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Detained director and playwright added to Russian government list of ‘terrorists and extremists’
Yevgenia Berkovich and Svetlana Petriychuk in court following their sentence extension in April. Photo: SOTAvision
Russia’s financial watchdog Rosfinmonitor added theatre director Yevgenia Berkovich and playwright Svetlana Petriychuk to the government’s list of “terrorists and extremists” on Monday, according to the government agency’s website.
Berkovich and Petriychuk were both arrested last May and charged with “justifying terrorism” for their staging of Petriychuk’s play Finist, the Brave Falcon in Moscow in 2020. The play tells the true stories of several Russian women who married radical Islamists they met online and moved to Syria.
Both women have been in pretrial detention for the past year, and are expected to be sentenced next month. They face up to seven years in prison if found guilty.
The play, which received two prestigious Golden Mask awards in 2022, was deemed by an expert for the prosecution to contain “the ideology of radical feminism,” which he linked to “the conscious preparation and execution of terrorist acts.”
A report on the play written for the Federal Security Service (FSB) concluded that the play “glorified terrorists”, making them appear “interesting and attractive to girls and women” while portraying Russian men in a negative light.
The Russian Volunteer Corps, a Russian paramilitary group fighting alongside the Ukrainian Armed Forces against the Russian military, was also added to the terrorists and extremists list on Monday.