NOVOSIBIRSK, Russia — Boris Mezdrich sits before a large desk in the spacious director’s office of the Opera and Ballet Theater. An unrelenting flow of calls to the two cellphones he rotates between his fingers interrupts the lawyers and journalists who have been visiting all day. Outside the office window, hundreds of people who spent the afternoon chanting for his resignation begin to disperse.
“You can derive your own conclusions,” Mezdrich says. “I have an inspection from the Culture Ministry arriving in a few minutes, this is not the time to discuss the politics of the decision.”
On Mezdrich’s desk lie printed copies of articles from the Russian press about the theater’s plight. Brushing them aside, he lifts up an official document in a light blue folder delivered moments prior from Moscow. Bearing the stamp of Russia’s Culture Ministry, the letter declares Mezdrich’s immediate dismissal from his post as the theater’s director. No reason is given.
“We are a federal theater. It’s written into my contract that the Culture Ministry can dismiss me without a motive,” he tells Al Jazeera, a clear tone of resignation in his voice.
By 11 p.m. the next evening, Mezdrich has cleared out all his documents and possessions and vacated the director’s office. The following day a new man sits in his chair, appointed by Russia’s Culture Minister to assume management of the state-owned institution.
Seventy years since it staged its first performance during the same week WWII ended, the famous Opera and Ballet Theater in Siberia’s capital is at the epicenter of a religious scandal that has split Russian society and provoked heated debates about freedom of artistic expression. With the Ukraine crisis and resulting standoff with the West accelerating the Kremlin-sponsored campaign against liberal values, the Russian Orthodox Church is emerging as a major ally to the large network of conservative movements whose expansion the state is going out of its way to facilitate.
Boris Mezdrich, who had spent 11 years at its helm, is the first victim in a feud likely to continue despite his public firing.
Offending religious feelings
The case dates to December 2014, when theater premiered an avant-garde production of Richard Wagner’s opera “Tannhäuser” directed by 30-year-old Timofey Kulyabin. In this adaptation, the play’s eponymous hero is reimagined as a movie director whose fictional story of Jesus’s decadent youth, “Venus’s Grotto,” is submitted for a film competition held in Germany’s Wartburg castle. The promotional poster for the fictional film depicts Jesus’s crucified figure between a naked woman’s legs.
Offended by the performance, several audience members wrote complaints to regional Russian Orthodox Church head Metropolitan Tikhon, who filed a case in the city court against Mezdrich and Kulyabin “for offending religious feelings.” The case was thrown out on March 10, but an appeal against the decision by the local Prosecutor General led to plans for a retrial.
In March the theater staged two more performances of “Tannhäuser,” this time replacing the offending image with a blank white poster.
But for religious leaders, the concession was too little, too late. On March 22, Tikhon used his Sunday sermon at Novosibirsk’s Voznesensky Cathedral to condemn the opera and encourage his congregation to attend a rally outside the theater the following weekend.
“The director and the theater’s director decided to denigrate and spit on sacred Christian objects in return for the thirty silver coins they got paid for the production,” Tikhon told the congregation, before suggesting those who don’t attend the rally are “together with the crucifiers and the vituperators.”
The following Sunday, Tikhon did not repeat the message. Instead flyers were distributed outside the church depicting a sword-wielding knight in armor and the words: “We will defend sanctity — we will save Russia!” Tikhon didn't attend the rally personally, either. The highest representative of the Orthodox Church at Novosibirsk’s Lenin Square was Alexander Novopashin, rector of the city’s Alexander Nevsky cathedral who has emerged as one of the key figures in the “Tannhäuser” case.
In his more than twenty years of service in Novosibirsk, Novopashin has made a name for himself fighting quasi-religious sects. In 1994 he opened the “Informational Consulting Center on Sectarianism” at the Alexander Nevsky cathedral, Novosibirsk’s oldest church, where he receives people who claim to have fallen under the influence of such groups. Earlier this month, he was awarded an Interior Ministry medal “for countering extremism.” In the days leading up to the “Tannhäuser” rally, although apparently unrelated to the case, Russia’s President Vladimir Putin bestowed another award upon the priest “for services to the country.”
Novopashin told Al Jazeera that staging the opera was a violation of Russia’s constitution, claiming Mezdrich and others involved in the production have intentionally refused to listen to the Orthodox community’s concerns. “We’ve been deliberately ignored. There is a constitution, according to which people cannot offend others on the basis of religion,” Novopashin said. “What is happening here is a violation of the constitution and existing laws.”
The March 29 rally on Lenin Square was the culmination of a protracted campaign Novopashin and conservative activists have waged against “Tannhäuser.” Since the court’s ruling in favor of Mezdrich, that campaign has gained pace, attracting support from federal politicians such as State Duma deputy Yevgeny Fyodorov andformer heavyweight boxer turned politician Nikolai Valuev, whose 7-foot frame towered above the crowds on Lenin Square.
“I’ve come to give my support. If we let this go, these kinds of things will repeat themselves,” Valuev, a practicing Orthodox Christian and a deputy for the ruling United Russia party, told Al Jazeera. Those responsible should be fired and the play should cease showing, he added.
By the time those words were uttered on the sidelines of the rally, Mezdrich had already received his notice. A statement outlining the official reasons for the dismissal, published on the Culture Ministry’s website the following day, highlighted “unwillingness to consider prevalent values in society, lack of respect for citizens’ opinions and failure to execute the proprietor’s instructions.”
In an appearance on state-owned channel “Rossiya 24,” Deputy Culture Minister Vladimir Aristarkhov claimed Mezdrich had been asked by the ministry to fulfill a range of conditions following the Church’s complaint, of which only one was obeyed: removal of the offending image used in the December performances. The requested public apology was never issued, Aristarkhov said.
For his part, Mezdrich remains adamant that he has no reason to repent. “What should I say sorry for? Should I apologize to people who have not even seen the play? I see in this play something very different to them. I see four performances to a packed audience, and standing ovations every time,” he says.
The ousted theater director says the “Tannhäuser” case is an example of a newly intrusive policy by the Culture Ministry, which now reserves the right to cut funding for a play midway through its cycle.
“We had censorship in the Soviet Union, but this is even worse. It was never the case then that a play could be taken down or denied funding after it had been officially approved. This is a system that the Culture Ministry has only recently created,” he says.
The drama around Novosibirsk’s famous theater is the latest in a string of related incidents in Russia that have provoked warnings from some quarters of a broad suppression of artistic freedoms. After a 2012 performance in Moscow’s Cathedral of Christ the Savior by anti-Putin punk band Pussy Riot, public acts offensive to religious feelings were made punishable by three years in prison.
Since then, several other vaguely worded laws against “extremism” have been introduced. Critics have denounced them as attempts to stifle expression and increase censorship. Religious leaders have demanded their feelings be respected.
“Art should be free, but it should not break laws and it should not offend that which is holy for other people. The Charlie Hebdo case is an example – why provoke people?” Novopashin said, referring to the terrorist attacks in Paris in January 2015 which claimed the lives of 17 people at the offices of the French satirical magazine as well as a kosher supermarket.
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