Jailed playwright Svetlana Petriychuk and director Zhenya Berkovich receive prestigious Kamerton award for excellence in journalism

Two jailed female theater artists, Svetlana Petriychuk and Zhenya Berkovich, have been awarded this year’s prestigious Kamerton prize, established by the Russian Union of Journalists in memory of the intrepid reporter Anna Politkovskaya, murdered in Moscow in 2006.

Both Petriychuk and Berkovich are now in pretrial detention, on allegations of “justifying terrorism” with Berkovich’s prize-winning production of the documentary play Finist the Bright Falcon, written by Petriychuk.

Finist the Bright Falcon tells the true story of hundreds of Russian women recruited online by ISIS, later to end up in prison in Russia.

Kamerton, the prize whose title translates as “tuning fork,” symbolizing professional conduct that sets a standard, was only awarded to journalists in the past. In 2019, for example, Ivan Golunov, an anti-corruption reporter writing for Meduza, won the prize.

This year’s awards were handed to the winners’ representatives by Elena Milashina, a Novaya Gazeta reporter brutally assaulted in Chechnya earlier this summer, when trying to attend a court hearing for Zarema Musayeva, the mother of prominent Chechen human rights lawyer and activist Abubakar Yangulbayev.

When Milashina appeared on stage, the entire audience rose to its feet, Novaya Gazeta reports.

On behalf of Berkovich and Petriychuk, Berkovich’s husband Nikolay Polishchuk and actor Marietta Tsigal-Polishchuk accepted the awards.