Prominent Russia Theater Director Given Suspended Sentence
Prominent Russia Theater Director Found Guilty of Embezzlement
(Bloomberg) -- A Moscow court gave one of Russia’s most prominent contemporary theater directors a three-year suspended sentence for embezzlement Friday, in a trial that sparked fears of tightening state control over artistic freedom.
Kirill Serebrennikov, the art director of Moscow’s Gogol Center and one of Russia’s best-known theater personalities, was found guilty of leading a group that stole 129 million rubles ($1.9 million) from the state but he will not be imprisoned, according to Interfax news service. Prosecutors sought a six-year prison term.
The case has been criticized in Russia and abroad as an attempt to limit artistic freedom. Nearly 5,000 local cultural figures signed an open letter to the culture minister this week requesting that it be dropped.
”This is about how people who made a successful theater project are without evidence declared a ‘criminal group’ due to changes in the public mood,” Serebrennikov said in his closing statement, which contained a veiled message that he has no regrets. “It’s about how the state -- after all, the Ministry of Culture is the state -- rejects what it has done and created using taxpayers’ and budget money.”
He and colleagues jailed over the allegations denied any wrongdoing, calling the charges politically motivated given the sometimes provocative nature of his productions.
Serebrennikov, together with two colleagues who were also convicted, will have to repay the Culture Ministry 129 million rubles, Interfax reported from the courtroom.
Serebrennikov, 50, was put under house arrest in 2017 over charges of misusing government funds for an arts festival before he was released on bail last year. The case appeared to fall apart in 2019 after evidence emerged that he hadn’t misused the funds, but a renewed trial this year led to Friday’s conviction.
His work has remained popular, with a premiere at the Bolshoi Theater of his Nureyev ballet drawing Kremlin officials and others from the elite in late 2017, when he was still under house arrest.
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