Russian culture is another casualty of Putin’s war

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Russian theater director Yevgeniya Berkovich (R) and fellow playwright Svetlana Petriychuk, accused of “justifying terrorism” over their award-winning play about Russian Islamic State brides, sit inside a defendants’ box during the verdict announcement in Moscow on July 8, 2024.

Much of Russia’s intellectual and technological elite fled the country after the invasion of Ukraine. Vladimir Putin sent hundreds of thousands of his soldiers to die or be wounded in Ukraine.

Now, bent on militarizing Russian society and crushing all independent thought, Putin is assaulting Russian culture.

The latest casualties are stage director Yevgenia Berkovich and playwright Svetlana Petriychuk, both celebrated in the Russian theatrical community. In 2021, they staged “Finist, the Brave Falcon,” a courtroom drama interwoven with a fairy tale.

Theater has a rich history in Russia and fairy tales are embedded in the Russian psyche. Berkovich and Petriychuk based their play on a fairy tale in which a woman named Maryushka overcomes obstacles to be with Finist the Falcon.

In their adaptation, a young Russian woman named Maryushka is on trial for aiding terrorism. She explains that she fell in love with a radical jihadist in an online audio call. The judge ridicules Maryushka, and by extension the thousands of women from the West and Russia who became infatuated online with ISIS fighters and went to Syria to join them: “How can you fall in love with someone without even seeing their picture? Are you completely f‑‑‑ed in the head?”

Maryushka explains to the judge that the jihadist lured her into coming to Syria, where she married him. “What sort of blasted love is this?” asks the judge. “This wicked guy of yours would come home and he’d drop his blood-stained boots and shag you, before he even showered? Was that what you wanted?” Maryushka replies, “Maybe.”

Maryushka had a child with her fighter and cooked and did laundry for his terrorist network. After her husband was killed, the Kurdish military arrested her and returned her to Russia. The judge, calling her a “dimwit,” sentences Maryushka to four-and-a-half years in prison.

The production, financed with funds from multiple state agencies that had pre-approved the script, was a critical success. It won Russia’s prestigious Golden Mask award.

But after the Ukraine invasion, Russian authorities arrested Berkovich and Petriychuk. The charges against them, worthy of an absurdist play on their own, alleged that “Finist, the Brave Falcon” romanticized women who fall in love with terrorists, despite the play’s very clear warning that a terrible fate awaits such women. Last week, Berkovich and Petriychuk were convicted of supporting terrorism and sentenced to six years in prison each.

Putin is hollowing out Russia’s once great culture. Artists, actors, writers and musicians are fleeing, silencing themselves, disappearing or else succumbing to fear and using their art to glorify the “special military operation.”

Zelfira Tregulova, the highly esteemed director of the world-renowned State Tretyakov Gallery in Moscow, was removed in 2023 because she failed to prove that the museum’s collection was “in line with spiritual and moral values.” Her replacement, the daughter of a senior official of Russia’s Federal Security Bureau, lacks a fine arts background.

For Putin, the ideal Russian society is like ancient Sparta, where only one profession was open to males: warrior. Putin spends half-a-billion dollars a year on patriotic education and military training for children and teens, who are indoctrinated by Ukraine war veterans wearing camouflage and black balaclavas. Children are taught to make drones and crutches.

Berkovich and Petriychuk are tragic victims of yet another senseless Putin war.

Gregory J. Wallance was a federal prosecutor in the Carter and Reagan administrations and a member of the ABSCAM prosecution team, which convicted a U.S. senator and six representatives of bribery. He is the author of “Into Siberia: George Kennan’s Epic Journey Through the Brutal, Frozen Heart of Russia.”