Moscow Trial for Blasphemy

The director of Moscow’s Andrei Sakharov Museum (a human rights museum) has gone on trial because a recent display has outraged leaders of the Russian Orthodox Church. As a result, the exhibition has been labeled “blasphemous“ and Yuri Samodurov faces up to five years in prison because he intended the display to "incite hatred or enmity" and/or to impugn the dignity of a group based on their ethnicity and relation to religion.

The Scotsman reports:

Works by about 40 artists were featured in the museum’s exhibition called Caution, Religion, which included a Russian Orthodox-style icon with a hole instead of a head where visitors could stick their faces and picture themselves as the Almighty. There was also a Coca-Cola logo against the usual red background, but with Jesus’ face drawn next to it and the words, “This is my blood.”

Four days after its opening last year, the exhibition was vandalised. The six perpetrators were detained and charged with hooliganism, but after a publicity campaign conducted by a Russian Orthodox priest, the charges were dropped. Russia’s lower house of parliament, the State Duma, petitioned the prosecutor-general’s office “to take the necessary measures” against the exhibition organisers. In addition to Samodurov, another museum employee and three artists also face charges.

Anatoly Shabad, chairman of the Sakharov Museum's governing board, writes for The Moscow Times:

The exhibition "incited hatred and enmity" among a "group of persons" spurred on by Orthodox clergymen, who unleashed a pogrom in the museum, vandalizing the artworks with paint sprayers. ... The vandals' indignation was deemed to be righteous by the court. How else can you explain the fact that all six were acquitted, and the art works they had damaged were seized as material evidence in the hate crime case?

[I]nvestigators in this case called in art experts and psychologists to determine whether or not the artworks exhibited at the Andrei Sakharov Museum had in fact fueled hatred. The experts relied on the power of a science that investigates the mysterious ways that art affects people through the unconscious mind and all sorts of tangential associations. Yet they concluded -- with a certainty that their colleagues in the exact sciences could only envy -- that the art works incited hatred because they combined the sacred and the profane. A classic case of reductio ad absurdum.

The fact that this prosecution is being taken against those associated with a museum named for Andrei Sakharov is incredibly ironic, though I doubt that anyone involved on the government side appreciates it in the slightest. I wonder if this site would be considered blasphemous and an incitement to hatred? I wouldn’t want to travel to Russia to find out.

Read More:

• News on Free Speech and Civil Liberties
• Recent Books on Free Speech
• Court Decisions on Free Speech and Censorship