C) Vika Lomasko
Russian Orthodox believer testifying: "I heard about the exhibit on the radio. And looked at the works on the Internet."
Russian Orthodox believer sitting: "Sonechka is great today."
With all the hoopla coming up with the Russian-American summit this week, and even a Civil Society-to-Civil Society summit called CS2CS on Twitter (which I certainly didn't elect or appoint and neither did you!), with enthusiastic tweeting already fired up, as I said, I hope human rights issues will not be overshadowed. Of course, they will be. We're supposed to forget these troublesome unsolved murders and people in jail during the "reset" and be "constructive".
As if on cue, the judge in the case of Yuri Samodurov -- Judge Svetlana Alexandrova of the Taganskaya District Court -- finished hearing arguments June 21 in the case of former Sakharov Center director Yuri Samodurov, a long time crusader for freedom of speech and culture in Russia, and Andrei Erofeyev, an artist in a controversial exhibit that wound up offending some religious believers -- or their managers. The decision -- I wouldn't say "verdict," because that's a term one should reserve for courts with due process under the rule of law -- is awaited now July 12.
Edward Kline of the Sakharov Foundation writes, in the long tradition of the old Chronicle of Human Rights, the facts of what occured:
The largest room of the Taganskaya courthouse was filled to overflowing with journalists, supporters of the defendants and Russian Orthodox activists. The prosecutor Alexander Nikiforov; the defense counsel Anna Stavitskaya, Dmitri Krepin, and Ksenia Kostromina; and the defendants Samodurov and Erofeyev all spoke during the session which lasted from 1 PM to 7:30 PM.
You would think that a case involving a very, very classic free speech problem right out of the textbooks of the persecution of dissidents in the Soviet era would have gotten more attention than it has (the Times gave it a brief note in the arts section last year; some people in France cared.) For all kinds of reasons -- it didn't. The Russian Orthodox Church -- at least an extremist arm of it allowed to have a field day with harassment of Yuri and the artists -- weighed in to have the prosecution move forward despite attorneys' appeals. Basically, what happened, is that some of the art work angered someone in the ROC hierarchy -- and likely it didn't start from one of these carefully-orchestrated indignant Russian Orthodox believers from the St. Nikolay Cathedral parish. As Vika Lomasko, a Moscow artist who sketched the trial described on her postcards of the scene, "the trial turned into a propagandistic tribunal for radical Orthodoxy."
"This is only the beginning. We're going to sweep this filth from Russian land," one of the Russian Orthodox fanatics is shown saying to a Russian TV crew at the trial in her sketch. During a recent show of her works and others who had become courtroom artists for Khodorkovsky's trial, the artist showed me a large book of all her many sketches of the Samodurov-Yerofeyev proceedings, which attracted very little Western press attention. It was a circus. The fanatics were allowed to boo and hiss and catcall, and shout out slogans. The intellectuals had few people supporting them -- some people from the old dissident crowd and a few younger human rights activists.
And even the dedicated Moscow human rights crowd, such as it is these days, tended to sigh and say about Samodurov things like "On khochet s'est''" -- which is a kind of world-weary, Russian idiom from the fatalist lexicon that translates to something like "He *wants* to go to jail as a martyr to show off the cause." Yuri's co-defendant was more pragmatic. He didn't want to sit in jail. He tried to convince the judge that these art works were not so terrible, after all.
Mind you -- and as we're minding Russia here -- these works were not the "piss Christ" of our own Brooklyn Museum fame. (And we're not Russia, because then-mayor Giuliani just didn't want to...pay for the art with tax dollars. He didn't order the artist or the museum curator to be tried and sentenced.) The Russian works were pretty mild stuff (see the French link above). Like Jesus Christ, showing as a kind of advertised commodity, with "This is My Blood" in a kind of "Drink Coca Cola". A kind of subtle satire of the fact that the Russian Orthodox Church, which sells vodka and tobacco duty free and owns lots of property, is a commercial operation as well as a spiritual one.
There were other works that seemed to denigrate the icons for these Russian believers -- in a previous exhibit that led to a fine, one had its eyes punched out, as if it were one of those life-size stand-up photographs of Vladimir Putin on the Arbat, which tourists can pose in by peering through the eyes. The art might be tasteless, but sacrilegious? Well, only in a country where the state religion was starting to intervene more in public life. Oh...
The "irate believers" all gave remarkably similar testimony. That is, word for word. That is, as in "written for them by other people" in the Church or prosecutor's office. I saw the indictment, and you can read all the case files and stories here. The trial sessions were the same, with people stumbling over their rehearsed text that was all identical with words that not all of them could even pronounce, and the judge also seeming to sigh with the resignation that only someone in a third branch of government that is really powerless can sigh. The telephone didn't ring on her desk -- but it didn't have to. It was all pre-fixed long before at the all-powerful prosecutor's office.
Whether "he wants to sit" or not, neither Yuri or Andrei should go to jail or even be fined. They haven't done anything wrong. They haven't "incited hatred" but only endured it, themselves. Even their own colleagues have gotten exasperated with them for perhaps exercising poor judgement in holding another controversial art show after showing one that had already gotten Yuri fined some years ago. People felt enough is enough. It's like what Mikhail Shevelev, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty Moscow broadcaster is saying, explaining why he doesn't want to go out and demonstrate for Art. 31 of the Russian Constitution again. People are tired of playing the isolated and "marginalized" intellectual in the cold, calculating managed democracy of Vladimir Putin and Dmitry Medvedev. They want to live and thrive and not go to jail. So they look for other forms of expression rather than the most free ones. And the West, preoccupied with gas or Iran votes or whatever, isn't going to care, either.
Even so, the work that Yuri curated and that Andrei and others made falls within the universal definition of Art. 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. It doesn't interfere with public order or public morals. A show in a private gallery of a non-profit organization not paid for by tax-dollars is *not* a show that the sensitive extreme Russian Orthodox believer has to even attend. It was not covered in the state-controlled press. So it's all quite fake, and all about trying to crush people who speak up.
C) Vika Lomasko
Russian Orthodox believer: "It's a band of bums who were given the assignment to besmirth Orthodoxy."
Russian Orthodox believer: "This is only the beginning. We will sweep this filth off Russian land."
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