In May 2024, Yevgenia Berkovich and Svetlana Petrichuk, the director and writer of an experimental play, became the first Russian artists since Soviet times to be put on trial for the content of their work. It was a show trial. Like all show trials its outcome was preordained. But when professional actors took the stand, it turned it into a different kind of show—one that put the spotlight on a radical ideology that has gripped the Russian state.
In this bonus episode, Arkady presents a dramatisation of that trial to find out why the Russian state needed to make an example of a fringe production and, more importantly, its director.
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