Russian poet and theatre director, born on April 29th 1985 into the Leningrad intelligentsia. Known as Zhenya. About 5ft tall with big eyes and curly hair. She has the word "fragile" tattooed on her left wrist next to the image of a fractured glass.
Her family consists of journalists, human-rights defenders, writers, teachers and dissidents. Her grandmother, Nina Katerli, was a dissident writer who played a large part in her upbringing, giving her Soviet romance and adventure novels that extolled friendship, justice and duty. She describes herself as shaped by "a specific Soviet Jewishness"—the historic memory of being part of a discriminated minority.
From the age of 11 she wanted to be a director "to compensate for being an ugly girl with a fiery temper". In 2008 she arrived in Moscow and became the favourite student of Kirill Serebrennikov, a rebellious theatre director who was then in vogue with both the elite and young liberals. Serebrennikov recalled that she had "a heightened sense of empathy".
She staged plays in Serebrennikov's theatre and ran workshops with teenagers in orphanages. She and her colleagues set up a camp where they and the children lived together for weeks; as a result several children gained foster parents. She later became a foster mother herself, taking in two girls whose previous foster mother had been diagnosed with cancer.
In 2018 Berkovich, with a group of female actresses, founded an independent theatre company—private and not dependent on state funding. Her productions were staged in intimate spaces; her characters—children, women, elderly people—inhabited the domestic sphere, even when caught up in conflicts waged by men possessed by dogma.
She regarded herself as a feminist but rejected any form of radicalism, artistic or political.
Her best-known production, co-created with playwright Svetlana Petriychuk, tells the story of thousands of Russian women who from 2015 were seduced online by recruiters from Islamic State and travelled to Syria to marry jihadists. The title comes from a folk tale. The play is part docu-drama, part fable, set in a courtroom where the women explain how they fell into the arms of IS. It premiered in 2020 to critical acclaim, was performed across Russia and won the Golden Mask awards for best play and best costumes.
Berkovich published her poetry on Facebook, providing what friends described as oxygen for those gasping for words after Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. A poem published on May 11th 2022—in the form of a dialogue between the ghost of a dead second-world-war veteran and his grandson, rejecting the use of the war dead as propaganda—went viral. It was set to music and read out by actors on YouTube. Two sources told The Economist it was brought to the attention of Alexander Bastrykin, Russia's most senior policeman.
Her last production, in late December 2022, was a modern nativity play moving between Bethlehem and contemporary Moscow.
On May 4th 2023 Berkovich was arrested and charged, along with Petriychuk, with "propaganda and the justification of terrorism" for "Finist, the Bright Falcon". They were the first artists to be jailed in Russia since Soviet times for the content of their work. The case was brought to the attention of Vladimir Putin himself, who gave the green light to proceed.
The prosecution's main expert witness was Roman Silantyev, inventor of a pseudo-discipline he called "destructology", and a member of the World Russian People's Council—a right-wing project headed by the patriarch of the Russian Orthodox church that had hailed Putin's invasion of Ukraine as a "holy war". Silantyev claimed the play simultaneously promoted radical feminism and radical Islamism. The defence obtained a letter from the ministry of justice declaring that destructology "does not draw on any scientific or practical data and therefore cannot be verified".
The trial began on May 20th 2024. The judge refused to read the play or watch a recording of the performance. On July 8th 2024 Berkovich and Petriychuk were each sentenced to six years. They are currently held in a penal colony, where their work assignment is sewing clothes. Berkovich is forbidden from making theatre but continues to write poetry.
It looked like something resembling white marble, which was probably what it was: something resembling white marble.