here is the full text of the poem:

“The eternal lackeys of Europe,
Her spiritual slaves
You have distorted your father's experience
And the ancestors were betrayed by the coffins.
At the whim of a bad slave,
Servants of other people's plans,
You have become the cattle of Europe,
You fell in love with the whistling of the whips.
You betrayed Rus' a hundred times,
Trusting someone else's mind.
Rus' forgave you, but back
You pulled your neck towards the yoke.
A foreign land is dearer to you than your homeland.
And because you are destined
Know the will... only of the master
And bow to him forever..."

These poems with reference to Pushkin gained particular popularity in 2014 after the events in Ukraine - then many addressed them to the Euromaidan participants. For example, one of publications works on Facebook generated almost 800 reposts. The poem also circulated in "LiveJournal" In August of the same year, in his article for “RIA Novosti“These lines were attributed to Pushkin by political scientist Yuri Gorodnenko. In 2021, the text of the poem with the signature “A. S. Pushkin" appeared on the fence near the House of Trade Unions in Odessa.

However, no matter how hard you try, you won’t be able to find such lines in Pushkin—neither in canonical works, nor in drafts, nor in letters. One of the earliest surviving mentions of the poem in Runet is found in one of the blogs on the newspaper’s portal "Tomorrow" dated October 4, 2005, where the work is attributed to a certain Elena Lavrentyeva from the city of Donetsk. Lavrentieva has her own page on the website "Poems.ru", from which you can find out that she has been a member of the Union of Writers of the USSR since 1971. What you are looking for poem, according to the poetess, written on October 23, 2003 and included in her printed collection 2006. In a number publications it is specified that the work (dedicated, as indicated, to the “Galician elite”) was written for the first Maidan, but then it turns out that the date of its creation is indicated incorrectly, because the “orange revolution” occurred in 2004.

Thus, the poem about the “lackeys of Europe” attributed to Pushkin actually belongs to a poetess from Donetsk and appeared in the first half of the 2000s. This is not the first time that they are trying to “enrich” the legacy of a great poet in such a way. So, in 2020 Runet flew around his fake poem about quarantine.

Fake

What do our verdicts mean?