On Chaplygin Street in Moscow. Photo by anatrrra. Used with their permission
EXTERIOR: A neo-classical building in Moscow’s old German quarter. A plaque on the wall reads, “Western District Military Court No 2”. A group of actors and journalists mill around on the lawn.
INTERIOR: A large hall with a grand staircase. Through the frame of a metal detector stands a statue of Lady Justice in her blindfold, holding scales in one hand and a sword in the other.
A commotion. Several portly guards in flak jackets, with a dog on a leash, escort two handcuffed women through the hall. One, about 5ft tall with big eyes and curly hair, is Yevgenia Berkovich, a 39-year-old poet and theatre director. She is dressed in a white shirt and black trouser-suit. The other, slightly taller, wearing jeans, a white T-shirt and large owlish glasses, is Svetlana Petriychuk, a 44-year-old playwright.
The two women are led into a courtroom and placed in a cage of bullet-proof glass. A bailiff lets in the spectators, who sit down on the upholstered, green benches. Berkovich mischievously sticks out her tongue as photographers’ cameras flash and click. Yuri Massin, the judge, looks towards Berkovich.
Massin: Are you ready for the proceedings? Berkovich: Well, it depends on what will happen.
What happened was a show trial that revealed the radicalisation of the Russian state in the past few years. By the time proceedings began on May 20th 2024, Berkovich and Petriychuk had already been in detention for more than a year, having been charged with “propaganda and the justification of terrorism”. In the eyes of the regime, they had committed a crime by writing and staging a play called “Finist, the Bright Falcon”. Part docu-drama, part fable, “Finist” tells the story of the thousands of Russian women who, from 2015, were seduced online by professional recruiters from Islamic State (IS), and travelled to Syria to marry jihadists. Many of these women received lengthy sentences on their return home. The play premiered in 2020 to critical acclaim and was performed across the country.
As with any show trial, this one’s outcome was preordained, and its purpose was to justify the existing system and demarcate the ideological limits of the state. In doing so, it elucidated the ultra-conservative, anti-Western belief system that has expanded across public life since the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. Berkovich and Petriychuk were the first artists to be jailed since Soviet times for the content of their work—or, more precisely, the thoughts of their characters. But as theatrical professionals, they managed to turn the trial into their show.
A court in Moscow has remanded the theater director Zhenya Berkovich to custody in a pretrial detention center and almost inevitably will render the same decision about the playwright Svetlana Petriichuk (whose pretrial restrictions hearing is still underway). This is the first criminal case in Russia against the authors of a work over its content. Both are accused of “condoning terrorism” in the play Finist the Brave Falcon, which recounts how Islamists recruited Russian women as wives. Last year, the production was awarded the state-sponsored Golden Mask theater prize in two nominations.
Before the court hearing, it transpired that the case was based on a forensic examination conducted by Roman Silantyev, head of Moscow State Linguistic University’s Destructology Laboratory, and his colleagues.
“Destructology” is a science invented by Silantyev himself. He claims that the new discipline “comprehensively examines extremist and terrorist organizations; psychotic cults and non-religious sects; totalitarian sects and the magical services sector; suicidal games and hobbies; deadly youth subcultures (Columbine, AUE, etc.) and medical dissidence.”
There are many experts in Russia whose findings are used by the security forces to imprison people for what they say and write. Often such experts are ignorant, their conclusions are unscientific, and their public statements are frankly obscurantist.
But Roman Silantyev stands out even in this crowd.
A former employee of the Moscow Patriarchate’s Department of External Ecclesiastical Relations (the church’s equivalent of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs), at the outset of his expert career, Silantyev presented himself as a specialist in Islam. In 2005, the publication of his book “The Modern History of the Russian Islamic Community” triggered a scandal: Russia’s Council of Muftis wrote that the author’s stance was at odds “with the most elementary norms of universal ethics and morality.”
To understand the outrage of the muftis, we should take a look at Silantyev’s statements. For example, he said that in order to fight the Wahhabis, “physical force—destruction and gouging—is maximally effective” and dreamed that “law enforcement agencies would finally realize that in this case it is better to cross the line than to come up short.”
Over time, Silantyev felt that he had outgrown his narrow remit as a scholar specializing in Islam and since then he has been commenting on everything. He has opposed Star Wars (callingJediism an “anti-Christian multifunctional propaganda project”), claimed that Ukrainians profess the “religion of Ukrainianism,” and called for a legislative ban on Satanism in Russia, accusing Ukraine of spreading it.
In 2020, Silantyev traveled around Russia giving lectures on “extremism prevention.” He boasts that he has taught classes to officers and staffers at the Federal Security Service (FSB), the Federal Penitentiary Service (FSIN), and the Interior Ministry. And they seem to actually pay heed to him, or at least to successfully use him for their own purposes. It seems that Silantyev has already helped to send dozens (if not hundreds) of people to prison, including Muslims and Jehovah’s Witnesses.
And now he has helped send artists to jail. In their expert report, Silantyev and his fellow destructologists write that Berkovich and Petriichuk’s play contains “traces of the ISIS ideology, as well as the subculture of Russian Muslim neophytes.” In addition, the experts detected the “ideology of radical feminism” in the play.
“The ideology of radical feminism, based on the idea of women’s immanent humiliation, is far from harmless. Destructological science has recorded cases in which adoption of this ideology led to the deliberate planning and execution of a terrorist act,” the self-styled experts teach us. And the court, by sending artists to jail, seems to share this opinion.
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Take a look at it, at its wooden hands,
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A video of a read-through of “Finist the Brave Falcon,” the play for which Russian theatrical director and poet Zhenya Berkovich was detained in Moscow earlier today on suspicion of “condoning terrorism.” Here is a link to a website where you can download the (Russian) text of the play, by Svetlana Petriichuk, who was also detained today. Thanks to Sergey Abashin for the heads-up.
Many have nearly forgotten the criminal case against the theater director Kirill Serebrennikov and his colleagues, who were tried several years ago. That affair was dubbed the Theater Case. Apparently, there will be another Theater Case in Russia: director Zhenya Berkovich (a former student of Serebrennikov’s, by the way) and playwright Svetlana Petriichuk have been detained in Moscow.
The criminal investigation is centered on the theatrical production Finist the Brave Falcon, which premiered in 2020. The play was staged as part of the theater project SOSO Daughters, which is run by Berkovich. It is based on the criminal trials of [Russian] women who married radical Islamists. They came to know the men online and, having never met them in person, went to live with them in Syria.
“Zhenya Berkovich’s staging of Svetlana Petriichuk’s provocative, documentary style play, tells the story of a Russian woman who befriends and is seduced by a member of an Islamic radical sect online, goes to Syria, marries him, and upon her eventual return to Russia is tried as a terrorist. In recent years, there have been hundreds, if not thousands of such cases in Russia, Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan. From what are these women running? What is driving them to abandon their friends, relatives, universities and workplaces for the promise of some shadowy paradise? All this takes place in the metaphysical space of the Russian fairy tale “Finist the Brave Falcon,” in which the heroine Maryushka seeks and cannot find her betrothed, the mysterious hero, whose face she has never seen and will never see, but is ready to sacrifice everything in order to meet him.” [This annotation has been edited slightly to make it more readable.]
The Investigative Committee claims that the production “publicly justified terrorism,” which is a criminal offense per Article 205.2 of the Criminal Code and punishable by up to seven years in prison. The details of the case are still unknown. Berkovich and Petriichuk spent the entire day undergoing interrogation as witnesses in the case, and it had seemed that they might be released, but as of evening both were still in police custody.
Last year, Finist the Brave Falcon won two Golden Mask Awards—for best playwright and for best costumes. Costume designer Ksenia Sorokina handed over her award to Petersburg artist Sasha Skochilenko, who has been in jail since April 2022, charged with disseminating “fake news” about the Russian army. (Skochilenko is alleged to have replace price tags in a grocery store with information about the war.)
Zhenya Berkovich has also not made a secret of her anti-war views, including in her poetry. A collection of her poems was published in Israel earlier this month.
“Open Telegram and keep up with the news. / Rate this year in terms of its nineteen-thirty-seven-ness,” one of them begins.
According to Berkovich, her grandmother, the 88-year-old writer Nina Katerli, was worried about her granddaughter, even going so far as to tell her, “Zhenya, be quiet for a while.” Actually, the director explained that she had decided to stay in Russia, no matter what, because she had to take care of her sick grandmother.
“It is to a large extent a necessity, due to all sorts of family obligations,” Berkovich said in December. “If it were now a question of going to prison or taking care of my grandmother, then of course I would leave, because I wouldn’t be able to take care of my grandmother from prison. But right now this is not the choice I’m facing.”
“Zhenya Berkovich: Why I have stayed in Russia and how to go on living”: Berkovich interviewed by journalist Liza Lazerson, as posted in on YouTube in December 2022 (in Russian)
This morning, the security forces searched Berkovich’s grandmother’s apartment. Berkovich and Petriichuk will spend the night at a temporary detention facility, and tomorrow a court will decide whether to remand them in custody or subject them to other restrictions.
