28 June: solidarity action in support of Russian theatre at the Brandenburg Gate, Berlin. I’ve figured out why Berlin’s Brandenburg Gate is so popular among young tourists. Your friend crouches down in front and then you jump in the air — your silhouette then appears with the four bronze horses driven by Eirene, the goddess of peace, immortalised on your Instagram or Facebook.
I know this because two days ago I spent three hours in front of the gate. There were a dozen or so of us, all Russian-born Berliners, and we were determined to present our placards, with slogans in English, to the tourists’ cameras. The placards called for support for creative freedom in Russia and demanded a fair investigation into the case of Alexei Malobrodsky.
A Midsummer Night’s nightmare
Alexei Malobrodsky, a well known theatre manager and former general producer of Studio Seven, an independent not-for-profit theatre, is currently being held in a pre-trial remand centre. The studio’s chief accountant Nina Maslyaeva is also on remand and Yuri Itin, its former head, is under house arrest. At the end of May, Russian Investigative Committee officers also searched the home of director Kirill Serebrennikov, the studio’s founder, and questioned several other former members of staff before relieving some of them of their foreign passports.
