High drama in Moscow
ARTISTS PROTEST AFTER POLICE RAID RUSSIAN DIRECTOR’S HOME, THEATRE
Asensational embezzlement investigation involving a theatre company has sparked a protest among prominent figures in Russia’s arts community, pitting directors and actors against powerful Russian law enforcement agencies and prompting appeals to Russian President Vladimir Putin to intervene.
At the storm’s centre is Kirill Serebrennikov, the virtuoso Russian stage director behind Moscow’s innovative, and often controversial, Gogol Center theatre, who awoke on Tuesday to find agents of the Russian Federal Security Service, the sprawling law enforcement and intelligence agency, raiding both his theatre and his apartment.
The reason? Accusations that a theatre collective he founded called Seventh Studio had been involved in an embezzlement scheme, siphoning off $3.5 million in government funding from 2011 to 2014.
For now, Serebrennikov, who did not answer repeated calls to his cellphone, is a witness and not a suspect in the case, which formally does not concern the Gogol Center. A former administrative director and accountant for the studio were detained on Wednesday, and on Thursday the accountant’s lawyer said she had admitted her guilt and was co-operating with investigators.
But supporters of Serebrennikov, including the head of the Bolshoi Theater, see ulterior motives behind the case: an attempt to force Serebrennikov out of the Gogol Center, which he has transformed since 2012 from a dramaturgical backwater into Russia’s leading avant-garde theatre.
It has not been a smooth ride, fraught with conflicts with conservative activists and a 2015 brush with financial problems.
With the company’s actors still detained by masked officers in the theatre on Tuesday, hundreds of supporters from artistic and journalistic circles began gathering outside, among them former members of the punk protest band Pussy Riot and loyalist film directors like Fyodr Bandarchuk.
Mikhail Baryshnikov, the prominent ballet dancer, said that for a man with Serebrennikov’s publicly expressed dissident views, “these sudden repressions look particularly nasty.”
Marina Davydova, a veteran theatre critic who also believes the case has political motivations, said in an interview that while there are plenty of cultural figures skeptical of the Russian government, it was Serebrennikov’s “esthetics” that put him in the “group at risk.”
“He’s always been an irritant, independent and unconventional, and that irritates people in power,” Davydova said.
“If you ask me, I think the goal of this probe is simple: so that Kirill leaves the country and to create a fog over the Gogol Center.”
The centre’s 2014 play Muchenik, the martyr, a difficult production about a student’s religious transformation in a Russian school, was considered by some critics to run afoul of Russia’s newly adopted laws on offending religious views. A 2013 play called Thugs was reviewed by the Moscow police for possibly inciting extremism.
The current investigation is the latest cause célèbre in a series of political demonstrations that have bubbled up in Russia in recent months, an unusual period of opposition activity.
Ahead of the 2018 Russian presidential elections, where Putin will likely run for a fourth term in power, politics is back in Russia. Thousands of homeowners turned out for protest rallies this month against the expected demolition of Sovietera apartment houses, part of a city beautification effort that opponents believe is a handout to construction companies tied to the government.
An unsanctioned March rally led by anti-corruption whistleblower Alexei Navalny brought out tens of thousands of protesters, and led to 1,000 detentions in Moscow alone.
Outwardly, the Kremlin’s goal in the Gogol Center case has been to tamp down political speculation surrounding the investigation.
“There is no need to make this political, there’s no reason for the Kremlin to be informed about this,” Dmitry Peskov, Putin’s personal spokesman, told reporters on Tuesday.
But prominent figures in the theatre community, including Vladimir Urin, the director of the Bolshoi Theater, have written directly to Putin, asking him to review the investigation.
Another theatre director, Yevgeny Mironov, who runs the popular Theater of Nations, addressed Putin directly with a separate letter in support of Serebrennikov at an awards ceremony on Wednesday.
According to Andrei Kolesnikov, a political journalist close to Putin who has reported from the president’s pool for more than a decade, Mironov told Putin that the investigation could undermine his trip to France slated for Monday, where Putin will meet with French President Emmanuel Macron.
Putin, according to the report, agreed.
“Yes, they’re idiots,” he said, according to Kolesnikov.
For Davydova, the case recalled the troubles of Anatoly Vasiliev, the founder and former director of the School of Dramatic Arts, a well-funded laboratory for inventive theatre who was pushed out by the government and left for France in 2006.
Others have recalled a darker case: that of Vsevolod Meyerhold, the pioneering Soviet theatre director, whose unusual style at first propelled his career, and then led to his arrest, torture, and death in 1940 under Stalin.
THESE SUDDEN REPRESSIONS LOOK PARTICULARLY NASTY.