How Moscow lost the Gogol Center

The rise and fall of Russia’s premier avant-garde theater

On June 29, Moscow’s Culture Department dismissed the heads of three theaters. Among them were the leaders of Gogol Center, Alexey Agranovich and director Alexey Kabeshev. Both are associates of the venue’s founder, well-known director Kirill Serebrennikov. After nine years of successful work, the theater will change not only its management, but also its name: it will now be known as the Gogol Drama Theater. And it will be headed by Anton Yakovlev and Alexander Bocharnikov, who have no relationship with the previous leadership. For Meduza, theater critic Anton Khitrov explains what the Gogol Center meant to its audience and what its closure means for the Russian theater world.

By destroying an opposition theater, the state has sent an unambiguous message to all dissenters: Your needs no longer matter, you will no longer be tolerated, there is no place for you in Russia. The Gogol Center’s spectators irritated the regime as much as its leaders did, by longing for a future that the theater tried to satisfy as much as possible.

As incredible as it seems today, the Gogol Center was created not only with the permission of the authorities, but at their initiative. At the beginning of the last decade, Sergei Kapkov was in charge of culture in Moscow. A forward-thinking official in the era of Dmitry Medvedev, he understood that citizens wanted to live in a new way. With his deputy Evgenia Shermeneva, Kapkov launched theatrical reform. The Gogol Center became one of its first achievements — and the most convincing. In every respect, the Gogol Theatre came to define the city’s new appearance — along with the Garage Museum of Contemporary Art, the Winzavod Art Center, and Gorky Park.

The creator of the venue was Kirill Serebrennikov, who in 2012 was Moscow’s hottest theater director, and leader of the interdisciplinary Platform project at Winzavod. Serebrennikov’s main innovation, it’s now clear, was not in his directorial language, his freewheeling treatment of the classics, or his position on civic issues (which was always easy to read from his performances) — but in the unusual public role that he gave the theater.

The Gogol Center was a showcase of the future. Its owners were citizens, not artists. You could come there at any time without a ticket and find something to do: listen to a lecture, see an exhibit, or just sit in the cafe with a laptop. The theater had no separate dining area for performers and employees: they dined together with visitors, and it was often possible to catch Serebrennikov in the lobby. The stage defiantly gave up the spiritual authority that is usually attributed to it: the artists accepted spectators as equals. This was also manifest in the theater’s design. Instead of columns and velvet chairs, there were bare bricks, assorted pieces of old furniture, and inexpensive building materials.

The Gogol Center was an alternative Moscow — friendly, democratic and tolerant. Here they cherished tradition, but saw it as a public resource, not as canon. Shakespeare and Molière, Pushkin and Gogol, Pasternak and Kuzmin, became partners of the directors. Here the past was not praised over the present, as the repertoire of classics and contemporaries was combined. The Gogol Center was not bound by norms of body, sexuality, and gendered behavior. Naked nature and queer aesthetics became hallmarks of the theater — for which it was both loved and hated. The Gogol Center also criticized the government.

A call to protest was not the meaning of the Gogol Center, but that naturally followed from its visionary mission. The theater’s heroes were dissidents, opposition artists, and political activists. Its anti-heroes were fans of Stalin, religious fundamentalists, the perpetrators of state violence.

At the same time, the venue accepted money from the state and never felt shy about it. An honest deal with the state was, in fact, the policy of the Gogol Center. That’s how Serebrennikov’s team understood the deal. A state theater works for the benefit of taxpayers. It is the right and duty of the theater to interpret their interests at its discretion. The task of the state in this scheme is to entrust the platform to professionals and from time to time check how they handle their work. The criterion is simple: if the halls are filled, it means that the citizens’ demands of the theater are being heard. The Gogol Center held up its end of the bargain: its indicators were exemplary.

That was enough, when the capital’s culture department was under Kapkov, and the modernization announced under Medvedev had not yet been phased out everywhere. However, when the conservative course finally prevailed, knowledge of the people’s needs became the prerogative of the state. An artist who wants and is able to define these needs independently, goes from a useful specialist to a dangerous competitor — especially an artist who is sensitive to various calls to protest.

The living symbol of this change was Vladimir Medinsky, who was Russia’s culture minister from 2012 to 2020 and remains a close adviser to the Kremlin. The correct cultural policy in his view, looks like this: The state decides which art is useful to society, and which is harmful — and finances only the “useful” art. Artists who are disloyal to the authorities, by this logic, naturally become “harmful.”

Medinsky’s rhetoric reached an apogee with the beginning of Russia’s all-out war against Ukraine. In April, State Duma Speaker Vyacheslav Volodin said that “Those who are provided for by the state — and therefore by the people — and who betrayed it, should leave the leading positions in state-supported cultural institutions.” He was referring to creative leaders who opposed the invasion. Among them was Gogol Center head Alexey Agranovich, who replaced Serebrennikov at the beginning of last year. During the first days of the war, he signed a pacifist letter circulated by theater actors.

The Gogol Center team had been anticipating a crackdown since 2017, when Serebrennikov and his colleagues at the Platform project were accused of fraud. After a three-year trial, the director was given a suspended sentence, despite the fact that the Serebrennikov’s defense exposed the incompetence of the prosecution. Nevertheless, the Gogol Center continued to operate as if the state was still willing to honor the deal that had once been struck. The Moscow authorities tolerated a successful theater – until politics outweighed the economy. Even the word “center” has now turned out to be unacceptable for them, because it expresses a claim to independence. The venue has been hastily returned to its former name — the Gogol Drama Theater.

The fate of the Gogol Center is proof that today, the state will pay an artist only if he allows it to dictate his choice of values — in other words, if he ceases to be an artist. The only ones who will remain in the profession are those who know how to work without state support and those who are in demand abroad. This is fatal news for Russian theater, where the state was the main sponsor.

P. S. On June 30, the theatrical blog Inner Emigrant published video recordings of eight Gogol Center performances on its Telegram channel.

Text by Anton Khitrov

Translation by Carol Matlack