Notes at the Front

Yevgenia Berkovich, a playwright and theater director, has been in jail since May 2023, when she and Svetlana Petriychuk were arrested and accused of “justification of terrorism.”

Petriychuk wrote and Berkovich directed a play about women who married followers of radical Islam and then joined them in Syria. The play, Finist the Falcon, is based on actual criminal cases against so-called “brides of the Islamic State” and received partial state funding and several prestigious Golden Mask awards in 2022. Russian investigators then launched a criminal case into the alleged “justification.”

The arrest has separated Berkovich from her two daughters, teenage girls she adopted from an orphanage several years ago.