Notes at the Front

Last Word

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.

The case against Berkovich and Petriychuk is a symbolic one, referred to as the “theater case” and followed closely by the media. Every three months, their arrest is extended via a court hearing, during which the accused have a chance to address the court with a “last word.”

Last words are a Russian tradition protected by law, granting the accused one last opportunity to argue their case. In today’s Russia, where free speech is all but stifled, these are rare instances of self-expression. As Berkovich is an artist, she chose to deliver her most recent last statement, in January, in verse. The Russian original was initially published by Mediazona.

Doctor Without Borders

Darya Kozyreva is 18, and in January she was expelled from her first year of medical school at St. Petersburg University. The reason for her expulsion was a social media post “discrediting” the Russian military. The post was made nearly two years ago, before the Russian Duma’s law criminalizing such public speech went into effect.

In her March 2022 post Kozyreva wrote that she “was furious” after “our benevolent State Duma"
made disseminating information about Russia’s military actions in Ukraine an imprisonable offence. “I admit, until recently I couldn’t believe that the authorities would dare go as far as this – even on Wednesday [the law was passed on Friday, March 4] I was still thinking that they might reject it... But no, hats off to you, kind sirs, I underestimated you. You passed it, my little doves, just one day after it was proposed. You worked quickly, no denying it.”

Kozyreva was informed of the case against her in December 2023, when she showed up at the university for classes. She was summoned to the police, informed of her case, and a few days later the court fined her R30,000 ($334).

She did not attend the trial for her case because she felt it was pointless. “I understood perfectly well that my post contained what was meant [in the law] by ‘discrediting.’ I deny that this army can be discredited. In my opinion, it has discredited itself very well. What is dead cannot die. Discrediting the Russian army is an oxymoron.”

This was far from Kozyreva’s first encounter with the police.

When the war began in February 2022, Kozyreva was 16. That summer she received her first two write-ups with the police. The first was for tearing the letters Z and V off military equipment on display in Kronstadt’s Patriot Park. The second was for tearing down a poster calling for contract fighters. Both of these instances had limited consequence because Kozyreva was still a minor, and thus could not be prosecuted under the law on “fakes” and “discreditation” that she had railed against in March of 2022.

But in December 2022 things got a bit more serious. Kozyreva openly defaced an art installation in St. Petersburg’s Palace Square. It showed two interlocking hearts and touted the “brotherhood” of Petersburg and Mariupol. Kozyreva spray-painted the installation with the words: “Murderers, you bombed it. Judases.”

From February to May 2022, Russian troops invading Ukraine surrounded Mariupol and laid siege to the city, bombing it to ruins and killing an estimated 22,000 city residents. Then, in the summer, an official sister-city relationship was established between St. Petersburg and Russian-occupied Mariupol.

The installation was taken down the day after Kozyreva’s action, and she was charged with “discrediting” the army, but, again, since she was a minor, her case had to be taken up by a commission for the affairs of minors, which has yet to happen. But in January 2023 her case took a different turn when she was charged with criminal vandalism, which was later changed to destruction of property valued at over R250,000.

“I was detained right on Palace Square.” Kozyreva said. “I went [to the installation] in broad daylight and didn’t hide from anyone. The police detained me. The cops, of course, are for the war, but I cursed it. I told them the truth, that the installation should not be there. That this is monstrous hypocrisy and a terrible lie. I was taken to Police Station 78 and was charged with discreditation. Then they repeatedly called me in to make statements. In my testimony, I straightforwardly dictated my hatred of the imperialist massacre and told them to write it all down.”

The installation was later returned to its location at the center of Palace Square, but with full-time guards on duty, one of whom told a journalist that the company had been hired to prevent, say, someone “having their picture taken in front of the installation with a sign of some sort.” Two months later, the installation was removed, reportedly “because the contract had been concluded.”

In a January 2024 interview with Bumaga, Kozyreva said “it has been suggested that they [the security services] were waiting until I turn 18 [to take action]. But in October [2023], when I became an adult, no case was opened. I have no idea if it is closed or not.”

According to Article 280.3 of the Russian Criminal Code, a repeat “discreditation of the army” offense within a year of being found guilty of violating the analogous administrative provision can elevate the second action to a criminal offense and entail imprisonment for up to five years.

So why has Kozyreva not fled the country?

“They won’t shut me up,” she said. “I consider it beneath my dignity to remain silent because it is so ordered. Maybe my words won’t influence anything, but at least my conscience will be clear. I will know that in 2022, 2023, and 2024, I was not silent.

“I may leave. I am no longer fundamentally opposed to this idea. But for now, simply running from one’s pursuers doesn’t seem quite right. Another thing is that I’m tired of walking down the street and seeing banners for ‘contract service,’ or ‘real work.’ If I leave, it will be easier psychologically, but I am a patriot and a patriot in the proper sense. Not in the sense that propagandists put into this concept.

“I hope things change. The people’s patience won’t last forever. And one day, I believe, the people will take up cobblestones, the weapons of the proletariat, and take action against these villains who imagine themselves to be tsars. And no one who is guilty of this bloodbath, who is responsible for the evil being perpetrated now, will be safe. No evil lasts forever and every night comes to an end. And this night will also end.”

In a video interview with Vot.Tak in late January, Kozyreva noted that for authoritarian leaders war can contain the seeds of their destruction. Just as it was in 1917, so it will be this time around, she predicted. Then, as now, she said, it was women who were the harbingers.

“All of these repressive things, introduced in 2022,” she said, “absolutely contradict the Constitution. They don’t care about the Constitution, and, as was made clear with the story of Adam Kadyrov,[1] they also don’t care about the Criminal Code. They do whatever they like, not fearing any repercussions.

“The potential of a person to say what they think is not based on something external, but is entirely internal. It is one of the most important things that has to happen now. I decided something that is very important for me personally: if they order us to close our mouths, to keep quiet in our rags, to not stick out, then the sacred duty of the citizen is to speak. To say what they think about those in power, even if it has not only legal implications, but criminal ones. It saddens me that so many are afraid, since that is what gives this dictatorship its power – the tacit consent, be it out of indifference or fear.

Moveable Trinity

One of Russia’s most iconic (literally!) artworks has become the victim of a mysticism-infused power grab. The fate of Andrei Rublev’s Trinity, the fifteenth-century depiction of the Father, Son and Holy Ghost, has been hanging in the balance since May 2023, when it was unexpectedly handed over to the Russian Orthodox Church by President Vladimir Putin.

The artwork had rarely left its permanent home at the Tretyakov Gallery without the supervision of restorers. The Tretyakov describes the condition of the icon as very fragile, due to being painted over three wooden boards rather than a solid block. Over the centuries, each fifteenth-century board deformed in its own way, developing cracks and separating the paint from the wood.

The Trinity spent some time at the Trinity Lavra of St. Sergius, the Moscow Oblast monastery with historic ties to Rublev, where the icon was taken for restoration work. The plan had been to construct a special capsule to house the icon after its eventual permanent relocation to the monastery.

Instead, the artwork was taken away from restorers and unexpectedly moved to the Cathedral of Christ the Savior just before Christmas, without any protection from freezing temperatures. There it is displayed in a simple glass case with no climate control.

The BBC described the icon as a “hostage” of Putin’s wartime decision-making, with some observers suspecting that it’s been selected to serve a war-time purpose.

Ksenia Luchenko, a journalist and observer of the Russian Orthodox Church, described the situation as “a high-level battle between culture and heavy-handed sorcery,” referring to an interest in mysticism and a belief in the power of sacred objects within security-service circles.

“The logic is simple,” Luchenko wrote on Telegram, “They gave the icon to the church in the summer, and the Ukrainian counteroffensive failed. It works! Now they have to ensure the success of the elections and the spring military campaign.”

“In the nineteenth century, when the era of professional icon restoration began, Russia’s imperial authorities established that the value of a cultural monument takes priority over its utilitarian use. Two centuries ago, it was customary to destroy icons when they reached a decrepit state. Most often they were burned. Thousands of works of icon painting that could have been the pride of top museums around the world perished due to the ignorance of Russia’s church and state leaders. Only a few survived. Andrei Rublev’s Trinity takes a special place among the survivors, depicting the Father, Son and Holy Ghost in a discussion about eternity.

“The very idea of using such a precious and fragile work of art in a utilitarian manner could only occur to people with a cultural nerve that has completely atrophied. Culture is above religion, above the church, and certainly above state power. The forced return of Trinity to church use is a return to illiterate Middle Ages.”

–  Historian and liberal politician Lev Shlosberg