"Directly or indirectly interested?"

The second court in the case of the Seventh Studio on the threshold of the third examination

“ The German side forbids,” Kirill Serebrennikov tells me in the elevator, with whom we go up together to the fourth floor of the Meshchansky court. We are talking about reporting with rehearsals, quite unique for Moscow: the artists of Deutsches Theater Berlin arrived in the Gogol Center to work on the play “Decameron” for ten novels Giovanni Bokkaccio. The troupe and the quartermaster of the famous theater were tired of waiting for the invited director to come to Berlin, and finally two and a half years later, and three years from the moment of invitation, they decided to organize the performance of the play with a rotational basis.

And now-the first milestone on the path of victory of justice over the mind in the 2020s that has come: a court hearing for the selection of witnesses necessary for the third examination. The prosecution never offered a single expert. The side of the defense was a list of 11 people. A lot of candidates by the court have already been rejected-because of the "connection" with the defendants.

An excessive task is to find a person in the metropolitan theater world who could act as a competent researcher of the issue and at the same time never encountered any of the participants in the process.

The applicant for an expert role from the defense is considered - Philip Wulala, director of the NET festival, resident of St. Petersburg. Prosecutor Reznichenko asks: “Have you signed a letter from young cultural figures in support of the“ Seventh Studio ”case? Wulala does not remember - years have passed. The key, determining the final choice is the question of the judge: "Are you directly or indirectly interested in the outcome of the case?" Wulala replies: "No."

Meanwhile, the entire community is directly and indirectly interested in the outcome of the case, its completion and the acquittal: this court, as an abscess, has been poisoning the theater organism for the third year. The level of professionalism of the security forces, which demonstrates literally every meeting, is essentially theatrical, according to roles, compromise. So they should also dream of the finale, if they have not yet finally entered the role of comedians.

The short story of the year is the refusal to the chief witness of the prosecution to the accountant Nina Maslyaeva in a special consideration order. So far, she is ready to recognize the theft of only five million (which she designated as her salary), but it is necessary to recognize 133 million. Those that are charged with the defendants in the Seventh Studio of the TFR and the prosecutor's office. So the case of Nina Leonidovna, although it is allocated in a separate proceeding, will now be considered in the usual court in parallel with the “seventh studio”.

“We put off until the 21st,” the judge Olesya Mendeleeva says menacingly, “and this is the last time that the participants in the process are given the right to introduce their candidates.”

But the prosecutors of the Lavrov and Reznichenko seem unlawful. Perhaps their “experts” are already standing at the “Smirno” counter. So, the second court is on the threshold of the third examination.