A Moscow court has ordered political performance artist Pyotr Pavlensky to pay nearly 1m rubles (about $15,400) for setting fire to the door of the Federal Security Service (FSB) headquarters in a performance called Threat last November. Pavlensky was released from custody on Wednesday, 8 June, and given a fine of 500,000 rubles for damaging a “cultural heritage” site and 481,000 for the cost of replacing the door—but the artist told reporters he refused to pay.
“Of course I’m not going to [pay it], otherwise it will end up that Threat was carried out on loan, as if I had bought it from the FSB,” he said, according to the RIA Novosti news agency. “Even if I had that kind of money, I wouldn’t pay the fine.”
Pavlensky’s dramatic middle-of-the-night performance at the FSB building on Lubyanka Square—a notorious former prison run by the security agency’s predecessor the KGB—placed him in direct conflict with Russia’s current political system. He first gained widespread media attention in 2012, when he sewed his mouth shut to protest the imprisonment of Pussy Riot. In 2013, he nailed his scrotum to Red Square in protest against Russia’s “police state.” In 2014, he set fire to tires on a bridge in St Petersburg in a show of support for Maidan Square protesters in Ukraine. Last month, he was found guilty of vandalism for the latter action, but the court ruled that he would not be imprisoned because the statute of limitations had expired.
The artist, who was taken into custody after staging Threat and held until his release today, had demanded that he be tried on terrorism charges for the performance. Prosecutors chose instead to charge him with damaging cultural heritage, arguing that the FSB door is a historic site because of the cultural luminaries who had been imprisoned by the KGB and were interrogated and tortured during Soviet leader Joseph Stalin’s Great Terror in the 1930s.
Pavlensky mocked those arguments in court and told reporters on Wednesday: “The most important thing that we were able to see is that it is possible to methodically destroy culture, and then on these grounds declare oneself a cultural heritage site.” He also used every opportunity during the trial to ridicule the judicial process, inviting prostitutes in April to testify on his behalf.
“Pyotr Pavlensky has turned the trial against him into a brilliant artistic performance. It will enter the annals,” Valery Solovei, a history professor at the Moscow State Institute of International Relations, the university of Russia’s Foreign Ministry, posted on Facebook shortly before the verdict was announced. “He is a true artist. A great master. My sincere admiration.”