MOSCOW (CelebrityAccess) — The Director of a state-run theater in Moscow has resigned in protest over Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
Elena Kovalskaya, the director of Moscow’s Vsevolod Meyerhold State Theater and Cultural Center announced her resignation via social media, stating that it was impossible for her to continue to accept salary from the government.
“Friends, in protest against the Russian invasion of Ukraine, I am resigning from the post of director of the state theater,” Kovalskaya wrote in a post in Russian on social media. “You can’t work for a killer and get paid by him.”
She went on to note that she plans to finish all of her current projects at the theater on a voluntary basis.
A spokesperson for the theater also voiced dissent against the invasion, citing the theater’s mission station of “respect for humanity and equality of people regardless of gender, gender and national identity, age, religion, sexual orientation, physical and mental characteristics, appearance”
The events that are happening now are in a tragic contradiction with our mission, with the work being carried out in the CIM, with the CIM team and our residents.
“The events that are happening now are in a tragic contradiction with our mission, with the work being carried out in the [Theatre], with the [Theatre] team and our residents,” a statement posted to the theater’s social media said.
The statement went on to thank Kovalskaya for her courage.
The theater, long a fixture of Moscow’s cultural landscape, was founded in 1920 by Russian actor and theater director Vsevolod Meyerhold. Meyerhold was a major figure in Russian theater and devised the biomechanical method of acting but was executed in 1940 after being forced to confess, under pain of torture, to being a foreign agent.
He was later exonerated by the Soviet Supreme Court in 1955 as part of the first wave of destalinization.
