The artistic director of the State Russian Drama Theater in Ulan-Ude, Vyacheslav Dyachenko, called the police to force the security forces to take a group of actors working there out of the building. This is reported by the local telegram channel “All Ulan-Ude. Buryatia.
According to the channel, the artistic director of the theater said that the reason for calling the police was that the actors were «arranging liberal tricks.»
Today, the theater will host the premiere of the play «Living Goods», in which the Moscow troupe plays. Dyachenko believes that local artists can «spoil the mood» of colleagues from the capital. Theater employees complained that they were not invited to the press screening of the performance, they were forbidden to come to the theater and suspended from work.
At the end of March, one of the theater actors Artur Shuvalov, after the performance, said that the management pressure and tried to fire. After that, the man cut his wrists. Today, the artistic director of the theater, Dyachenko, announced that three artists who were friends with Shuvalov would not be allowed into the theater.
According to Shuvalov, the pressure was due to the demand of the actors to return the artistic director of the theater, Sergei Levitsky, who in 2022 the Ministry of Culture Buryatia was removed from his post due to his statements against the war in Ukraine. Levitsky was then also fined under the protocol on «discrediting» the army (part 1 of Article 20.3.3 of the Code of Administrative Offenses).
In protest against the dismissal of Levitsky, the theater employees removed a poster with the letter Z from the building , wrote complaints about the new artistic director Vyacheslav Dyachenko and applied to the media. As a result, in an interview, Dyachenko called the actors «representatives of the oldest profession» and said that he intended to stage performances «simpler and more understandable to ordinary people.»