The Moscow Procurator’s Office has indicted Yuri Samodurov, Ludmila Vasilovskaya and Anna Mihalchuk under Article 282 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation, accusing them of actions “intended to incite hatred and hostility toward a group of people and to humiliate them on the basis of their national identity or their religion.”

Human rights advocates have sought in vain the application of Article 282 against fascists and all kinds of Black-Hundred types and racists.  Instead, it is now used against people of democratic conviction, museum employees and a poet, who are charged with the organization and conduct of the exhibition “Caution! Religion”. The concept of the exhibition - to give artists an opportunity to freely express their ideas concerning the problems of religion and also concerning the positive and the negative sides of the activity of religious institutions –was suggested by the exhibition’s curator and participant, Mr. Zulumyan, a citizen of Armenia. The exhibition, which displayed works of more than forty artists (including persons from Armenia, Germany, Georgia, Cuba, the USA and Japan), lasted for only four days in January 2003.  On the fifth day a group of Russian Orthodox fanatics wrecked it. The majority of works were destroyed or damaged, and some that the Procurator’s Office took from the artists have still not been returned.

Legal proceedings were instituted in February 2003 as a result of the State Duma’s appeal to the Procurator General, which was provoked by Archpriest Shargunov’s slanderous letter to the Duma’s Committee on Security.  In his letter, Shargunov characterized the exhibition as blasphemous and all of the Sakharov Center’s varied educational, cultural and human rights activities as “threatening the Constitutional order.”  In Shargunov’s opinion, “the Andrei Sakharov Museum and Center over the last several years has been propagating antisocial ideas, defending bandits and criminals, especially Chechens, and through the exhibition “Caution! Religion” committed a politically provocative act, intended to incite hostility and feelings of hatred toward Christian culture, traditions, and religious rites and to insult the national dignity of the fundamental portion of our country’s population.”  On several occasions, officials of the Department of Foreign Relations of the Russian Orthodox Church’s Moscow Patriarchy Metropolitan Kirill and Archpriest Chaplin publicly urged that the organizers of the exhibition should be punished, and the Department’s Information Service issued a statement that “The Church insists that any public profanation of iconographic images of the Lord Jesus Christ, the Holy Mother or the saints – that is, mixing them with alien images, placing them in an inappropriate context, including them in books, films or displays propagandizing human passions, using them in advertisements or in labels for consumer goods, and their exploitation by pretended sorcerers – insults the feelings of believers.”

This constitutes a direct attempt by the Moscow Patriarchy’s Department of Foreign Relations to regulate secular culture and to “privatize” images of Christ, the Holy Mother, and the saints despite the fact that for centuries their images have been the property not just of the Christian churches and Christian believers, but of all civilized people, including atheists, Buddhists, Confucianists, and others, who may not believe that Christ was the Son of God or even that he was an historic personage, but nevertheless consider his image very important and significant for world culture and for themselves personally.  These images are used in business as well. 

We also see here an intrusion of the legislative power into the competence of the judicial power. The Duma deputies, having no firsthand knowledge of the exhibition or its contents, nevertheless stated in peremptory fashion in their appeal to the Procurator General that the works exhibited were “aimed at kindling religious hatred and humiliating the feelings of believers”, i.e., the deputies passed sentence without investigation or trial.

Article 13 of the Constitution of the Russian Federation states that no ideology can be established as an official state or obligatory ideology.  Article 14 states that the Russian Federation is a secular state, that no religion can be regarded as official or obligatory, and that religious organizations - including the Russian Orthodox Church - are separate from the state and equal before the law. Article 28 guarantees freedom of conscience and the right of everyone to practice any religion or none whatsoever, to hold and to promote religious beliefs or other beliefs and to act in conformity with them. Article 29 guarantees freedom of speech and thought, and the right to freely produce and impart information.  It also forbids propaganda of social, racial, national, religious, or language superiority and forbids propaganda or agitation inciting hatred or hostility based on these characteristics.  Article 44 guarantees freedom of artistic creation and the right of everyone to participate in cultural life, to use institutions of culture, and to enjoy access to cultural values.

Modern society is a complex mechanism; people of different nationalities, cultures, faiths, views, tastes and preferences must get along together. All laws of the civilized world proceed from the premise that one person’s rights and freedoms should not infringe upon the rights and freedoms of other persons.  As atheists must consider the feelings and rights of believers, so must believers respect the rights of atheists and adherents of other faiths. The laws of the secular state are there to maintain the balance among various rights and interests, to introduce some rational limitations (including to religious interests), and to secure equal rights and social peace.

These ends are served by the Federal Law “On Freedom of Conscience and Religious Organizations”: “The conduct of public meetings or the distribution or display of literature or images insulting the religious feelings of citizens is prohibited in the vicinity of establishments of religious worship” (article 6).  The violation of this norm leads to administrative responsibility (article 5.26, КоАП). From this it is clear that the prohibition does not affect lecture-halls, museums, or exhibition centers even if the literature or images exposed there does, in fact, insult the religious feelings of certain citizens. 

The organizers of the exhibition “Caution! Religion” followed the demands of the Constitution and the laws of Russia. It was presented in a museum, far from any place of religious worship. Its very title served as a warning to those who do not want their religious feelings put to the test. Nothing whatsoever obliged the organizers and the artists to be governed by the ideas of those Russian Orthodox believers and officials of the Russian Orthodox Church who refuse adherents of other faiths and atheists the right to express their views on the problems of religion in a secular state, who consider Christianity, the Russian Orthodox religion and the Russian Orthodox Church immune from any criticism, and who regard any deviations from church dogma or unconventional portrayals of religious symbols in works of art as antireligious and anti-Orthodox actions, offending their feelings. 

The vandalizing of the exhibition was not the spontaneous protest of some oversensitive citizens who came to satisfy their cultural interests and were surprised and shocked by what they saw. These persons came for the specific purpose of destroying the exhibition and the exhibits with the approval and support of a Russian Orthodox priest. The aggressive actions of religious hooligans, inspired by their fanatic pastors, confirm once again that “something is rotten” in the Russian Orthodox Church. Therefore, the exhibition Caution! Religion as a form of protest against clericalism, against the claim of Russian Orthodoxy to the status of the state religion, against the totalitarian aspirations of some influential church officials and against other negative aspects of the Russian Orthodox Church’s activity is not only permissible from the standpoint of the law but also to the point and timely. Moreover, the organizers and the participants of the exhibition did not pursue the goal of kindling religious or national hostility or offending anybody’s dignity, which is a necessary condition for the application of Article 282 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation. Besides, this article, which should be interpreted in the light of the Constitution, is intended to defend the equality of citizens regardless of their nationality and religious or other beliefs. Its primary purpose is the protection of minorities from any discrimination against them. It is hard to believe that the Russian Orthodox Church, its adherents, ethnic Russians, or the Russian state need the Criminal Code to protect them in Moscow against the creation and  exhibition of works of art which portray religious symbols in unconventional ways. Today, art is as free and as unconstrained by state frontiers as is science. To think otherwise is to suggest that it will be impossible in our country and its capital to exhibit not only many works of Russian artists, but also much of the modern secular and even modern religious art from the museums of France, Germany, Israel and other countries. Because the images of Christ, the Holy Mother and the saints in the works of modern Western artists, sculptors, and photographers are often far from conforming to traditional Christian canons and the canons of the Russian Orthodox Church.

The preliminary investigation of the exhibition “Caution! Religion” was extremely tendentious and involved gross violations of the law and of the defendants’ right to objectivity. For one thing, the individuals appointed as experts, whose conclusions serve as the keystone of the indictment, are extreme fundamentalists in their religious beliefs, lacking any tolerance for unconventional thinking, and completely rejecting modern art.  Reflecting this standpoint, they have written lengthy opinions, which defy all attempts to summarize their tone or substance.  In many respects, their opinions eclipse even the “masterpieces” of our “literary critics in mufti” which not so long ago served as the bases for the sentences passed on “traitors of the Motherland” and other “anti-Soviet elements.”

Thirteen (!) volumes containing complaints of citizens who never saw the exhibition but hurried to express their “deep indignation” are part of the case file. Practically all of the complaints duplicate each other, and recall the times when Soviet citizens, including Soviet scholars and scientists, were involved in mass campaigns, writing “I have not read Pasternak (Solzhenitsyn, Brodsky, Sakharov) but I want to express my angry protest against the criminal actions of that slanderer (renegade, parasite) and to demand severe punishment for him.” Evidently in order to put additional pressure on the court, an openly Black-Hundred style video cassette was attached to the file. The cassette contains a film of the TV program “Russia House” showing priests of the Russian Orthodox Church, brandishing copies of the Criminal Code and threatening to muster thousands of their parishioners if the organizers of the exhibition - “those heretics and blasphemers” - are not tried and punished.  On February 21, 2004, a group of persons vandalized a Saint Petersburg exhibition of a modern Russian artist whose works imitated certain elements of icons. The modus operandi of the criminals leaves no doubt that this was the act of hooligans convinced of their absolute impunity. Their belief feeds on their Moscow predecessors having been exonerated of all charges, as well as on the ever growing appeals to recognize Russian Orthodoxy as the state religion, to introduce an obligatory course of Divine Law in schools, to recognize icons and other symbols of Russian Orthodoxy as state symbols of Russia equal to the flag and the state seal, and to punish disrespectful treatment of Church symbols according to the same article of the Criminal Code as state symbols.

It seems that the Russian Orthodox Church, as part of civil society, should not try to dominate its other parts, but should find and support more appropriate and modern ways to resolve the problems of religion in a secular state. In particular, it is desirable and should be possible for the religious and secular institutions of civil society to collaborate in order to find solutions to such urgent and acute problems as ending the bloodshed in Chechnya, reducing social inequality, lowering hostility towards migrants, assisting disabled persons and war veterans, defending the rights of communicants of other faiths, supporting modern religious art, and so on. As to works of art and exhibitions strongly opposed by the Church, it would not be difficult to solve this problem if good will existed – priests could recommend to their parishioners not to attend such exhibitions, while museums and curators could specify which exhibitions contain works that make use of religious symbols in unconventional ways, and suggest that persons who may be upset by this should avoid these exhibitions.

Yuri Shmidt,  Counselor-at-law

Yuri Samodurov,   Director of the Andrei Sakharov Museum and Public Center 

May 13,  2004 г.

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