The Zamoskvoretsky Court of Moscow granted the petition of the investigation and arrested the theater director and member of the Seventh Studio Zhenya Berkovich in the case of justifying terrorism in the play Finist Yasny Sokol – she will be sent to a pre-trial detention center. In addition to Berkovich, playwright Svetlana Petriychuk was detained as part of the case. A preventive measure has not yet been chosen for her.
As journalist Vasily Polonsky reported from the courtroom, the investigation saw the justification of terrorism in the actions of director Berkovich for publishing a reading of the play on YouTube. The defense noted that Zhenya Berkovich is the mother of two adopted children, one of whom is a minor.
As part of the consideration of the issue of choosing a measure of restraint, the director’s lawyers announced the list of Berkovich’s guarantors, including actor Konstantin Raikin, journalist Ksenia Sobchak, editor-in-chief of Novaya Gazeta Dmitry Muratov, founder of the Vera Charitable Hospice Fund Nyuta Federmesser, director Pavel Lungin, actors Alexander Filippenko and Veniamin Smekhov, as well as the founder of the House with a Lighthouse Charitable Foundation Lida Moniava and others.
In addition to the defenders from the OVD-Info project (recognized as a foreign agent) Yulia Tregubova and Yulia Kuznetsova, representing Zhenya Berkovich and Svetlana Petriychuk, respectively, lawyer Sergey Badamshin, who previously worked with documentary filmmaker Vitaly Mansky, media manager Ilya Krasilshchik and others, was involved in the case of the director and playwright, as well as Ksenia Karpinskaya, who defended the former director of the Gogol Center Alexei Malobrodsky in the Seventh Studio case. Ksenia Karpinskaya herself spoke about this in a Forbes commentary.
The fact that Berkovich became a defendant in the case of justifying terrorism became known on May 4. The director’s mother, Elena Efros, said that a search was conducted in her house in St. Petersburg. “They came to our house with a search. A criminal case has been opened against Zhenya because of Finist. “Justifying terrorism,” Efros wrote on Facebook (owned by Meta, which is recognized as extremist in Russia and banned). Later it became known that Berkovich was detained. “OVD-Info” then reported that the case about the play “Finist Yasny Sokol” was initiated on the fact of a “crime”, and not against specific individuals, and that Berkovich was involved in the case as a witness.
On the evening of May 4, it became known that Berkovich had been detained as a suspect in the case of justifying terrorism. The director was charged under part 2 of article 205.2 of the Criminal Code (“Public justification of terrorism using the media”). The maximum punishment for it involves a fine of up to 1 million rubles or the income of the convicted person for a period of up to five years or imprisonment for up to seven years with deprivation of the right to hold certain positions or engage in certain activities for up to five years. Earlier, the human rights project “The First Department” wrote that the case for justifying terrorism in the play “Finist Yasny Sokol” was initiated almost a month ago, on April 10.
The play “Finist Yasny Sokol” (a project of the independent theater “Daughters of SOSO”) tells about women “who decided to virtually marry representatives of radical Islam and go to live with them in Syria.” The production is based on a play by Svetlana Petriychuk, who was also detained on May 4. In addition, it used real sentences and records of interrogations of such women in Russia, Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan. Last year, the performance won two nominations at the Golden Mask theater award and received awards for the best work of a playwright and the best costumes.
“We took on a very difficult topic <...> I had to shovel through a huge amount of documentary material, look for real heroines and their stories, consult with Islamic clerics and even Russian law enforcement officers … And all in order to understand: what is so lacking to a man, a woman, that she is ready to put absolutely her whole life on the line, to believe not even a man, but a picture on the screen and rush to distant lands to look for her Finist, ”Berkovich said earlier about the production.
After reports of the detention of Zhenya Berkovich, the Novaya Gazeta newspaper launched a petition in support of the director and playwright Svetlana Petriychuk. In an open letter, the journalists note that, contrary to the accusation, the performance “Finist the Clear Falcon” carries “an absolutely intelligible anti-terrorist call”. At the time of writing, the open letter has been signed by more than 1,300 people.
