I’m from Russia but I now live in Europe and can’t go back to Russia. That’s because a few weeks ago a Russian court sentenced me to eight and a half years in prison for talking on Instagram, Twitter and in interviews about the war crimes in Ukraine the Russian army has committed, in Bucha, Irpin, Mariupol and Kherson.
I was charged under a new law, “on the dissemination of knowingly spreading false information about the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation.” And yes, they will arrest me and put me away the moment I show up in Russia or any country “friendly to Russia”, but the point is not in taking revenge on me but in making an example of me.
When Russia attacked Ukraine, thousands of Russian actors protested. Entire theatres protested, the directors, screenwriters and designers guilds protested. A year and a half has passed now, and nearly all of them have fallen silent. They’ve fallen silent because the Kremlin has been able to find a way to get at them.
When pressured by force, when pressured by terror, in dread of standing out from the masses, people learn to accept a lie
The actors who protested against the war were put on a blacklist. Producers were forbidden to cast them and films they appeared in were removed from circulation. If they were to return to their profession, they had to “atone for their sins” — for instance, by going to Russian-occupied territory in Ukraine and entertaining Russian soldiers.
The directors who protested were fired from their theatres. Now management is forcing employees to donate money for thermal imaging units and drones for the Russian soldiers their theatre is “sponsoring.”
This war opened my eyes to a lot. Among other things, the fact that when pressured by force, when pressured by terror, in dread of standing out from the masses, people learn to accept a lie. How they themselves trample their sense of their own dignity in the mud. And how hard it can be to continue to speak the truth, despite everything — especially to oneself.
My play, The White Factory, opened last month in London. It’s a story about the life of the Jewish ghetto in the Polish city of Åódź under the Nazi occupation, a story about how pressure from a monstrous force destroys some people physically, but not morally, and in others it exterminates the human being while preserving his undamaged shell. These events are more than 80 years old. There is no one left whom they touched — which makes it all the more important for us to remember them.
As long as Russia did not attack Ukraine and the majority of my country’s population did not accept this war, I couldn’t understand how the virus of Nazism could have overtaken people who were so proud of their culture and learning, the German people. Now I do.
If we forget history, history repeats itself. I am still certain that striving for the truth is inherent to any person, and distorting and concealing the truth is inherent to any regime, but hardly anywhere in this world as acutely so as it is in my homeland — as it is at home, where I can’t return to.
