2 Russian Women Put on a Play. Then the State Came for Them.

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The prosecution of a salient playwright and a manager successful Russia implicit their enactment is simply a chilling motion of accrued repression, taste figures say.

Yevgenia Berkovich, left, and Svetlana Petriychuk basal   down  a wide   partition  with 2  bars across.
Yevgenia Berkovich, left, and Svetlana Petriychuk wrong a courthouse successful Moscow successful May. The 2 are being tried connected charges of coercion relating to the accumulation of their play, “Finist the Brave Falcon.”Credit...Dmitry Serebryakov/Associated Press

Valerie Hopkins

June 25, 2024, 12:01 a.m. ET

They wrote and staged their play arsenic an indictment of terrorism, examining the deception and depravity of convulsive extremists and the radical whose lives they ruin.

But present the 2 women down the accumulation of “Finist the Brave Falcon” are lasting proceedings successful a Moscow courtroom, charged with justifying the benignant of acts they meant to condemn.

The director, Yevgenia Berkovich, 39, and the playwright, Svetlana Petriychuk, 44, 2 highly decorated fixtures of modern Russian theater, person been successful custody for much than a year. They look up to 7 years successful situation if convicted.

One of their lawyers and radical successful the Russian taste assemblage contend that the prosecution is 1 of the clearest examples of the accelerating crackdown connected state of look since Russia attacked Ukraine successful February 2022.

Cultural figures supporting the women accidental this is the archetypal clip successful Russia’s post-Soviet epoch that a enactment of creation is efficaciously being enactment connected trial. The prosecution has been condemned by immoderate of Russia’s champion known intellectuals, including the Nobel Peace Prize laureate Dmitri A. Muratov and the manager Kirill Serebrennikov, nether whom Ms. Berkovich studied, arsenic good arsenic Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch and different rights groups.

“Finist the Brave Falcon,” interweaves a classical Russian fairy communicative with the idiosyncratic calamity of a pistillate who falls successful emotion online with a extremist extremist, who deceives her into coming to Syria to articulation the Islamic State. But determination is nary blessed ending; instead, feeling horrified and betrayed, she returns location to Russia, wherever she is convicted arsenic a terrorist.


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