‘Why Crocus and not the Kremlin?’

Head of St. Petersburg cultural space resigns over husband’s provocative Facebook post about terrorist attack

Roksana Shatunovskaya, the general director of St. Petersburg’s New Holland cultural space, has resigned in the wake of a scandal surrounding a social media post her husband made about the Crocus City Hall terrorist attack. She had held the position for 13 years.

On March 24, two days after armed men killed at least 139 people at Moscow’s Crocus City Hall concert venue, Shatunovskaya’s husband, Nikolai Konashenok, published two posts on Facebook about the attack. The first read: “Why Crocus and not the Kremlin? Did they get mixed up?” In the second, he said that Piknik, the band scheduled to perform on the night of the attack, was “on the small side,” and that an attack on a concert of songs from the film Brother 2 would “really have been something.”

According to the Telegram channel Ostorozhno, Novosti, acquaintances of Konashenko said that he has long been an “inflammatory” social media user and that his comments were not “serious.” By the time he deleted the posts, they had caught the attention of pro-Kremlin Telegram channels, many of which mentioned that Konashenok’s wife was the director of New Holland.

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The following day, Shatunovskaya announced on Instagram that she was stepping down from her post. She noted that her husband had never worked at New Holland, as some Telegram channels had alleged.

My superiors and I have mutually come to the decision that I will no longer hold my position or fulfill my duties in light of the fact that a member of my family allowed himself to make monstrous and inhumane statements.

Shatunovskaya stressed that she “condemns and does not support” her husband’s comments and fully sympathizes with the victims of the attack but that she “remains with her family.”

On March 25, Konashenok was arrested at St. Petersburg’s Pulkovo Airport, where he planned to get on a flight to Yerevan.

The press service of the Russian Interior Ministry’s St. Petersburg branch said in a statement that Konashenok’s Facebook posts contained “signs of extremism” and that the agency has not decided whether to launch a criminal case. Police have released a video that shows Konashenok apologizing for his statements. “I offer my deepest apologies. I don’t support terrorism. A monstrous crime has been committed, one we’re all grieving over,” he says to the camera.