Russia: The Show (Trial) Must Go On
Russia: The Show (Trial) Must Go On
The Putin regime’s awkward case against theater director Evgenia Berkovich has not gone as expected.
SINCE THE INVASION OF UKRAINE in February 2022, the Vladimir Putin regime has launched hundreds of political prosecutions, mostly under hastily passed laws that prohibit “discrediting” the Russian military or disseminating “fake news” about the war. But even against this depressing backdrop, the case of writer and theater director Evgenia Berkovich and playwright Svetlana Petriychuk, which is currently being heard in a Moscow court a year after the women’s arrest, stands out for its sheer absurdity and cruelty. The women are being prosecuted for “justifying terrorism” by writing and producing a play about Russian jihadi brides—a play, Finist the Fair Falcon, first produced in 2020, which won the “Best Dramatic Work” award at Russia’s prestigious Golden Mask theater festival in April 2022.
The real reason for the prosecution, most observers agree, is that in early 2022 Berkovich emerged as an outspoken critic of the war in Ukraine. Her arrest for an antiwar protest two days after the invasion went unnoticed (at the time, such protests and arrests were still numerous), which is probably the reason it didn’t keep her production of Petriychuk’s play from winning in the festival. But shortly afterward, right after the May 9 Victory Day celebrations in 2022, Berkovich wrote a striking antiwar poem that went viral on the Russian internet. In the untitled poem, a Russian man—not a war hawk but an ordinary conformist who helps keep Vladimir Putin’s war propaganda machine chugging along by participating in the annual glorification of “our grandfathers’ great victory”—gets a nighttime visit from his actual, dead World War II veteran grandpa who tells him to knock it off:
“My dear, beloved grandson, would you please, if you can,
Never, ever write about me on Facebook again?
Not in any context, not with a Z, not without a Z,
Just don’t do it at all,” says grandpa, “it’s easy, you see?
And no victories in my name.
Just no victories. Let it be.”
(My translation; see the poem’s full text at the end.)
On May 11, 2022, the Belarusian dissident website Salidarnasc reported that the poem was “flying around the internet at the speed of sound.” A few days later, Berkovich gave an interview to the European edition of the independent Novaya Gazeta, which had ceased publication in Russia because of wartime censorship; in it, she scathingly denounced the official Kremlin mythology of the Greater Patriotic War and of Victory Day as pobedobesiye— a word first coined by the dissident priest Father Georgi Mitrofanov in 2005, which can be translated as “victory derangement” but also has overtones of demonic possession. This victory cult, Berkovich argued, was a militaristic monstrosity, a “false memory” that had nothing to do with honoring actual veterans and survivors of the war. (The grandfather in the poem, she said, was based on her own grandfather who had been too young to be a soldier but had survived the blockade of Leningrad as a child and had a lifelong aversion to the war cult.)
Berkovich’s newfound fame as an antiwar poet also drew attention to another poem she had written—remarkably, almost two months before the invasion—in which the Virgin Mary’s grief and anger at the prediction of her son’s death on cross becomes the futile cry of the soldier’s mother who wants to protect her son from becoming cannon fodder:
Every single body you’ve turned into meat for battles
Used to be somebody’s soft and warm little son.
The denunciations came fast. Putin propagandist Mikhail Shakhnazarov slammed the “grandpa” poem as “vile” two days after it was posted. Since Berkovich is Jewish, the antisemitism wasn’t far behind: One of Shakhnazarov’s commenters on the Russian social media network VKontakte wrote that if Berkovich wanted to let go of historical memory, she could start with the Holocaust. Some vigilant citizens wrote complaints to the authorities asking that Berkovich’s poetry be investigated as “insulting to the armed forces of the Russian Federation.” In October 2022, when Finist the Fair Falcon was about to open in Nizhny Novgorod, a local actor and director, Vladimir Karpuk—a war hawk, ardent Putin supporter, and Stalin fan who believes that “We’ll have to take back all those shitty [former Soviet] republics by force”—posted a rant denouncing the show as an devious attack on patriotism. Karpuk derided Berkovich as a pro-Ukraine, pro-LGBT lib and militant feminist with a “sonorous” (read: Jewish) last name; but he also suggested, for the first time, that Finist amounted to “propaganda and justification of terrorism”—especially insidious, he wrote, in the wake of Ukraine’s “terrorist attack” on the Kerch bridge to Crimea.
The Nizhny Novgorod showing of the play was canceled. But that was only the beginning.
On May 5, 2023, four days before the Victory Day celebrations, Berkovich and Petriychuk were arrested on a warrant from a Moscow district court for posting to YouTube a reading of Finist the Fair Falcon that allegedly contained justifications of terrorism. They have been in detention ever since. Berkovich, who is raising two disabled adopted children, was only briefly released from jail last November—after petitions from numerous artists and writers, many of them not otherwise involved in dissident activity—to attend her grandmother’s funeral in St. Petersburg. In a grim irony, Berkovich subsequently told the court that this ostensible gesture of mercy turned into torture: she was loaded into a six-by-six foot prisoner transport box without being told where she was going and spent twenty-five hours traveling with no heat, no warm clothing, and only two toilet stops.
Finally, this year, on May 20, the trial opened. (Like all other cases related to abetting or justifying terrorism in Russia, it is being heard by a military court.) Notably, at the opening session, the prosecutor read out ostensibly unrelated complaints—or, as she called them, “citizens’ statements”—about Berkovich’s antiwar poetry. (In one of this trial’s many remarkable moments, when the prosecutor read the first verse of a Berkovich poem that talks about dead Russian mobiks or conscripts and imagines how their lives could have been different—“Mobiks fly through the sky / To a faraway place; / Open coffins below, / And above, empty space”—Berkovich interjected with a plea to read the rest; the prosecutor skipped several verses but did read the end of the poem.)
Reports from the proceedings at Russian-language news sites like Meduza and Mediazona leave little doubt that the courtroom drama is as absurd as the charges (based on an “expert” report that accused the defendants of promoting both radical Islamism and radical feminism). A literary critic called as an expert witness by the defense told the court that treating Finist the Fair Falcon as pro-terrorism was akin to treating Crime and Punishment as pro-murder. What’s more, all the actresses and crew members involved in the production, called as witnesses for the prosecution, have testified that they saw the play as anti-terrorist: Based on real-life cases of Russian women who were recruited as mail-order ISIS brides and tried to join their “husbands” in Syria, Finist tells a tragic—and sometimes tragicomic—tale of romantic delusion and its terrible consequences. Berkovich herself has said that she regards the production as “terrorism prevention.”1
So far, the only witness to back the charges has been Karpuk, who testified that he had seen the play in Moscow in the fall of 2021 and was upset because it induced him to sympathize with the characters. Also, the ISIS brides’ unflattering comments about Russian men hurt his feelings, and Berkovich’s feminism offended him because “we have a patriarchal society” in which “men are the leaders.” (One may wonder how the female prosecutor felt about that.) When asked why it took him over a year to complain about the play’s alleged terrorist and Russophobic bent, he explained that the “special military operation” in Ukraine had sensitized him to these issues.
Karpuk (who proudly claims filmmaker and loyal Putin henchman Nikita Mikhalkov as his former professor and mentor) turned out to be a terrible witness even by the standards of political trials in Russia in 2024. At several points, the judge had stop him when his patriotic ramblings digressed too far from the substance of the case (such as it is). What’s more, cross-examination by the defense attorneys revealed that Karpuk may have never seen Finist at all: He couldn’t describe what the theater looked like, did not recall the moment when one of the “brides” makes the rounds of the auditorium handing out meringue cookies while celebrating her online wedding, and asserted that he had bought his ticket from “girls [who] were selling tickets at the entrance” even though ticket sales for the show were web-only.
Of course, this is still a political trial in Putin’s Russia, and while the prosecution has been a fiasco by even a minimally objective standard, that doesn’t mean the women won’t get convicted on a charge that carries a possible seven-year term in a penal colony. What’s more, if they are somehow miraculously acquitted, Berkovich, at least, is likely to face new charges of “discrediting the armed forces.”
Their victory has been to show the world that, alongside Putin’s Russia, a different Russia does exist—and to give that other Russia two new heroines (particularly Berkovich, whose poetry has been set to music and read in numerous YouTube clips). But that victory, like every moral victory in Putin’s Russia, is likely to come at chillingly high cost.
Two poems by Evgenia Berkovich
(translated by Cathy Young)
Maybe he’d had too much news, or too much wine (and more),
but at night to Sergey came grandpa, the one who’d been in the war.
He sat down on an Ikea stool, his broad back
to the window, and told his grandson,
“Listen, my boy, we need to chat.
“My dear, beloved grandson, would you please, if you can,
never, ever write about me on Facebook again?
Not in any context, not with a Z, not without a Z,
just don’t do it at all,” says grandpa, “It’s easy, you see?
And no victories in my name.
Just no victories. Let it be.”
“Also,” he says, “if one more request can be made,
I’d be much obliged if you didn’t take me to the parade.
Please, I beg you, Seryozha (he gestures like this with his hand),
I don’t need any regiment—
mortal, immortal, you understand?2
Let me rest, dear Seryozha: I’ve earned it.
I have no other demand.
“Yes, I know, you’re a smart, hardworking, liberal guy.
You didn’t choose any of this.
But neither, my boy, did I.
We lived our one life;
it was hard; we did it, somehow.
But can we please not serve as
your symbols of war right now?
Kids, we’re done; we’re over;
we’ve been reclaimed by the ground.
Could you do it without us,
on your own, this time around?
We don’t need your pride, and
we don’t need your secret shame.
What I really want is for folks
to forget my face and my name.”
“But then I’ll forget how we went
to the art museum! Forget
how you changed my clothes that one night
when I woke up wet,
how we read nature stories and maps,
and how you’d explain
why there’s a trail of white in the sky
behind every plane;
now you gave me a magnifying glass,
My favorite toy. . .”
“That’s all right,” grandpa says, disappearing,
“It didn’t help you, my boy.”
Oh how Mary wept, oh how she wept bitterly,
how she covered her parts with her hand:
“Can we please have no blessings and no miracles,
and no cross at the end?
Or it could be a girl; isn’t it best that way?
Then a son-in-law, grandkids—a whole pack . . .”
But the angel just stands like a tree: you can’t get to him.
He’s a courier, a foreigner; what do you expect?
“It’s not a doll! he’ll be born as a real baby!
Our little Issy, or someone’s Hassan—
every single body you’ve turned into meat for battles
used to be somebody’s soft and warm little son.
Take away your papers; take them, I’m not signing them.
I won’t register; I’ll give birth in a barn!
You want wars, at Kosovo, Chudovo?3 Keep fighting them;
while I live, I won’t let my boy come to harm.”
“Calm down,” they tell her, “please stop shouting, young lady.
It’s all decided without you ahead of time.
Tomorrow, start saving up loaves—they’ll need to be ready,
and start distilling water to use for wine.
Mom, it’s out of your hands, no matter how great your parenting:
In time, Judas plays the rat; Herod, the boss.”
By the way, God also wanted a girl, apparently.
But he’s just the dad. What to do but
send his sweet boy to the cross?
The title of the play is derived from a Russian folk tale in which the heroine shows extraordinary self-sacrificing devotion to her beloved.
The “immortal regiment” is a procession with photos of Russia’s fallen soldiers as part of the May 9 Victory Day celebrations.
The location of the medieval Russian “Battle on the Ice” against Teutonic knights.