It has been more than six months since the Russian playwright Svetlana Petriychuk and the theater director Zhenya Berkovich were arrested and jailed for their work on “Finist, the Bright Falcon,” an acclaimed play sympathetic to women recruited by ISIS.
The charge? “Justifying terrorism.”
The plaintiffs have appealed being held in pretrial detention three times; each time, the court has denied it. The prosecution, on the other hand, has asked the court three times to postpone the trial “to interview important witnesses”; each time, the court has granted the request.
Being a feminist is not against the law in Russia. But if Ms. Berkovich and Ms. Petriychuk are found guilty, that could change, lawyers say. As President Vladimir Putin’s crackdown on civil society continues, this case has sent a fresh warning — both to artists, who could be persecuted directly for their art, and to women. Expressing feminist views in Russia has become an increasingly dangerous thing to do.
The play at the heart of the case is based on the true stories of Russian women who were recruited by ISIS terrorists. (There were, at one point in 2018, some 7,000 of them in Syria, according to one human rights activist who has been documenting their cases.) The play’s title refers to a folk tale about a woman named Maryushka who fell in love with Finist the Bright Falcon, a prince in the body of a magical bird living in a faraway kingdom.
But unlike the fairy tale, in which Maryushka rescued Finist from captivity and brought him to her home to live with her happily ever after, these women found themselves in the midst of a war, deceived and abused. Those who managed to escape back to Russia were met with public insults and prison sentences.
In “Finist, the Bright Falcon,” Ms. Berkovich and Ms. Petriychuk, who have both advocated women’s rights in their work, mixed this folklore with the dry language from real interrogations to tell the back stories of these modern Maryushkas, who left their homes and families to unite with “Finists” they met online.
The play premiered in Moscow in 2021 to rave reviews, which also widely noted its antiterrorism message. Ms. Berkovich’s production, which was funded by the Ministry of Culture, won prestigious theater awards. The play was widely discussed on social media and workshop productions ran around the country, including a reading at a women’s prison.
But the play’s success ran afoul of another phenomenon unfolding in Russia: the Kremlin’s crusade against feminism, a campaign that has been gaining traction alongside the state’s broader suppression of dissent since the invasion of Ukraine.
The Kremlin has never been especially fond of feminist ideas. More than a decade ago, members of the feminist punk band Pussy Riot were sentenced to two years in prison for performing an anti-Putin song in a Moscow church. But pressure against feminist thought and activity has been ratcheting up. A domestic abuse law introduced in the State Duma in 2019 went nowhere. The next year, authorities designated the prominent Russian nonprofit Nasiliu.net, which supports domestic violence victims, as a foreign agent, a label regularly applied to critics of Mr. Putin’s politics. (Nasiliu.net’s founder, Anna Rivina, was personally deemed a foreign agent.) In 2021, they shut down a major national feminist festival, Moscow FemFest. “They didn’t refer to any laws but simply said, ‘We need to clear the space,’” the festival’s founder, Lola Tagaeva, told me.
When Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, the Feminist Antiwar Resistance quickly formed and became one of the loudest protest movements in the country. More than 100 of its activists have faced various forms of persecution, the organization says. In one of the most high-profile cases, the artist Alexandra Skochilenko was recently sentenced to seven years in prison for swapping price tags in a St. Petersburg supermarket with statements highlighting civilian deaths in the conflict. Other political and social women’s initiatives have gained momentum since then, including mothers worrying about their sons being sent to war.
This summer, Russia’s health minister, Mikhail Murashko, criticized women putting their education and careers ahead of having children as “improper” and announced a national initiative to control the circulation of abortion-inducing drugs in pharmacies. At least two Russian regions have already outlawed “coercing” women into abortion, and in two other places, annexed Crimea and Kursk, private clinics have nearly stopped providing abortions altogether. Women nationwide have been panic-buying emergency contraception pills amid fears of a national ban.
Until now, the Russian state has typically opposed women’s groups by blocking their efforts to change laws or by issuing “black marks,” such as the foreign agent designation, designed to complicate lives bureaucratically. But a month before Ms. Berkovich and Ms. Petriychuk were arrested, a Russian lawmaker, Oleg Matveychev, claimed he had drafted a bill recognizing feminism as “an extremist ideology.” The bill has not advanced in the Duma.
Officially, the pair have been accused of violating a Russian law that forbids “public calls for terrorist activities, public justification of terrorism or propaganda of terrorism,” an offense punishable by up to seven years in prison. The state’s case against them is based on a document whose authors include the historian Roman Silantiev. He and his co-authors wrote that the play contained “signs of ISIS ideology” and “radical feminist ideology”; the document was presented as evidence the play supported terrorism.
Konstantin Dobrynin, a Russian lawyer based in Britain, said that under that law, it is possible that an official charge of radical feminism might stick, given “the darkest times we live in today.” If that happens, he said, it could very likely lead to the criminalization of feminism as an ideology in Russia. It would be, he said, “a witch hunt and the Holy Inquisition in the most literal form.”
Despite growing government suppression, Russian women persevere in their fight. Ms. Tagaeva of Moscow FemFest has since started Verstka, a media outlet that is gaining attention for its investigative work. Ms. Rivina, the nasiliu.net founder, countered receiving foreign agent status by starting a new national help line for domestic violence victims. Behind bars, Ms. Skochilenko has defiantly declared her own freedom. “I am freer than you,” she said in court on Nov. 11. “I can make my own decisions and speak my mind.”
As for Ms. Berkovich and Ms. Petriychuk, their trial is now set for Jan. 10. Regardless of whether it is postponed again, their defense lawyers say they are confident they will win. “We will prove to them that we are in the right,” Ms. Berkovich’s attorney, Ksenia Karpinskaya, told me. “Even if not right away, we will prove it.”
Vasilisa Kirilochkina is an independent journalist covering social issues and a former chief editor of Forbes Life Russia.
The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.
Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram.