Office in St. Petersburg celebrates International Women's Day by pretending to hang an employee in blackface

People all around Russia are gearing up for International Women's Day celebrations, but some are going about it more bizarrely than others. At a government research-and-development facility in St. Petersburg, for instance, employees decided to throw a Wild-West-themed party. In a feat of bad taste, one gentleman attended in blackface, apparently dressed as a sharecropper. Realizing they could take things even further, his colleagues then constructed a makeshift gallows, proceeding to “hang the black man.”

Anastasia Storozhilova, a 23-year-old engineer who works in the office, thought the stunt was so adorable that she tweeted a photograph from the party, writing, “Today at the office we hanged a black man.” Soon thereafter, she deleted the image. Then she deleted her Twitter account. Then she deleted her Facebook account. And then she made her Instagram account private.

Before disappearing from Twitter, Storozhilova briefly tried to defend her office's antics, arguing that there's no use trying to “invent” a racist theme in the photograph.

“I can explain what's happening in the photo: it was a scene from history. The Wild West: cowboys, Indians, blacks. It's history, you see. It's the past—it's not today. They show this sort of thing in movies—this and a lot worse,” Storozhilova told TJournal.