I think it’s safe to say that freedom of speech is not high on the agenda in Russia at the moment. Indeed it appears to be the Putin government’s favourite pastime to shut down anything they consider to be dissent from the party line.
This has now led to a screening of the documentary Pussy Riot: A Punk Prayer being cancelled after the cinema that was due to show it received a letter from Sergei Kapkov, the head of Moscow’s cultural department.
The screening was due to take place last Sunday and was to be followed by a Q&A with Maria Alyokhina and Nadezhda Tolokonnikova, two members of the queer-friendly punk group who were released from prison last week. The letter from Kapkov demanded that the screening be cancelled, saying, “I would like to draw your attention to the fact that the theater run by you is a government cultural institution…and financed from the city budget You, as the director of the institution, should show responsibility before the founders and, most importantly, before the audience.”
“I deeply believe that a government cultural institution should not associate with those people who provoke such an ambiguous reaction and whose activity is based on the provocation of society… I have no right to get mixed up in your repertoire politics, and I’ve never done that, but considering this showing is not part of the official schedule, I demand you cancel the showing of the documentary film ‘Pussy Riot: A Punk Prayer’ and the discussion with the main heroes of the film.”
Kirill Serebrennikov, the director of the Gogol Center theater, reacted to the news on Facebook saying, “Until recently, in all interviews, I would declare like a mantra: ‘There’s no censorship at the theater, there’s no censorship at the theater.’ That’s it, fuck, there’s censorship at the theater! Cynical, pointless and stupid.”
Members of the anarchist punk group Pussy Riot were imprisoned after they held a protest against the Putin Government and the power of the Russian Orthodox church inside a cathedral. Locking them up made them a cause celebre around the world, and indeed led to the documentary, which charts what happened and how three of the women were sentenced to spend years behind bars.
The final two were released from prison last week in what many have seen as a move by the Russian government to try and bring an end to the issue before the Sochi Olympics. One of the freed women even said she would have preferred to stay in prison rather than be part of what she believes is a propaganda move by a ‘totalitarian machine’.
As with the new Russian laws banning the promotion of ‘non-traditional’ sexual relationships to Children, the shutting down of the screening is evidence of an increasingly restrictive line taken by officials in the country, where they feeling increasingly free to stamp out anything they don’t like, irrespective of the wishes of individuals. (Translations via BuzzFeed)
