ANNA NEMTSOVA: Putin Didn’t Murder the Playwrights. His Regime Broke Their Hearts
When Mikhail Ugarov
and Yelina Gremina died only 45 days apart after producing a play about Sergei
Magnitsky, conspiracy theories were rife. But the truth is simpler, and sadder.
MOSCOW—Mikhail Ugarov
and Yelina Gremina, husband and wife, created the only independent documentary
theater company in Moscow. Teatr.doc took on contemporary Russia and
its most acute issues with anthropological rigor. Every performance gave clear
evidence, hard proof of injustice.
There is a sort of
bitter irony in the narrative that developed about the couple’s passing, as
people on the other side of the world tried to fit them into a narrative of
mysterious deaths that might be linked to vindictive conspiracies by the
Kremlin. But that simply was not the case. The couple’s love for the theater
and for each other was bigger than life, and they died within less than two
months of each other, not least, because their hearts were broken.
Ugarov died age 62 on
April Fool’s Day this year. People who loved him complained that it was a poor
joke. Gremina passed away on Wednesday. In the past year she was seriously ill
and rarely left the house, and everybody who knew her understood that she could
not live long without her Ugarov. To those who loved them it felt “as if they
disappeared under water, while still hugging,” culture and art observer
Ksenia Larina wrote on her blog.
To be sure, Gremina’s
play “One Hour Eighteen” was not to the Kremlin’s liking. It documented the
death of anti-corruption lawyer Sergei
Magnitsky, whose name has been given to laws the
world over punishing Russia for human rights abuses. “Our theater is about
true details and not about conspiracy. Both Yelena Anatolyevna [Gremina] and
Mikhail Yuryevich [Ugarov] were very serious about honesty,” Zarema Zaudinova,
Ugarov’s assistant and one of Teatr.doc’s young directors, told The Daily Beast
on Friday. Gremina showed the human indifference around the death of a prisoner
suffering agonizing pain, and it is classic Teatr.doc: the viewer is given a
chance to see a well-verified drama—the nurse, who is standing by the door to
the cell, not doing anything, while security officers are inside the cell with
Magnitsky during the last minutes of his life… read more:
