As Russia’s relations with the world soured over the past year, performing artists here have learned a harsh lesson: Use your stage, canvas or microphone to criticize the country or its president too freely and you run the risk of being .
That message is increasingly being directed at artists considered to be in violation of an unspoken moral code of the Russian regime, which seems to be taking cues from the Orthodox church.
In the past few weeks, Russian Orthodox Church leaders in Novosibirsk organized protests over the portrayal of religious symbols in an opera that led to the theater director being fired by the Russian Culture Ministry. Orthodox activists in Moscow delivered a severed pig’s head to a famous director to protest religious symbols he used in a play in one of the city’s preeminent theaters. A Russian arts council began examining ways to prevent and punish “distortions” of classic plays, and Kremlin officials proposed introducing a preliminary review process for theatrical productions — effectively, a Soviet-style censoring board.
Officials defend their actions as steps to urge Russian theater directors to exercise greater “taste, common sense and responsibility,” as Culture Minister Vladimir Medinsky told Russian news outlet Moskovsky Komsomolets this month, and to “show respect for the audience, the public, to the city.” That includes censoring one’s output from within, Medinsky stressed — and not “neglect[ing] the feelings of believers.”
But the artistic community in Russia sees it as a blatant attempt at social control.
“What is happening is a total conservative revolution,” said Marina Davidova, a well-known arts critic in Russia. “We have a ministry of culture that works against culture, against art and against the entire cultural community.”
As Davidova and other critics see it, the trend toward muzzling theatrical productions on moral grounds isn’t limited to those that Orthodox church officials deem offensive. The latest flare-ups have focused on sensational uses of religious symbols onstage — and the fierce response of the faithful claiming personal injury from the episodes.
Metropolitan Tikhon, the head of the Russian Orthodox Church in Novosibirsk, had not even seen the production of Richard Wagner’s “Tannhäuser” when he began to complain about it in January. He filed a court case against the director and theater officials for violating a 2013 law criminalizing insulting someone’s religious feelings. He lost but told his followers to protest the theater last month.
The opera’s plot centers on the struggle between the flesh and the spirit, with the title character, Tannhäuser, appealing all the way to the pope for salvation but falling back into his old hedonistic life when he is rejected.
Timofey Kulyabin’s modernist staging features Tannhäuser as a film director producing a movie about Jesus enjoying the lusty pleasures of Venus and advertising it with a racy poster depicting a crucifix between a naked woman’s legs. It’s supposed to cause a scandal in the opera — just as it did in real life, after the image got onto the Internet.
Church officials decried the image as a “provocation.”
“All the actors who appeared naked, simulating sexual relations, even touching Christ, who is sacred for us — this is something we cannot tolerate, because it is against our conscience,” said Vakhtang Kipshidze, a spokesman for the Moscow Patriarchate of the Russian Orthodox Church. The opera directors should have discussed the staging with the church first, Kipshidze said, to avoid this situation.
“Of course it would be a very stupid thing to expect artists never to do anything shocking,” he said. “You have freedom of self-expression, you are free artists. But we are also a religious community. We have our religious freedom and we deserve to be respected.”
The irony of this case, according to theater director Boris Mezdrich — who was fired and replaced with a director who believes the opera was “blasphemous” — is that in context, the shocking poster was only used to make a moral point with which the church would probably agree.
“The message of this poster was very simple: that you cannot go beyond certain ethical limits. You cannot live like that, you shouldn’t. That was our message,” Mezdrich said.
“But you know, those people who brought all these charges never saw the performance,” Mezdrich said. “And in a way, the government ministers just are under the influence of the church leaders.”
The bond between the government and church leaders didn’t start with the Wagner opera in Novosibirsk. Russian President Vladimir Putin’s close relationship with the church has been on display for years, reflected in his personal displays of faith, the Kremlin’s response to the group Pussy Riot’s 2012 shock-show in the Cathedral of Christ the Savior in Moscow, the Russian crusade against homosexual “propaganda” and Putin’s numerous warnings about a “moral crisis” of Western-style secularism. Even Russia’s Oscar-nominated foreign language film “Leviathan” earned the culture minister’s this year for drawing the government-church association.
But the latest incidents show that “we are getting to the critical stage of this disease,” Davidova said. “There is a link between Russia’s foreign policy and political course and what is happening in culture. Tannhäuser — there’s no criticism of the regime there. But the performance showed a free way of thinking, the free thinking of a European intellectual, and that really irritates them.”
Since the opera event, theater directors and their supporters have called for Medinsky to be fired, for Mezdrich to be reinstated, and for the church in Novosibirsk to back off from actions “which can lead to religious extremism.”
But as the war of words and street protests continues, other attempts to muzzle the country’s most experimental theatrical minds are progressing.
Several of the country’s best-known directors are being scrutinized for their modernized productions of classic Russian plays, such as Alexander Pushkin’s “Boris Godunov” and Nikolai Gogol’s “Dead Souls.” Members of the Russian Heritage Institute’s review board — which is exploring ways to limit the interpretations of Russian classics — recently told state news service Tass that many of the productions were “distortions” and even “trash.”
Putin’s spokesman has articulated the Kremlin’s opposition to any forms of censorship, but he also maintained that the government should not have to fund projects that aren’t “appropriate.”
Theaters’ dependency on state funding makes them a prime target for restriction.
“This is absolutely comparable with Soviet times,” Davidova said. “It’s just shocking how these measures are being restored.”
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