Still from interview between Alla Pugacheva and Katerina Gordeeva. Photo: YouTube channel, Tell Gordeeva
A veteran of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan has begun legal proceedings against Russian singer Alla Pugacheva for comments she made in an interview earlier this month about 1990s Chechen independence leader Dzhokhar Dudayev, the Moscow courts’ press service reported on Tuesday.
In his lawsuit, Alexander Treshchev accused Pugacheva of making statements “defaming the president, the army and the law enforcement agencies of the Russian Federation” in her recent interview with well-known journalist Katerina Gordeeva. Treshchev also claimed that Pugacheva had “praised” Dudayev, the first president of the self-proclaimed Chechen Republic of Ichkeria, who was assassinated in 1996, and in doing so had “insulted the Russian people”.
Treshchev, who filed the lawsuit on 15 September, asked the court not only to recognise that Pugacheva’s words were “untrue” but that she had damaged his “honour and dignity as a citizen of Russia, a veteran and a patriot”.
A lawyer who regularly appears on talk shows on national TV, Treshchev also asked the court to order Pugacheva to issue a retraction and to pay him compensation of 1.5 billion rubles (€15.2 million) for the “moral suffering” he had incurred.
Gordeeva aired the interview with Pugacheva, her first since the start of Russia’s war against Ukraine, on her YouTube channel on 10 September, since when it has been viewed over 23 million times. During the interview, Pugacheva described Dudayev, whom she knew personally, as “a decent, correct, intelligent, beautiful person”.
Russian officials, cultural figures and bots began harassing the singer immediately following the interview’s release. On 10 September, Kremlin bots left an average of almost 10 comments per post about Pugacheva, more than the average number of comments on posts about Ukraine, though fewer than on posts about Vladimir Putin or migrants.
TV presenter and propagandist Vladimir Solovyov, political strategist Alexey Yaroshenko and actress Yana Poplavskaya were just some of those who joined Treshchev in calling for Pugacheva’s prosecution. On Tuesday, Russian State Duma Deputy Biysultan Khamzaev, from the ruling United Russia party, appealed to the head of the Justice Ministry to review Pugacheva’s comments “for signs of extremist activity”.
Pugacheva, a musical superstar in Russia who has been famous since the mid-1970s, has been outspoken in her criticism of Vladimir Putin and his regime since the start of the war in Ukraine, despite supporting his presidential run in 2008. Pugacheva, who holds dual Russian-Israeli citizenship and currently lives in Cyprus, left Russia definitively when her husband, comedian Maxim Galkin, was declared a foreign agent in September 2022.