Russian director Kirill Serebrennikov charged with embezzling £880,000

A controversial Russian director known for his criticism of the state has been arrested and charged with embezzling £880,000, sparking outrage among many of the country's leading political and cultural figures.

Kirill Serebrennikov was detained overnight in a hotel in St. Petersburg, where he has been making a movie about the perestroika-era rock star Viktor Tsoi, and taken to Moscow for interrogation, state news agency TASS reported. He is now being held in the Sailor's Silence prison in the capital, his lawyer said.

The investigative committee has charged Mr Serebrennikov with stealing £880,000 of the state funds allocated to a project to popularise modern visual and performing arts through a series of performances and classes. He previously called the allegations “absurdity and schizophrenia”. He faces up to 10 years in prison.

Officials including the head of the presidential human rights committee, the deputy mayor of Moscow and the former finance minister said Mr Serebrennikov's confinement was too harsh a measure. A court will rule tomorrow on whether he will be imprisoned or put under house arrest with travel restrictions before the trial.

Prominent cultural figures and human rights activists have rushed to speak in Mr Serebrennikov's defence. Kommersant newspaper arts columnist Anna Narinskaya wrote that his arrest was meant to intimidate independent thinkers who “fight to build our own ideal Russia in some small place, a theatre, hospital, museum, school”.

Clouds have been gathering over the director since May, when investigators searched his flat and the Gogol Centre and detained employees of his Seventh Studio theatre company, one of whom later testified against him. In particular, prosecutors argued that state money allocated for a 2012 staging of A Midsummer Night's Dream had been embezzled, even though the play was performed in Moscow, went on tour to Paris and was still running this year at the Gogol Centre that Mr Serebrennikov heads.

President Vladimir Putin called the investigators “idiots” when asked about the searches in May.

Independent news site Meduza reported that the Seventh Studio corruption case had been opened as the result of a campaign by the pro-Kremlin Art Without Borders foundation against cuss words and “propaganda of amoral behaviour and pornography” in theatre performances. The foundation later denied this.

Mr Serebrennikov has been an outspoken critic of many of the government's more reactionary laws in recent years, as well as Russia's increasingly conservative cultural climate. Last month, the Bolshoi Theatre canceled a ballet Mr Serebrennikov was directing about the life of emigre dancer Rudolf Nureyev three days before the premiere. The Bolshoi management said the ballet wasn't ready to be staged, but many thought the allusions to Mr Nureyev's homosexuality and battle with AIDS were what actually raised red flags.

In 2013, the state cinema foundation denied funding to a film Mr Serebrennikov was to direct about Pyotr Tchaikovsky amid rumours that officials were angered by its treatment of Tchaikovsky's alleged homosexuality.