Rector of the St. Petersburg Russian State Institute of Performing Arts (RGISI) Natalya Pakhomova fired theater critic Marina Dmitrevskaya. Theater critic Olga Vaisbein reported this; she later published a statement from Dmitrevskaya herself on her Facebook page.
The rector’s order cited “an employee committing an immoral offense” as the reason.
70-year-old Dmitrevskaya, who was a professor at the Department of Russian Theater and Theater Criticism at the Faculty of Theater Studies of the Russian State Institute of Social Sciences, was fined 30 thousand rubles in April under the protocol on “discrediting” the army (Part 1 of Article 20.3.3 of the Administrative Code).
Reason became Dmitrevskaya’s 2022 Facebook post, written on the first day of the full-scale invasion of Ukraine. In it, she accused the Russian leadership of starting a “bloody war” and supported the Ukrainians and “foreign agents.”
«The whole procedure was an absolute insult to my entire life at Mokhovaya,» the teacher wrote after her dismissal. «I came to study in 1971, entered graduate school in 1977, and have not gone anywhere since then. In the work record book that was handed to me, there are only thanks and steps of growth: graduate student-teacher-senior lecturer… professor… <…> It seems that the last time our faculty (and it has always been pure Switzerland) fired I. I. Shneiderman in 1949 during the campaign against cosmopolitanism.»
Marina Dmitrievskaya is a PhD in art history and editor-in-chief of the Petersburg Theater Journal. In the summer of 2022, in a commentary for the publication Public O, she condemned “kvass patriotism” and “called on people to love their homeland, not the government.”