TALLINN, Estonia (AP) — A Russian courtroom on Monday opened the trial of a theater director and a playwright accused of advocating terrorism in a play, the most recent step in an unrelenting crackdown on dissent in Russia that has reached new heights since Moscow despatched troops into Ukraine.
Zhenya Berkovich, a outstanding impartial theater director, and playwright Svetlana Petriychuk were jailed for over a yr. Government declare their play “Finist, the Courageous Falcon” justifies terrorism, which is a crime in Russia punishable via as much as seven years in jail. Berkovich and Petriychuk have each again and again rejected the accusations in opposition to them.
Berkovich informed the courtroom on Monday that she staged the play with a view to save you terrorism, and Petriychuk echoed her sentiment, pronouncing that she wrote it with a view to save you occasions like the ones depicted within the play.
The ladies’s attorneys have identified at courtroom hearings ahead of the trial that the play was once supported via the Russian Tradition Ministry and received the Golden Masks award, Russia’s maximum prestigious nationwide theater award. In 2019, the play was once learn to inmates of a ladies’s jail in Siberia, and Russia’s state reformatory carrier praised it on its web page, Petriychuk’s legal professional has stated.
The case in opposition to Berkovich and Petriychuk elicited outrage in Russia. An open letter in strengthen of the 2 artists, began via the impartial Novaya Gazeta newspaper, has been signed via greater than 16,000 other people since their arrest. The play, the letter argued, “carries a completely transparent anti-terrorist sentiment.”
Dozens of Russian actors, administrators and newshounds additionally signed affidavits urging the courtroom to unencumber the 2 from custody pending investigation and trial.
In an instant after Russia introduced its full-scale invasion of Ukraine, the Kremlin unleashed a sweeping marketing campaign of repression, unheard of because the Soviet generation. It has successfully criminalized any grievance of the struggle, with the government concentrated on now not handiest outstanding opposition figures who ultimately won draconian jail phrases, however any person who spoke out in opposition to it, publicly or differently.
Power fastened on crucial artists in Russia, too. Actors and administrators had been fired from state-run theaters, and musicians had been blacklisted from acting within the nation. Some had been slapped with label “international agent,” which carries further govt scrutiny and robust detrimental connotations. Many have left Russia.
Berkovich, who’s elevating two followed daughters, has refused to depart Russia and persevered operating together with her impartial theater manufacturing in Moscow, referred to as Soso’s Daughters. In a while after the beginning of the struggle in Ukraine, she staged an anti-war wood and was once jailed for 11 days.
apnews.com
