The Weekend Intelligence: The trial of Yevgenia Berkovich
The Intelligence from The Economist
The Economist
4.6 • 3.6K Ratings
🗓️ 11 October 2025
⏱️ 47 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
In May 2024, Yevgenia Berkovich and Svetlana Petrichuk, the director and writer of an experimental play, became the first Russian artists since Soviet times to be put on trial for the content of their work. It was a show trial. Like all show trials its outcome was preordained. But when professional actors took the stand, it turned it into a different kind of show—one that put the spotlight on a radical ideology that has gripped the Russian state.
In a bonus episode of our Next Year in Moscow series, The Economist’s Russia editor Arkady Ostrovsky presents a dramatisation of that trial to find out why the Russian state needed to make an example of a fringe production and, more importantly, its director.
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| 1:14.2 | The Economist. |
| 1:24.9 | In 2023, we released a podcast series called Next Year in Moscow. |
| 1:28.7 | It told the story of how Russia changed almost overnight when the war in Ukraine began, |
| 1:31.1 | and what that meant for the lives and hopes of the free-thinking Russians |
| 1:34.3 | who were against the war and opposed Vladimir Putin. |
| 1:38.6 | Ever since reporting that series, |
| 1:40.7 | Arkady Ostrovsky, the Economist Russia editor, |
| 1:43.4 | has been thinking about a story he |
| 1:45.0 | heard just as the first episode was going out. I'm Rosie Bloor, and today on the weekend intelligence |
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