Husband of jailed Russian playwright keeps lonely vigil in exile

To the casual eye, there was nothing unusual about the bearded young Russian man sitting on a bench in the German city of Hamburg on a summer’s day two years ago. But Yury Shekhvatov had come there for a special reason: he was waiting for life-changing news.

About 1,750km away, a Moscow military court was about to deliver its verdict in the closed-door trial of Shekhvatov’s wife, the playwright Svetlana Petriychuk, and theatre director Zhenya Berkovich.

“I took several phones with me and I sat and waited,” he said.

Then, via news feeds and in messages from friends, came the outcome he had been dreading. The two women, arrested in 2023, were sentenced to six years each in a penal colony for “justifying terrorism” in a play Petriychuk had written and Berkovich had staged.

They argued in vain at their trial that the play Finist the Bright Falcon, depicting Russian women who marry Islamic State fighters, was intended to condemn terrorism, not promote it.

Human rights campaigners said the verdicts crossed a new threshold in the suppression of free speech in wartime Russia. The Kremlin declined to comment on the case.

On July 8, the anniversary of the sentencing, Shekhvatov said he will sit on the same bench, overlooking a canal, and think about his wife while looking at old photos.

Asked what angers him the most, he singled out what he calls the “sheer indifference” of the judicial machinery.

“Once you’re caught up in this system, things just roll along on autopilot,” he said in an interview with Reuters.

“They opened the case, and it just dragged on. The investigator shuffled some papers around, and then the judge sat there putting on an act, pretending to be a rather intelligent man who was well-versed in literature. He went through the motions of looking into everything, yet he knew all along the verdict would simply be handed down to him.”

Under the Russian constitution, courts are independent and judges are meant to be immune from political pressure, but human rights campaigners said this is not true in practice, especially in sensitive, high-profile cases where acquittals are practically unheard of.

Shekhvatov, who was Petriychuk’s theatrical agent, said many in the film and theatre world spoke out in her support, often at great personal risk. However, he felt betrayed by others who had worked with her closely but failed to contact him even privately to express sympathy.

“To me, that is monstrous, something I will never be able to understand.”

Penal colony sentence has three years to run

Petriychuk, 46, is serving her sentence at a penal colony in the Moscow region where she and fellow convicts work six days a week in a sewing workshop.

After her arrest in May 2023, Shekhvatov wrote long letters to her every day for the first two years. Now they communicate mostly by short messages through a prison service app, and are allowed to speak by phone several times a month.

To support Svetlana, Shekhvatov, 38, said he adopted a deliberate strategy to always validate whatever mood she was feeling, without trying to change it.

“From the outside you could see things would hardly turn out well, but when she had moments of hope I always supported her and said, ‘Yeah, we’ll fight, absolutely, we’ll do it.’

“When she was sad I didn’t try to shift her mindset, like ‘No, let’s be positive, let’s fight.’

“It’s hard to describe how a person feels when they’re in prison. What they really want is total support in the broadest sense, just to be understood and supported.”

He runs a website, freesveta.org, to publicise Svetlana’s case and promote her play. More than 75 performances of Finist the Bright Falcon have taken place worldwide in 13 languages.

While working as a massage therapist and health coach, Shekhvatov is also seeking publishing experience to become Svetlana’s literary agent one day.

“She has always dreamed of writing prose, not only plays. [After her release] it will all happen, global bestsellers,” he said.

“I haven’t the slightest doubt, not for a second, that when she gets out and starts writing, it will sell all over the world, be translated and so on. I’ll make sure it happens.”

Reuters