MOSCOW — It’s been a tough two months for Kirill Serebrennikov, Russia‘s most prominent contemporary theater and film director, an outspoken critic of the Kremlin and an artist who’s not afraid to stage politicized performances in state-funded theaters.
First, he was subject to unexpected and humiliating raids, with police squads turning his apartment upside down and paralyzing the work of the Gogol Center, the theater Serebrennikov runs in Moscow. Not long after, the arrests of several of his former colleagues followed.
Charges brought against them sent shock waves throughout the Russian theater community. The prosecution accused them of embezzling state funds that had been allocated to stage a play that never saw the light of day. The thing is, it did; the play has regularly featured on the Gogol Center playbill for the past five years.
“Absurd, schizophrenic situation,” Serebrennikov wrote on Facebook.
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For many in the Russian cultural community, the situation surrounding Serebrennikov and the Gogol Center is part of a trend of the state cracking down on what it sees as dissent in the arts. This crackdown has been unfolding for the past four years, as Russia has pivoted toward conservatism amid worsening relations with the West and the growing influence of the Russian Orthodox Church.
“We’ve seen attacks on theaters and artists across Russia,” says prominent theater critic John Freedman, an American who has long been active in Moscow’s theatrical community. “Anyone who tried to stage something less traditional, without hoop skirts and samovars involved, was considered a danger to the sanctity of Russian culture.”
From the Very Top
In the 1990s, the Russian arts scene was poorly funded by the state, which was in dire financial straits. Yet, it was enjoying freedom and hopes of becoming financially independent; there was no ideological pressure whatsoever.
The first harbingers of the future clampdown appeared in the early 2000s, at the beginning of the Vladimir Putin era. Pro-Kremlin activists would protest against provocative artists, like the prominent writer Vladimir Sorokin, whose novels they saw as “pornographic” and full of obscene language.
However, the current tone was set more than a decade later by Culture Minister Vladimir Medinsky, a defender of traditional Russian values and the country’s greatness, both past and present.
In 2014, Medinsky’s Ministry released a document outlining official culture policies, which prioritized Russia’s “traditional values” over “multiculturalism” and stressed the country’s “unique” cultural background. The document had been in the works since late 2013, when the Presidential Council for Culture and Arts first suggested formulating Russian policies on cultural topics.
Since then, the Ministry has carefully watched new artistic productions, making sure they are “patriotic, didactic, based on Russia’s great past or broadcasting Russian eternal values,” says Yury Saprykin, a former chief editor of Afisha, Russia’s once flagship culture magazine.
The vast majority of Russia’s cultural institutions are heavily dependent on state resources — 98 to 99 percent of theaters, for example, are either state, city or federally funded, Freedman says. Another estimate says two-thirds of funding for filmmakers comes from the government. Such a climate gives government agencies such as the Ministry of Culture plenty of leverage over artists.
In 2015, the Ministry withdrew financial support from an independent film festival because its founder made “anti-state comments” in the press. A year later, it banned an avant-garde theater production depicting Jesus Christ because it “offended religious believers’ feelings.” Around the same time the Ministry refused to license the screening of “Child 44,” a Hollywood thriller about a series of child murders in the Stalin era, because it “distorted historical facts” about Russia.
Attacks by Proxy
With independent institutions, authorities often act through proxies. Theater.Doc, one of the few independent theaters in Moscow, was evicted several times from spaces they rented between 2014 and 2015. The landlords cited contractual reasons, but evictions would coincide with law enforcement unexpectedly attending plays about the 2014 revolution in Ukraine or the imprisonment of Russian protesters.
The evictions stopped after the group issued a statement vowing to always find a space to continue its work, says Yelena Gremina, founder and director of Theater.Doc.
“However, we’ve been excluded from all the government projects we used to participate in, including a children’s theater festival they used to invite us to all the time.”
In other cases, pro-Kremlin activists intervened. In 2016, members of Officers of Russia, an association of former servicemen and young activists devoted to “patriotic education” and other nationalist beliefs, blocked entry to a Jock Sturges photo exhibition at The Lumiere Brothers Center for Photography, a popular independent gallery in Moscow. They described their actions as “community sanctions,” imposed in response to complaints about an exhibition depicting naked children.
“I have never seen anything like that in my 16-year career,” says Natalya Grigoryeva-Litvinskaya, director of the Center.
New Level
What is happening to Serebrennikov and the Gogol Center and his allies is merely a continuation of the culture wars that have heated up in the past few years, says Freedman.
Serebrennikov, 47, was appointed to run the Gogol Theater, an outmoded mediocre venue at the time, by the Moscow Department of Culture in 2012 and revolutionized it, turning it into the prestigious and edgy Gogol Center. Its progressive playbill sparked protests and elicited complaints from people who claimed they were offended by nudity and obscene language in the plays.
Serebrennikov has always been vocal about his politics. He often criticized the Kremlin in his interviews, including to the Western media. He has attended protests, signed letters in support of the controversially convicted feminist protest rock group Pussy Riot, as well as other high-profile political prisoners.
“He has become a lightning rod for the authorities,” Freedman says.
The interrogation of Serebrennikov and a criminal case against his colleagues is part of a broader effort by authorities to pressure people in the artistic community who are critical of the government. Prosecutors maintain that in 2012 Alexei Malobrodsky, former managing director of the Gogol Center, embezzled 2.3 million rubles ($38,000) allocated for staging “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” thus preventing the production from being staged.
Neither media reviews of the play from 2012 nor the fact that the production had been regularly performed at the Gogol Center until this month persuaded the prosecutor otherwise.
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Serebrennikov’s troubles didn’t end there. On July 8, three days before the premiere, the Bolshoi Theater canceled a much anticipated ballet about the life of legendary dancer and Soviet defector Rudolf Nureyev, which Serebrennikov co-directed.
The cancellation had nothing to do with the scandal around Gogol Center; the ballet was simply not ready, Bolshoi Theater Director Vladimir Urin said at a press conference the next day. Sources in the theater and people who had seen the latest rehearsals, however, rejected that claim, arguing that the production was one of the most beautiful ballets they have ever seen.
The Serebrennikov and Gogol Center cases are a signal for everyone in the arts, says Saprykin. “The message the authorities are trying to send is simple: if you work at a state-funded theater, you can’t afford to be such a free thinker — it ends badly. You can’t be part of the system and be free of the system at the same time.”
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