The third edition of the Festival of Theaters of the Far East has just ended in Khabarovsk [tout à l’est de la Russie]. The Buryatia Drama Theater presented there the show Korea 03, but the performance was canceled: the actors had been mobilized. Instead, the festival management decided to screen a recording of the performance. In the end, only the women of the troop came to salute.
The spectators in the room and the actresses were in tears. It is well known that Buryatia is one of the regions where the men were sent to Ukraine from the start of the “special operation” [le nom donné dans la presse russe à l’attaque de l’Ukraine, le 24 février 2022]. And they are still numerous to have received a mobilization order [le 21 septembre, le Kremlin a décidé d’appeler 300 000 réservistes pour le front ukrainien]including those in rare occupations.
Artists, soldiers like the others
Since September 21, many theaters have faced the same problem: the shows were canceled a few hours before the performance because the male actors were mobilized or chose to leave the country. The Petersburg theater Karambol, for example, was caught up in this problem while on tour in Novosibirsk [en Sibérie occidentale]. A replacement actor had to be brought in urgently, who, fortunately, knew his role. Such situations are numerous.
Because artists in Russia are not considered to belong to a separate social category. Any reservist can be called up for partial mobilization. It’s written in black on white on the government portal Объясняем.рф [Onvousexplique.ru) : “Si les emplois en question du secteur culturel ne sont pas protégés, si les employés sont réservistes de l’armée russe et ne sont pas réformés pour raison de santé, ils sont mobilisables.”
Le personnel technique aussi concerné
À en juger par les fils d’info régionaux, les avocats et les administrations des théâtres s’activent pour faire réformer leurs équipes : la perte d’une seule personne menace toute la programmation, car souvent, surtout dans les petits théâtres, les comédiens n’ont pas de doublure. En ce sens, la décision du directeur artistique du Théâtre dramatique Pouchkine de Pskov [près de la frontière avec la Lettonie]Dmitri Meskhiev, to donate the proceeds from one performance in five to the needs of the special operation looks like a safety net: if there are no more shows, it will also be a loss of income for the army .
Artists are not the only ones to be confronted with mobilization. Stage technicians, technical teams and decorators are also essential in a show. At the Bolshoi Theatre, for example, the stage equipment is particularly sophisticated. The technicians who operate it have undergone special training, they are irreplaceable.
In 1941, Soviet artists had been spared
Russia has no experience of military mobilization – the last was in 1941. And even then, comedians were spared and theaters continued to operate despite everything. The Seventh Symphony by Dmitri Shostakovich was performed in Leningrad [aujourd’hui, Saint-Pétersbourg] besieged! The actors exercised their art within the brigades on the front, famous and distinguished artists performed on the front line.
Unfortunately, today Russian society is decaying and the conflict also occupies the civil space of culture. Most of those who ran public cultural institutions and who spoke out against the special operation last spring were removed from their posts (sometimes by voluntary resignation), the performances of “unwanted” have been deprogrammed, removed from festival programs, etc. But the “answer” private investors was not long in coming: actor Georgy Teslia-Guerasimov complained to MP Dmitry Kuznetsov about being ousted from the television series Sled [“La trace”] because of its support for the special military operation. Kuznetsov seized the Prosecutor’s Office.
Artistic directors and troops now fear that mobilization, under these conditions, will put the programming of theaters on the ground, prevent them from operating and force them to close. And that’s not the only problem. As the figures show, when the mobilization was announced, ticket sales stopped: people were very worried, leisure activities took a back seat.
The whole country is waiting: who will be the next mobilized? And if other waves of mobilization were to follow, there would be no one to go up on the boards, shoot films or recite poems. And on the other side of the ramp it will also be the desert: the spectators will no longer have the heart to come to the cinemas.