Artist Yulia Tsvetkova. Photo: social networks
The unprecedented case of a young artist from Komsomolsk-on-Amur, feminist and director of the children's theater «Merak» Yulia Tsvetkova, accused of distributing pornography, is three years old. Yulia faces up to six years in prison for her and other people's drawings of naked female bodies, posted in a small public on VKontakte «Vagina Monologues».
And this is not just three years of life taken away while waiting for a court decision. These are three years of difficult struggle, torture, death threats, psychological pressure, insults, isolation, illegal restrictions on freedom, endless violations and new administrative cases on top of the criminal one.
“Distribution of pornography” was brought to the case later, and it all started with accusations of “LGBT propaganda” and the destruction of the theater: on February 5, 2019, Yulia’s mother, Anna Khodyreva, received a strange call from a local employee of the youth affairs department — a question with a request to refute rumors of obscene content their performances. This date can be considered the starting point of the Kafkaesque process, within which Yulia and Anna, as well as child actors, Yulia's students, found themselves.
The Color of Saffron Youth Theater Festival and the performance about the dangers of gender stereotypes Pink and Blue » local authorities first agreed, and then
canceled, as is usually the case, in the name of «child protection». Later, the «protection» quickly ended, and the security forces and Center «E» began to drag these same children and their parents for interrogations, intimidating and trying to get the evidence they needed against Tsvetkova.
Julia covered the situation with the cancellation of the festival in social networks and invited the administration to visit their production and stop creating a stressful situation for children. “It's about pressure, about boys and girls. About the fact that personality is more important than stereotypes,” Yulia herself described the performance, specifying that the name of the performance was invented by an 11-year-old actor who remembered that the city maternity hospital had signs from Soviet times — blue “Happy Birthday, son!” and pink «Happy Birthday, daughter!». But soon a criminal case was opened against Yulia, and the children's self-organized theater about equality and non-violence was replaced, as the activist Kira Shmyreva accurately formulated, with a theater of cruelty, already organized by the security forces and the state.
In the summer of 2020, thanks to the efforts of Yulia herself, her mother, activists and the media campaign under the hashtag #zayulyu, it seemed that the whole country was outraged by the persecution of the artist. Even people who are equally distant from both politics in general and feminism in particular spoke out, went to pickets and wondered who and why such an absurd case could benefit.
More than 250,000 signatures were collected in support of Yulia, more than the inhabitants of the city of Komsomolsk-on-Amur.
Yulia Tsvetkova explored the borderline themes of the changing norm, which caused consternation among the most conservative part of Russian society. Photos from the personal archive
In 2021, the political situation in Russia deteriorated sharply, and Yulia's case became part of the general repressive landscape: new baseless cases now appear almost every day. Cases that last so long inevitably fall in public attention, and
this is exactly what customers and executors of the case seek. They want us to get used to, to forget, to get confused in the numerous details of the process and thus lose the collective protection. SingleImage_image__3qIDn» alt=»» />
Daria Serenko. Photo from the personal archive
I am a member of the initiative group to help Yulia Tsvetkova and on behalf of the group I want to appeal to each and everyone who is reading this text now: please, let's leave the case of Yulia Tsvetkova re-into our lives.
She really faces a real prison. Yulia is being tried under a serious article, according to which a fine or corrective labor is impossible. In this text, I want to lay out the main chronicle and texture of the persecution, focusing on its most absurd details.
Children under interrogation
«My childhood ended earlier than I would like.» How the Merak children's theater was destroyed in the Khabarovsk Territory.
Siberia.Realii*, January 26, 2021
“We survived harassment and cyberbullying, from which the authorities did not protect us,” the teenagers who were actors of the Merak Theater write in an open letter. Interrogations of minors (15-year-old and 13-year-old) were conducted by the FSB and the police with violations — without the presence of parents, without prior clarification of rights and without the use of video recording during investigative actions.
The police came to schools without warning and called the children right during the lessons, trying to get the necessary evidence from them against Yulia: “Did Tsvetkova seduce minors? Was LGBT propaganda carried out in the theater?”
Parents in the same open letter talk about the fact that psychological pressure was exerted on children during interrogations. Failing to obtain false testimony, the police would then switch to three underage subscribers of Yulia's public on VKontakte, Vagina Monologues (a public of artworks about beauty and acceptance of the human body), which had an age limit of 18+.
< p>The police raided not only Yulia's house, but also in the studio during classes, scattering things in the presence of students in search of non-existent «pornographic cassettes.» Some of the parents whose children attended Yulia Tsvetkova's theater studio began to be threatened with dismissals and problems at work, and several families were forced to leave the city due to the actions of the administration and security forces.
“Nine employees walked and looked at pencils and children's albums. Among other things, they said that I was a lesbian and a sex trainer, I was doing propaganda. It has nothing to do with reality,” the artist recalled in an interview.
After all the events, the theater actors and their parents describe their psychological state as difficult, and they consider the destruction of the theater cruel and unfair. In an open letter dated January 27, 2021, they demand an apology from the head of the Khabarovsk Territory for the persecution they experienced. The administration of the Khabarovsk Territory ignored the open letter. The play «Pink and Blue», the meaning of which was distorted by the security forces, was also not visited by anyone from the administration.