This past Saturday night, as it has regularly for nearly two hundred years,
the stage of the Bolshoi Theatre, draped by its famous scarlet and gold
curtain, featured the long-anticipated première of a new ballet. Tickets
sold out within hours last month, with many left waiting in a long line
in the cold outside the box office. The Bolshoi’s capacious hall, ringed
by teetering loggia boxes, was filled with so many members of the ruling
élite—from Vladimir Putin’s press secretary, Dmitry Peskov, to the head
of Channel One, Konstantin Ernst—that the event seemed an updated
version of an old Communist Party Central Committee congress.

The highly anticipated ballet was “Nureyev,” a staging of the life and
work of the famed dancer and choreographer Rudolf Nureyev, whose
defection from the Soviet Union, in Paris, in 1961, was an international
sensation. Its director was Kirill Serebrennikov, who, at forty-eight
years old, is Russia’s most celebrated and internationally known theatre
director, an artist whose tastes run to the ambitious, provocative, and
avant-garde. The dancing in “Nureyev” is broken up by the intermittent
reading of text aloud, which muses on the fused ideas of art and exile.
One passage, which quotes a letter received by Nureyev after he had
emigrated to Europe, laments how Russia is a country that “does not
value its heroes.” The close of the first act features a sensuous and
lyrical pas de deux between Nureyev and Erik Bruhn, the acclaimed Danish
dancer and Nureyev’s partner of many decades, which shows the couple
falling in love after meeting, in Copenhagen, in the nineteen-sixties.

During the performance, Serebrennikov was at home, in his two-bedroom
apartment on Prechistenka Street, where he was in his fourth month of
house arrest. Last spring, prosecutors accused Serebrennikov of fraud.
They alleged that the famed director embezzled sixty-eight million
rubles, or more than a million dollars, in state money during the
production of theatrical festivals and performances over several years.
If found guilty, Serebrennikov could face up to ten years in prison.
(While under house arrest, Serebrennikov is barred from speaking with
journalists.) He is one of four defendants charged in the wide-ranging
case, which is, at once, numbingly typical (the Putin state regularly
makes a show of putting on trial those it says misallocate budget funds)
and deeply abnormal (Serebrennikov’s arrest brings to mind another
Russian theatre director, Vsevolod Meyerhold, who was executed by firing
squad, in 1940, during the Stalin-era purges). Few in Moscow think that
Serebrennikov’s problems are really due to money.

On Saturday, after the performance, members of the ballet’s production
team came onstage to take their bows wearing shirts reading “Freedom to
the director!,” with Serebrennikov’s face on them. Some in the audience
shouted out, “Bravo, Kirill!”—cries of praise for the one person not
present onstage, as if shouting Serebrennikov’s name could, in an act of
fitting surrealism, return him to the theatre.

As is frequently the case in today’s Russia, the facts of
Serebrennikov’s criminal case are overshadowed by the myriad, often
contradictory interpretations of its existence: What message is the
Kremlin trying to send to the country’s artistic and cultural figures?
If Serebrennikov did commit a transgression, what was the true nature of
it? Or is the randomness of the charge the point, the idea that any
director or artist or performer could end up in Serebrennikov’s
position? No matter the answer, many observers see his case as a sign of
a deeper and troubling turn in Russian political life, a symbol—and a
warning—of a state that has grown more inflexible, rapacious, and
unpredictable, liable to turn even on those it once fêted. It is not
accidental that Serebrennikov came to face criminal charges at a time
when Russia’s ruling ideology has turned inward and conservative, at
times veering toward the outright retrograde and obscurantist.

“Nureyev” should have premièred last July. But, two days before the
first show, the director of the Bolshoi suddenly announced its
cancellation. The supposed reason was that the ballet was “not ready,”
but that seemed unlikely. A dance critic at Kommersant, a Russian
daily, who saw snippets of rehearsals, declared that the world of ballet
has not produced anything “bigger and more significant” in years, and
that its choreography is like “breathing.” She predicted that “Nureyev”
would be the Bolshoi’s most “successful and profitable ballet since the
fall of the U.S.S.R.” A more probable culprit, then, was the ballet’s
nudity and overt theme of homosexual love. (Nikita Mikhalkov, a powerful
film director close to the Kremlin, told Vice that the Bolshoi was not
the place to “hang Nureyev’s cock.”) Rumors swirled of a call to the
Bolshoi from a high-ranking Kremlin official, or a politically
influential Orthodox cleric, which could have led to the theatre’s
abrupt decision not to stage the work. That Serebrennikov would soon
fall out of favor and be charged with fraud suggests that officials
targeted his ballet.

Yet Putin’s Russia is marked by a discursive, nonlinear quality, full of
contradictions for anyone trying to decode the meaning of events. This
weekend, after a five-month delay, the Bolshoi hosted the première of
“Nureyev” after all; but, just as his art is being celebrated on the
country’s premier stage, Serebrennikov remains out of sight, awaiting
trial, the outcome of which will define the relationship between art and
the state in the Putin era going forward. The question is what is the
aberration and what is the norm—that a ballet like “Nureyev” played on
the main stage of the Bolshoi or that its director is under house
arrest?

Serebrennikov was always a particularly Russian type of rebel: one who
sought, and attained, mainstream success, often with the blessing and
support of the state. He was, for a while, the house avant-gardiste of
Putin-era Russia. Serebrennikov grew up in Rostov-on-Don, a city in
southern Russia known for its scrappy, mafiosi-tinged local folklore.
His mother was a Russian teacher, his father a urologist—in other words,
archetypical members of the late-Soviet provincial intelligentsia.
Serebrennikov was educated as a physicist, but showed a talent for
theatre from an early age, and was a popular director of local plays and
televised films.

In the early two-thousands, when Serebrennikov was in his thirties, he
came to Moscow, where he staged a number of successful performances at
the Sovremennik, a theatre founded during the Khrushchev thaw, in the
nineteen-fifties, and the Moscow Art Theatre, the historic stage made
famous by Konstantin Stanislavsky and his eponymous acting method. This
fall, I spoke with Mikhail Shvydkoy, who was Russia’s Minister of
Culture from 2000 to 2004, and who remains a high-profile and
influential figure in the arts. Shvydkoy presided over a relatively
laissez-faire period in the state’s role in culture, including support
for innovative, and at times unconventional, art forms—sometimes making
the ministry more progressive than other arms of the state, or even the
viewing public. (During our conversation, he told me, “I always repeat
the words of Alexander Pushkin: ‘The government is the sole European in
all of Russia.’ ”)

Shvydkoy watched Serebrennikov’s career develop and saw him as a person
of thoroughly modern sensibilities, with the desire to push against the
conservative strain in Russian theatre, but also with the
professionalism and creative ability to execute that vision. “Kirill is
very talented and very genuine,” Shvydkoy told me. “Yes, he is
extravagant, and he creates a certain element of provocation in his art,
but this is natural and correct.” All the same, Shvydkoy went on, “He
always existed inside the system: he worked with Moscow’s largest
theatres, at the Bolshoi, he filmed movies.”

Serebrennikov’s star rose in tandem with the Putin system’s own, very
purposeful, flirtation with contemporary art. For a time, in the
mid-to-late two-thousands—Putin’s second Presidential term and the
short-lived reign of Dmitry Medvedev—the Kremlin had an interest in a
kind of stage-managed modernization, which, in the arts, led to state
support for innovation and experimentation, much of it controlled, but
some of it less so. Anna Narinskaya, a longtime journalist and arts
critic, told me that, by fostering the avant-garde, the Kremlin hoped to
send different messages to different audiences. For the West, it was an
“invitation to get involved,” as Narinskaya put it: for a while, foreign
curators and architects and contemporary artists regularly passed
through Moscow to present or oversee large-scale projects. Russia’s own
intelligentsia and creative professionals were meant to see the state’s
interest as a “call for collaboration—come work for us.” And the
country’s young people got a relatable style, an aesthetic that was
attractive and modern.

Not that Serebrennikov and others had much of a choice. Much of Russian
cultural life is dependent on state funding for its existence; that is
especially true in the dramatic arts, as nearly all of the country’s
more than six hundred major theatres are state institutions, which rely
on government support for seventy per cent of their budgets.
Fund-raising and endowments largely do not exist. “You don’t have a
choice between making a film with state participation or without,”
Narinskaya said. “The question is: Do you want to make a film at all?”

In the mid- to late two-thousands, the person behind the Kremlin’s
efforts to attract—some might say co-opt—artists and cultural figures
was Vladislav Surkov, a top adviser to Putin who was the architect of
Russia’s postmodern, make-believe politics. Surkov is a self-styled
cultural sophisticate, whose tastes range from William Burroughs to
Tupac Shakur. He and his deputies would regularly fly to Salzburg for
the opera. It was also Surkov who came up with the term “sovereign
democracy” to describe the Putin system, essentially a clever way of
masking soft authoritarianism. He deftly created stylish youth groups
and political parties. One summer, Surkov arranged for a beloved Russian
alternative rock singer, Zemfira, to perform at a pro-Putin youth camp
in the countryside. In Moscow, he organized a regular evening of poetry
and experimental theatre with actors who trained with Dmitry Brusnikin,
a director and pedagogue with a cultish following.

It wasn’t long before Surkov took an interest in Serebrennikov, and
Serebrennikov in Surkov. Alexey Chesnakov, a former Kremlin political
adviser who worked for Surkov, told me that Surkov knew that
Serebrennikov and other artists of his ilk “felt things very subtly, in
a way that Surkov understood, and other officials did not, and could, in
a way, elevate the state.” The two men were not especially close, but
their interests did, in part, overlap. Serebrennikov could use the
resources of the state to realize his creative ambitions; and Surkov
could harness the talents of people like Serebrennikov to further his
own vision of Putin-era cultural life, at once vibrant and edgy, yet
within prescribed boundaries. “It was a time when a lot of people were
attracted to the state, to the process that was taking place, when it
wasn’t just profitable to be close to the state, but also interesting,”
Chesnakov said.

Narinskaya, the journalist and critic, recalled Surkov as “this kind of
gray cardinal.” It seemed, she said, that Surkov “ran the whole of
Russia from behind the scenes—he was demonic, mysterious; how could you
not be interested in him? Plus, he had the power to give you a lot of
money.” As for Serebrennikov’s part, Narinskaya went on: “He knew how to
make nice with the bosses. He was friends with ministers and oligarchs
and beautiful socialites.”

In some ways, the relationship between Serebrennikov and Surkov
resembled that between Meyerhold—the avant-garde director shot during
the purges—and Lev Trotsky, the Bolshevik revolutionary; or between
Isaac Babel, the famed writer, and Nikolay Yezhov, the sociopathic head
of Stalin’s secret police. Both Meyerhold and Babel were, for a time,
bathed in the attention of the Soviet state, only to eventually fall
victim to its terror, shot during the purges. Yet neither
Serebrennikov’s rise nor fall was so dramatic. What’s more,
Serebrennikov never had any ideological affinity with the regime; in
fact, it was quite the opposite. His politics were quite obviously
liberal from the beginning, and, in 2011 and 2012, he even frequented
anti-Putin protests. Surkov’s innovation was to realize that one could
downplay ideology: his bet was on style, not substance.

The height of Serebrennikov’s artistic dalliance with Surkov, and the
universe he represented, came in 2011, when Serebrennikov staged a
theatrical production of “Almost Zero,” a novel likely written by Surkov
under a thinly disguised pen name. In his book on Putin-era Russia,
“Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible,” Peter Pomerantsev
described the sold-out première, in Moscow. The crowd was full of “hard,
clever men who rule the country and their stunning female satellites,”
Pomerantsev writes. For the play, Serebrennikov cleverly switched out
the main character’s cold cynicism, the theme of Surkov’s novel, and
made him wracked with doubt and self-loathing. Serebrennikov’s actors
talked directly to the audience, accusing them of being “at ease in a
world of nepotism, corruption and violence.” Pomerantsev described their
reaction. “The bohemians in the audience laughed uncomfortably. The hard
men and their satellites stared ahead unblinking, as if these
provocations had nothing to do with them,” he writes. “Many left at the
interval. Thus the great director pulled off a feat entirely worthy of
the Age of Surkov: he pleased his political masters—Surkov sponsors an
arts festival that Serebrennikov runs—while preserving his liberal
integrity.”

Not long after, Oleg Kashin, a Russian journalist fond of provoking his
subjects, asked Serebrennikov why he chose to collaborate with Surkov.
Serebrennikov’s answer was, effectively: Why not? He said that “Almost
Zero” was a “talented, representative, and interesting work that, in a
very serious way, speaks to our time.” He went on to tell Kashin, “I
don’t think that theatre should only engage in pure art, stuck in its
ivory tower. I’m interested in theatre, and cinema, that deals with
life, is right in the thick of it, asking disturbing questions, ready to
pronounce some unpleasant words.”

In March, 2011, aides at the Ministry of Culture passed a message to
Serebrennikov: he should ask for the state’s blessing. Dmitry Medvedev
was then President, and he, as much as Surkov, was responsible for the
state’s interest and support for cultural projects and contemporary art.
Medvedev had championed the idea of building a top-down, state-led
business incubator, called the Skolkovo Innovation Center, and now he
wanted to do something similar in the arts. The notion circulating at
the time was to launch a new state-supported festival, Platforma, with
Serebrennikov as one of its directors. “He was told that if he were to
come forward with this request, it would be approved,” a former employee
of the Ministry of Culture said, of Serebrennikov’s role.

For a time, the experimental stagings at Platforma—which, in addition to
theatre, explored dance, music, and media art—were among the most
relevant and energetic in the country. Serebrennikov’s production of
“Scumbags,” a raw, cruel play about Russia’s lost generation of the
nineteen-nineties, was a particular hit. Around the same time, in 2012,
I remember seeing his staging of “The Golden Cockerel,” an opera by
Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, which Serebrennikov turned into a satire of
contemporary Kremlin politics. A military parade with huge missiles
towed across the stage was an allusion to Russia’s annual Victory Day
parades; a horde of children glorifying the Tsar was a nod to the
pro-Putin youth groups fomented by Surkov. But, over time, the
hollowness of the idea that the Russian state could manufacture
creativity and innovation became obvious. Skolkovo faded from relevance,
and Platforma lasted only three years.

In 2012, the Moscow city government appointed Serebrennikov to take over
the Gogol Center, a struggling venue on a side street behind the Kursky
train station. Before Serebrennikov arrived, the theatre had trouble
drawing a sizable crowd and had taken to blocking off half the seats in
the main hall. His appointment was controversial, especially among the
theatre’s actors, a conservative bunch, who staged protests in front of
the mayor’s office and sent protest letters to everyone from the Duma to
the prosecutor’s office. Serebrennikov fought back and eventually turned
a core group of his former pupils into Gogol’s primary troupe. Under
Serebrennikov, the Gogol Center staged a number of successful
performances, including “The Idiots,” which was inspired by the Lars von
Trier film, from 1998, and played at the Avignon Festival. His staging
of Ivan Goncharov’s “A Common Story,” is a judgment of compromise, a
warning of the seductions and comforts that come with growing close to
the ruling system. Last year, I went to the Gogol Center for a one-off
performance that blended historical drama and political testimonials, on
the theme of Stalin’s funeral, in 1953, and the legacy of Stalinism in
present-day Russia. It was uneven, and preachy in parts, but probing and
sincere. The Gogol Center offers a new kind of venue for Moscow, a
cultural space in the most sweeping sense of the word, where people
gather not just to watch a play but to listen to lectures, participate
in seminars and master classes, or simply sit around and talk in the
café.

Marina Davydova, a prominent critic and the editor of the magazine Theater, told me that she warned Serebrennikov that this period could
not last long, just as the freewheeling cultural age after the Bolshevik
Revolution gave way to the stifling artistic controls of Stalinism.
“Don’t get too close to power,” she recalled telling Serebrennikov.
“There are people inside the system who are supporting you now—but
others will come to fight them, and, when they do, they will destroy you
in the process.” She added, “This was not a moral demand, but an
understanding of the algorithms of history.” At the time, Serebrennikov
waved off her concern. “Don’t worry,” he told her. “We’re not that
close.”

The Russian state’s relationship to the world of culture began to shift
in late 2011 and early 2012, when, in response to election fraud and
Putin’s decision to return to the Presidency, a large-scale protest
movement emerged on the streets of Moscow. The demonstrators were
largely middle-class professionals: Serebrennikov’s audience, and the
sort of people whom Surkov thought he could cleverly manage. Putin
responded by turning toward a new ideology, a mishmash of conservative
values, anti-Western resentment, disdain for urban élites, and an
elevation of the Orthodox Church. Putin demoted Surkov, and named
Vladimir Medinsky as Minister of Culture. Medinsky is a nationalist
ideologue with spurious academic credentials—amateur researchers have
provided evidence that one of his dissertations was poorly sourced and
full of errors—who shifted the ministry in a strongly conservative
direction. His arrival was “abrupt and palpable,” said the former
employee in the ministry. “We started to get all these questions about
why we are supporting this strange and unnecessary art.”

A period of political revanche followed, both inside the Kremlin and
outside, and the limited tolerance for free expression allowed in the
Medvedev era was withdrawn. In 2012, three women from the pop group
Pussy Riot were put on trial. And, after 2014, when Russia found itself
in a geopolitical standoff with the West over Ukraine, the country’s
politics, and cultural life, became increasingly curdled by reflexive
aggression and paranoia.

A policy paper issued by Medinsky’s Ministry of Culture called for “a
rejection of the principles of tolerance and multiculturalism.”
Contemporary art was unwelcome: “No experiments with form can justify
the substance that contradicts the values traditional for our society.”
Medinsky ordered the ministry to end its support for Serebrennikov’s
Platforma festival. In 2016, Serebrennikov directed a film, “The
Student,” which mocked the country’s increasing clericalism and
intolerance. It was visceral and unpleasant viewing, and won the
François Chalais Prize at the Cannes Film Festival. Serebrennikov and
the state that effectively employed him were moving in opposite
directions.

First, three of the employees at Serebrennikov’s Gogol Center, including
the financial director, were arrested last May. At that point,
Serebrennikov was a witness, but it was clear that he would end up a
target, as well. The crux of the accusation was that his production
studio embezzled state funds meant for the Platforma festival. It
appeared to be an absurd charge. At one hearing, prosecutors claimed
that a performance of “A Midsummer Night's Dream” had never happened at
all. But the play had won several awards, was performed abroad, and was
reviewed widely. Prosecutors dismissed news clippings presented by the
defense, saying, “A newspaper article cannot confirm that the
performance took place.”

Hopes of the theatre’s supporters were buoyed in May, when the
influential director of Moscow’s Theatre of Nations handed Putin a
letter in support of Serebrennikov and his colleagues. Putin, accepting
the letter, was heard to utter the word “fools,” presumably about the
overzealous investigators leading the case. But maybe Putin’s insult was
directed toward somebody else, perhaps the defendants and their
sympathizers. Or, perhaps, Putin himself no longer has the same
omnipotent hold over the country’s investigators and secret policemen.

On August 22nd, Serebrennikov was in St. Petersburg, filming a movie on
the life of Viktor Tsoi, a Soviet rock legend and counterculture hero
from the nineteen-eighties. Russian police arrested Serebrennikov and
took him back to Moscow, driving through the night. In the morning, a
judge sentenced him to house arrest while awaiting trial. At the
hearing, Serebrennikov said, “The charges brought against me are
impossible and absurd. I thought that we were engaged in a bright and
powerful project for our country, our homeland.” He finished by asking
for his release on bail—an appeal that was denied. “I am an honest
person, and I ask the court to allow me to work,” he pleaded.

The indictment centers on the studio’s use of obnal, or off-the-books
cash. It’s a tricky question, because obnal is, in essence, a way of
turning entirely legal funds into illicit funds, which can be spent on
whatever you choose: to line one’s own pockets, or, simply, to procure
necessary goods and services. State funds can only be released a certain
period of time after a particular good or service has been delivered.
But for a large theatre, all sorts of venders demand payment right away:
repairmen, prop studios, lighting technicians. Thus, in principle,
Serebrennikov and his colleagues at the theatre studio could be left
with the need for technically illegal cash for entirely legal means. The
law itself became a kind of trap.

“It’s quite obvious to me that they did not create a criminal group in
order to steal money,” said Shvydkoy the former Minister of Culture.
“They created their company in order to make plays and works of art—and,
in the process, it’s possible they could break the law somewhere.” If
anything, he suggested, Serebrennikov was led astray by his own success,
imagining that he was more protected and secure than he really was.
Shvydkoy offered a riddle in the form of a Latin saying: “What is
allowed to Jupiter is not allowed to the bull,” he said. “And the moment
when a bull begins to feel like Jupiter, all manner of funny things
start happening.”

The most recent work of Serebrennikov’s to première at the Gogol Center
was “Little Tragedies,” a series of small dramas of Russian life, based
on Pushkin’s verse. It made its début in September, when Serebrennikov
had already been sentenced to house arrest. “Staging a play without its
director is, of course, frightening, and a great responsibility,” said
Alexei Agranovich, the actor playing the “Miserly Knight,” who, in the
play, hoards not gold, as Pushkin wrote it, but books. We met in the
Gogol Center’s café, an open space of wood and brick, which hums with
the ambient busyness of actors waiting for rehearsal and people stopping
in for a coffee or slice of cake. Agranovich told me that, as he sees
it, those wielding influence in the Kremlin today “don’t understand why
they need a place like this, what is the benefit for them.”

He said that the officials in charge simply don’t have a clue what
Serebrennikov and his art are all about—and that scares them. “It’s like
an old person flipping through some Salinger,” Agranovich said. “For
them, this is just some incomprehensible shit. And, if this shit begins
to stink, and spreads around, they decide to have a look. Where do they
look? At the money side of things. Because that is a language the
state understands.” I asked Agranovich if he thought Serebrennikov’s
success had led him to danger, and if he and his team were inattentive
to the shifting reality around them. “Who knows,” he said. “Maybe some
mistakes were made—but they were sincere ones, childish, naive. Anyway,
it’s impossible to play a game successfully when the rules change four
times in the course of a match.”

In October, I went to see Sophia Apfelbaum, who is the director of
Russian Academic Youth Theatre, a large, storied state theatre across
from the Bolshoi. She had previously worked at the Ministry of Culture,
where she led the department that provides support to contemporary art,
including the Platforma festival. That made her a witness in the case,
and some weeks prior she had gone to the Investigative Committee for
questioning. “For a certain while, Serebrennikov was in favor, but that
turned out to be a disappointment,” she told me. Ultimately, she blamed
the state’s own capriciousness: what it had championed in one moment, it
recoiled from in the next. In her office, she handed me a copy of a 2011
decree, with Putin’s signature, calling on the state to fund the
Platforma festival. She emphasized that she acted in accordance with the
instructions she was given by the government. Platforma, she said, was
an “outstanding, absolutely preëminent art project. It’s sad this story
ended in such a way.”

I asked her what sort of effect the charges against Serebrennikov had
had on those inside the Russian arts and theatre scene. “The idea of
having a rational conversation with the state is gone,” she said. “Now
everyone feels tight, like they’re in a fishbowl, that at any moment the
authorities could show up with some sort of economic charges for them,
too.” On October 26th, just a few weeks after we spoke, Apfelbaum went
again to the Investigative Committee, where she was told that she was no
longer a witness but a suspect herself. She is now under house arrest,
like Serebrennikov, awaiting trial for allegedly serving as an
accomplice in the theft of millions.

A few days after Serebrennikov’s arrest, a director named Ivan Vyrypaev
released an open letter, addressed not so much to the authorities as to
his peers in the world of the arts. Vyrypaev is the former head of
Praktika Theatre, a popular space in Moscow for modern and experimental
productions. Last year, he left for Warsaw, where he is one of the
founders of a theatrical studio. His letter is an emotional appeal to
refuse further coöperation with the Russian state. Vyrypaev begins by
commenting on the actors, directors, and artists who showed up in
support at Serebrennikov’s court hearing in Moscow.

“In the meantime, most of you continue to shoot your films, put on plays
and receive grants from the ministry of culture,” he writes. “One way or
another, by collaborating with this regime while thinking that we can
change something in this country, or make a meaningful contribution to
change, through our art and our role in society, we are only fooling
ourselves and our country once again. And this, I’m sorry to say, looks
quite childish.”

Toward the close of the letter, Vyrypaev says that those who think they
can outwit the state while maintaining a clean conscience are deluding
themselves. “Living a double life is actually what put Kirill
Serebrennikov behind bars,” he writes. The letter was controversial
among cultural figures in Moscow, with many finding it self-serving and
overly simplistic. It was first published on the online portal Snob,
whose editors admitted that some on staff found it “demagogic,
provocative, and insulting.”

I reached Vyrypaev at the Polish Theatre, in Warsaw, where he was in
rehearsals for his new production of “Uncle Vanya,” which also premièred
this past Saturday, the same day as “Nureyev.” Vyrypaev feared that he
had been misunderstood. “I understand theatrical life in Russia is
impossible without the state. I didn’t mean that you should stop
working, no longer show up at the theatre or take money from the
Ministry of Culture,” he clarified. Still, he feared that the constant
searching for funding had become a kind of flirtatious game with the
ruling regime. “I left because I no longer wanted to coöperate, but I
can’t propose this to all my colleagues. It wouldn’t be humane. I had
the chance to leave, but not everyone has this opportunity.”

Vyrypaev emphasized that the real point of his letter was to make his
friends and peers think in advance of Russia’s Presidential elections,
next year, when Putin will run for a fourth term. During Putin’s last
campaign, in 2012, the Kremlin enlisted a number of cultural luminaries
to lend their image and reputation to Putin’s reëlection bid. Vyrypaev
told me that he wrote his letter with “five or six” specific people in
mind. “These people understood perfectly that I was talking to them,” he
said. “I know that, during the campaign, some officials will ask for
help, and I want to see how they react. No heroism is required. You
don’t have to declare anything, or go for some public feat like I did.
Just when they call, say you have the flu, or are filming somewhere on
location.”

Vyrypaev told me that several years ago he was invited to a meeting of
cultural figures organized by United Russia, the country’s loyal
pro-Kremlin party. He said he couldn’t make it—he was awaiting the
delivery of a new washing machine. Vyrypaev acknowledged that, “Back
then you could joke like that. Now they might not find it so funny.
Maybe there would be consequences.”

One of the most devious tricks of the Putin system is that the
consequences, just like the transgressions they are meant to enforce,
are left purposefully vague. Even the unofficial, unwritten rules aren’t
really rules at all, but rather a whispered language of hints and
suggestions. One criminal case with a figure like Serebrennikov is more
than enough for everyone in the world of arts and culture to understand
that the state expects something new and different from them. But what?
Davydova, the theatre critic, suggested one answer. “If you do something
a little too radical—and only you can guess where this line is
located—then they will show up and look for something,” she told me.
“And, of course, they’ll find something. You think even a place like the
Bolshoi is clean? If they wanted to come up with financial violations,
I’m sure they could find plenty.”

It’s hard to say what Serebrennikov’s mistake was, if he made one at
all. Perhaps the error was merely that he believed, up until the end,
that it was possible to have a conversation with those who had, in fact,
long ago stopped speaking with him. Serebrennikov once told an
interviewer that, no matter the government or system, “you need to go
and talk.” As he put it, “You tell them, ‘I know that you, the state,
are lying, mercenary, but by law you must help theatre and the arts, so
be good—fulfill your obligations.’ For the sake of theatre, I’m not
ashamed to do this.”