Singer-songwriter Alexander Rosenbaum defends Berkovich and Petriychuk at Victory Day concert
During a Victory Day concert in St. Petersburg, popular Russian singer-songwriter Alexander Rosenbaum defended the theater director Zhenya Berkovich and playwright Svetlana Petriychuk, two theater artists arrested and jailed last week in Moscow.
The prosecutors are now mounting a terrorist propaganda case against the two female artists, alleging that Petriychuk’s play, Finist the Bright Falcon, contains illegal elements of terrorist apologia.
Petriychuk’s play explores the motives of Russian women who convert to radical Islam and marry Syrian men to join in the jihad.
Rosenbaum compared Finist the Bright Falcon to Vera Glagoleva’s Word War II film One War, which tells a similarly complex story of Russian women who had children with German soldiers during the occupation. “I never could have imagined, nor could you, that Vera might be hauled away for justifying Fascism,” Rosenbaum said to the public.
“I haven’t seen Finist the Bright Falcon,” he went on, “but Svetlana Petriychuk and Zhenya Berkovich talk about Russian women who have been duped, simply duped. I’m not talking about politics at all…. But how can we shackle two girls for writing about these unfortunate women?”
