Police Raid Moscow’s Leading Avant-Garde Theatre, Detain Director

Kirill Serebrennikov, famous in Russia as both a stage director and a filmmaker, was taken into custody and held for interrogation following a raid of the Gogol Center (of which he’s artistic director), his apartment, and 15 other addresses. (He was released late in the day and said he was questioned as a witness.) Authorities claim that the issue is suspected embezzlement of state arts funding at the Gogol, but Serebrennikov is a well-known critic of the Kremlin’s policies on freedom of expression, LGBT rights, and Crimea, and several of the theatre’s more controversial stagings have been investigated for violating morals laws.