Degradation in Hypermasculine

Cultures of Disposability
RESEARCH ARTICLE

and Forgetfulness: Nikolai

Kolyada’s Ekaterinburg Theatre
VALLERI ROBINSON
University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign

A B S T RA CT Humiliation is a basic fact of life for many of the

characters who populate the plays and adaptations of Nikolai
Kolyada. The central figures in his plays, often middle-aged
women, endure shame, humiliation, and tremendous loss
at the hands of unrelenting perpetrators. Looking briefly at
Kolyada’s representations of Liubov from Cherry Orchard,
Blanche from Streetcar Named Desire, and SHE from Kolya-
da’s original play Nezhnost’ (Tenderness), this article examines
the director’s depiction of the downtrodden and brutalized
woman in modern cultures of disposability and waste. While
the violence addressed here is directed at women in particu-
lar, Kolyada’s battered women represent the disposability of
individuals in the hands of absolute power in an era marked
by forgetfulness. These depictions can be read in relation to
the reemergence of a hypermasculine Russian nationalism as
well as emergent global neoliberalism.
K E Y W O RD S Kolyada Theatre, Ekaterinburg, disposability,
hypermasculinity

Theatre and Performance Notes and Counternotes, Vol. 1, No. 1, 2024

Copyright © 2024 The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA
https://doi.org/10.5325/tpnc.1.1.0033

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 34 Valleri R o b i n s o n

Near the end of Nikolai Kolyada’s hilarious production of Gogol’s The Mar-
riage, the tone shifts suddenly. The stage darkens and grows silent. Suitors in
bright peacock tails sporting shiny samovar hats and rosy-red cheeks have
left the stage. Remaining are the sweetheart servants Dunyashka and Ste-
pan. In what begins as a slow motion romantic dumb show, the pair remove
their clothing to their undergarments, glancing giddily at each other. He ca-
resses her and showers her lovingly with white feathers as she, coyly, covers
her face. After this symbolic union, he shoves her away forcefully. She walks
back to him, still covering her face. He grows increasingly violent, pushing
her to the ground, kicking her again and again, until she stops coming back
to him. When he exits, however, she quickly gathers her clothing and sub-
missively follows him offstage. It is especially shocking to watch this vio-
lence, performed realistically against this woman, played by actress Tamara
Zimina, an actress in her seventies. The brutality against her exposed, aged
body startles members of the audience who sit stunned as the performance
ends.1 On Kolyada’s Ekaterinburg stage, the weakest, most submissive, and
most naive members of society are terrorized spontaneously, unexpectedly.
Humiliation is a basic fact of life for many of the characters who pop-
ulate the post–Cold War plays and adaptations of Nikolai Kolyada. The
central figures in his plays, often middle-aged women, endure shame, hu-
miliation, and tremendous loss at the hands of unrelenting perpetrators.
Looking briefly at Kolyada’s representations of Liubov from Cherry Orchard,
Blanche from Streetcar Named Desire, and SHE from Kolyada’s original play
Nezhnost’ (Tenderness), this article examines the director’s depiction of the
downtrodden and brutalized woman in modern cultures of disposability and
waste. While the violence addressed here is directed at women in particular,
Kolyada’s battered women represent the disposability of all individuals in the
hands of absolute power in an era marked by forgetfulness and materialism.
These depictions can be read in relation to the reemergence of a hypermas-
culine Russian nationalism, but also the resonant American hypermasculine
colonialist posturing as depicted in his adaptation of A Streetcar Named Desire.
Kolyada revises Cold War dichotomies though his critique of ultra-nationalism
and the patriarchal forces that keep such dynamics in play. Kolyada’s dis-
posables appear throughout his repertoire and warn against the abuses of
the powerful and reckon with ghosts of the past. It should be noted, how-
ever, that in the 2012 election, shortly after Kolyada received government

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 Degradation in Hypermasculine Cultures of Disposability and Forgetfulness 35

FIGURE 1 Aleksandr Zamyraev and Tamara Zimina in The Marriage. Designs by

Nikolai Kolyada. Photo by Elena Getsevich.

funding for a new theatre, he publicly supported Vladimir Putin’s reelection.

Kolyada was widely attacked for this stance, for his productions seemed to
criticize the abusive power of the regime.2 Kolyada, who single-handedly
financially supports most of the actors and staff of his theatre with income

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 36 Valleri R o b i n s o n

and apartments, indicated during an interview the complexities of his pub-

lic positions on political life in Russia.3 At the time, Kolyada believed that
shifts in national leadership would not alleviate patriarchal strongholds and
domestic violence, embedded in the remnants of the post–Cold War world.

Kolyada, the Provocateur

Nikolai Kolyada (b.1957), internationally renowned playwright and former
acting company member of the Sverdlovsk Academy of Drama, founded his
own company in 2004, after growing frustrated with the bureaucracy and
politics he found in the academic theatres in Russia. In addition to running
his company, he teaches playwriting and acting at the Ekaterinburg Theatre
Institute. His playwriting course has been considered the single greatest
influence on the development of Russia’s new drama, socially conscience
drama often focused on social outcasts, incorporating violence and vulgarity
as the primary lexicon of human engagement.4 A persistent supporter of
new play development, Kolyada founded the Eurasian Drama Competition
Festival in 2003 and the International Kolyada Plays Festival in 2006.
Many of the Kolyada Theatre company members and administrators
are his former students from the Ekaterinburg Theatre Institute. Largely
due to his sole leadership, he has been able to cultivate a theatre ensem-
ble that shares his worldview and approach to theatrical production. In the
early 2000s, Kolyada created an ensemble to stage his own plays in a small
basement of a history museum, but due to the popularity of Kolyada’s work,
Ekaterinburg city officials promised him a theatre space of his own. When
the city dragged its heels, Kolyada staged a hunger strike, which drew the in-
terest of the press and Ekaterinburg residents agitating to support the young
company.5 Soon after, the director was given a small, somewhat decaying
nineteenth century mansion, which had a small, dark stage, sixty seats, a
small lobby, and a changing room for the actors. The space was small, there
was no hot water, and the activities of the theatre spilled out into the street,
but Kolyada cultivated a devout audience for his energetic, emotionally
charged, often shocking performances. He has been nominated for Mos-
cow’s Golden Mask awards for his adaptations of classical works as well as
original plays. In April 2014, noting the Kolyada Theatre’s growing national
and international reputation, the local government provided Kolyada with a

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much larger building with high ceilings and bright, elegant rooms, 120 seats
in the main auditorium, much larger administrative and production spaces,
and increased capacity for technological advancement.
While Kolyada has cultivated a youthful audience of progressives, crit-
ics and literary figures have often condemned his work and aesthetic. His
production of the contemporary author Konstantin Kostenko’s play, Claus-
trophobia, in 2006 received the most vituperative response from critics. The
play focuses on the shifting relations between three male prison inmates.
They use harsh obscenities and a vulgar and violent physical vocabulary to
navigate territorial boundaries. One brief moment of endearing tenderness,
however, occurs in the play. One prisoner caresses and soothes another pris-
oner, after he has been debased and brutalized by the third prisoner. The two
men kiss slowly and tenderly.6 It is the single moment of hope and love in a
fiercely cruel world. The play ends, though, in a vicious murder that is swiftly
covered up by prison officials. Mainstream critics found the play offensive
for its vulgar language and physicality, its positive representation of a homo-
sexual relationship, and its gruesome outcome. But the play points to a re-
current theme in Kolyada’s works: individuals without access to power have
no inherent value in society. Like material waste and objects that have lost
their usefulness, the individuals are easily discarded and forgotten. The pro-
duction, while not directly representing a traumatic past, echoes a history
of brutal prison systems and gulags (a history Russian officials suppress).7
In a Kultura journal article in April 2014, Kolyada was listed among the-
atre artists who are “dangerous to the health of the Russian people.” Lines of
his plays were quoted in support of the argument that his “non-normative
lexicon and shameless jokes must leave Russia forever.”8 Unfazed, the provo-
cateur posted the article on Facebook. Though his characters long for com-
passion and tenderness, Kolyada doesn’t present an idealized version of
human relations or hope for a better future, but confronts violence and de-
humanization as a fact in post–Cold War era human relations, materialism,
and pseudo-democratic institutional structures.
Visually, Kolyada’s productions are perpetually moving collages of dis-
posable stuff and landfill landscapes of fantastical play. The stage of the
new theatre has three doors in the back that open to reveal new objects, un-
expected places, and scenes of irreverence. The things, though, that clutter
the stage come from the everyday: strips of paper, plastic cups, clothing,

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bedding, alcohol bottles, and lots of children’s toys. In addition to the sce-
nographic heaps of stuff (which he designs himself ), Kolyada’s plays incor-
porate water, mud, and various fluids that add to the muck that characters
must trudge through submissively, when their dignity has finally collapsed.
The garbage heaps in which characters linger are full of the discarded objects
of contemporary living and human history.

Ekaterinburg Landscapes
Ekaterinburg, Russia sits near the border of Asia and Europe, located about
nine hundred miles from Moscow on the Eastern side of the Ural Mountains,
and is considered the economic capital of the Ural region. The fourth-largest
city in Russia, with a population of 1.5 million, the city developed as an in-
dustrial center in Russia for its mineral mining and iron mills. It marks the
site where Tsar Nicholas II and his family were murdered after the Bolshevik
Revolution. Memorials in the city center and in its outskirts remind citizens
and visitors of this event in the city’s violent past. Another memorial, a short
drive from the city, recognizes Ekaterinburg victims of Stalin’s regime. Mu-
seums throughout the city bear witness to the erasure of lives within the city.
By contrast, the increasingly popular Victory Day parades, in Ekaterinburg
as elsewhere in Russia, displaying tanks and missiles and individuals carry-
ing portraits of ancestors who fought in World War II celebrate the military
industrial complex and “heroism” of the Stalinist Soviet past.
In the Soviet era, Ekaterinburg developed as a center for scientific re-
search. Due to its position as the center of Soviet strategic defense, the city
remained closed to foreign visitors until 1990. The city continues to be a
leading locus for Russian science and industry. It is also a thriving cultural
center with dozens of professional theatres, numerous art museums and
galleries, and a variety of music performance spaces. Street art and under-
ground music thrive among young spectators in Ekaterinburg. Since the
1990s, when the city became the crime capital of Russia, its public spaces
have become covered in graffiti, a sign of rebellion against the weakened
post-Soviet power structure and resistance to the formation of a new to-
talizing authority. The 2012 Ekaterinburg City Guide, published by the
Municipal Branding Department, boasts a two-hour street art and graffiti
walking tour.

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The Iset River, just a few blocks from the location of Kolyada’s former the-
atre space on Turgenev Street, is a layered site. As the river thaws in the spring,
the contradictory nature of the space becomes more evident: a beautiful nat-
ural landscape merges with a manmade boardwalk that borders what at first
glance can be seen as a container of modern disposability: the river’s edge is
littered with discarded packaging, clothing, shoes, automobile parts.9 As the
spring temperatures arrive, the littered landscape smells of decay. Nightly,
in the pre-COVID-19 era, bands of working-class men congregate outdoors
to drink beer from oversized containers, leaving their smashed glass bottles
and spit in muddy parking lots. Nearby, furs and European handbags are
sold daily in dozens of high-end shops. The architecture of the city offers an-
other curious blend: declining eighteenth- and nineteenth-century wooden
buildings stand next to rusting, graffiti-covered Soviet apartment complexes
and sleek, post-perestroika high-rises. The Municipal Branding Department
highlighted this unusual mix as one of its distinctive and appealing features
in its bid to host the 2020 World Expo.

Kolyada’s Cherry Orchard

The cultural blend of Russia’s history in the Ekaterinburg landscape is visible
in the productions of Kolyada, that often merge as a critique of an idealized
Russian past with a dark, domestic contemporary world. In Kolyada’s Cherry
Orchard, power shifts from one strict authoritarian regime (symbolized by
huge crosses around the character’s necks and the absolute authority of a
priestlike Firs) to a more brutal one (represented by a post-Soviet, quietly
bloodthirsty Lopakhin). For the production, the stage is strewn with white
paper cups and vodka bottles. Kolyada’s stage mirrored an image of the rem-
nants of a drunken evening he’d encountered on a walk through the park one
day. Glancing at the paper cups the revelers had placed around the trees in
the park, Kolyada thought, “Look, it’s the Cherry Orchard!”10
In his version of the play, the peasants build a cherry orchard out of
wooden handrails, placing the paper cups onto thin branches, transforming
them into cherry blossoms. In their anticipation of Liubov’s homecoming,
the characters, peasants and landowners, drink excessively and eat boiled
eggs messily while they address one another, spitting bits of egg all over the
stage. These drunken and wasteful people are thoroughly unaware of the

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shifting climate, thus submissively acquiesce as the play progresses. Even

as ghosts of serfs become more visible throughout the production, the play’s
inhabitants make no connection between the past and their complicity in
empowering a new authoritarian regime.
Liubov, along with her daughter Anya, enters into this environment in
layers of cheap and gaudy French couture. When among the crowd of peas-
ants and guests who greet her, Liubov drinks and parties loudly ignoring
Lopahkin, the only character who avoids the excess of the celebrations.
Throughout act one, Liubov comes across as wasteful, indulgent, and child-
ish, a clear match for her brother Gaev, who dresses in furs and constantly
pets his sister and clutters the space with garbage. During the act, though, as
Liubov makes her way around the nursery, kissing the floor and petting the
wardrobe, she discovers her dead son Grisha’s small jacket and boots, and
for a moment, the layers of theatricality dissolve, and an injured, suffering
woman appears briefly. It is her trauma that keeps her from actively engag-
ing in the present. Memories of her loss, which she hasn’t fully processed,
trap her in a liminal state of existence. Liubov’s trauma is a palimpsest of
Kolyada’s own individual trauma, caused by the sudden death of his sister.
In an interview in May 2014, he told me that all of his productions are essen-
tially autobiographical. In addition to being haunted by his personal history,
this Ekaterinburg production of Cherry Orchard provides traces of national
trauma, when various regimes institutionalized violence and erasure.
In Act III, Kolyada violently depicts Liubov’s humiliation and renewed
trauma at the loss of the orchard and her identity. When Lopakhin returns
to announce that he has purchased the orchard, he arrives with a cloth bag
full of old axes. He enters without saying hello, walks straight down center
on the quiet stage and drops the axes loudly, joltingly. Rarely is it quiet or
still in Kolyada’s theatre, so when silence occurs, something chilling is about
to happen. Slowly, Lopakhin removes an ax and silently walks to the side of
the stage to grab a wooden handrail/birch. Laying it down, upright, he be-
gins to chop the wood wildly as he verbally attacks Liubov with “You should
have listened.” She stands opposite him, and as he chops the wood more
frantically, bits of the wood fly at her—landing on her body, her face, and
in her hair. She stands like stone being hit by these pieces of wood until he
stops chopping. She then exits by climbing into the historic wardrobe and
closing it slowly, erasing herself completely inside the past. The inevitable

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destruction of the orchard and the family home ensures that Liubov’s loss
and trauma will be buried deeply in its remains. Like the orchard, and the
many dead serfs visibly reproduced in the setting, Liubov has no value in
this world. Remnants of the past are destroyed and scattered across the new
environment.
Varya, too, undergoes degradation at the hands of Lopakhin, who clar-
ifies her lack of value in the world he creates. At the end of the second act,
dressed in her undergarments, she enters the quiet stage and tying a string
to a thin birch branch says, “I am a seagull, no, I am an actress,” evoking
the equally disposable Nina. That Varya has no value in the emerging cul-
ture dominated by Lopakhin becomes clear in the final act of the play. As
Lopakhin smugly attempts to propose to her, he continuously and arrogantly
cracks boiled eggs on her forehead. She sits woodenly, enduring the humil-
iation until Lopakhin is called and exits quickly. Liubov and Varya become
dejected and discarded victims, powerless at the hands of an increasingly
cold and hypermasculine hegemony.

Kolyada’s A Streetcar Named Desire

For Kolyada, the West is no escape from the post–Cold War hypermasculine
cultures of disposability. His A Streetcar Named Desire resembles his Cherry
Orchard, but here the environment is even more degraded, more brutal, and
charged with a destructive sexual energy in which the oppressor degrades
and discards everything in his path. As the play begins, a brutal American
landscape is represented on stage by the presence of a hyper-fictionalized
Native American who, wearing a worn-out headdress, hides behind an iron
gate and tries to avoid annihilation. A row of simple, white chairs line the
stage, each with a Black baby doll placed on it. A motley group of masked
Mardi-Gras dancers thrust into the space to establish the exterior world of
excess and Dionysian revelry and to transform the orderly space. Chairs are
knocked down, clothes and paper are strewn about the stage, and the dolls
are piled all around. This wasteland is Stella and Stanley’s apartment. A well-
groomed Blanche enters this sphere where she will become part of its gar-
bage before being discarded altogether.
Stanley Kowalski controls the environment physically, vocally, and sexu-
ally. In his very first scene, he masturbates while talking to Blanche, sniffing

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 42 Valleri R o bi n so n

his fingers as he finishes. He cages her body, cornering her, threatening her
right away. A symbolic representation of “imperialist America” itself, Stan-
ley moves around the stage with the swagger and suspicion of an animal
protecting his territory. He dominates the environment, smoking cigarettes
that he puts out by spitting into his hand and crushing them in his palm and
flicking them away, raising his voice in loud, taunting laughter or drunken
shouts, and sprawling his body on the furniture. In one scene, he stands be-
hind Stella and Blanche, who are seated, and when he becomes angry, he
grabs the back of both chairs and violently shakes both women onto the
floor. They remain on the floor, heads down, until he is gone.
Neither Blanche nor Stella is weak in the production, though. They are
also forceful and passionate, but still Stanley overwhelms them and over-
powers them. Only as her chance with Mitch fades does Blanche begin to
unravel and deteriorate. The carnivalesque nightmare suggested by the
drunken revelers who punctuate each scene grows more threatening as her
mind weakens. When Stanley questions her about the Pink Flamingo, she
begins to retch, swallowing and spitting out strips off paper as she exits the
stage. Following a near-rape scene with Mitch, whom Blanche manages to

FIGURE 2 Irina Ermolova and Aleksandr Zamyraev in A Streetcar Named Desire.

Designs by Nikolai Kolyada. Photo by Elena Getsevich.

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force from her, Stanley finds her alone in her trunk, disheveled and wearing
smudged red lipstick. Hovering over her throughout the scene, threatening
sexual violence, he finally spits slowly on her back, then moves arrogantly
away from her.
Although Blanche appears in the final act washed and neatly dressed,
she hides once again in her trunk as the nurse and doctor arrive to take her
away. She has simply become another object of waste in this America, eas-
ily removed, displaced, discarded. Kolyada’s affinity for Tennessee Williams
is evident throughout his repertoire in his depiction of traumatized, aban-
doned, and abused women and other outsiders and disposables.

Kolyada’s Nezhnost’ (Tenderness)

Williams’s influence can be seen in Kolyada’s original play Nezhnost (Tender-
ness), which premiered in 2005. The play centers on a middle-aged woman, a
character simply named SHE, a mother, whose husband has abandoned her.
The character is played in turn by Tamara Zimina (who also plays Dunyasha
in Marriage) and Natalya Garanina (a middle-aged actress). SHE dreams of
tenderness, “by which she probably means so much: faithfulness, beautiful
love, honesty, openness.”11 She carries a backpack full of stuffed animals and
keeps a journal of poems in her cellar. She runs into a former boyfriend, HE,
dressed in military fatigues one day, and they talk about relationships, the
past, and their current lives. He laughs at her naïve dreams, positive outlook,
and hopefulness, and his realism and roughness contrast with her romantic
and open nature. Their relationship develops in several scenes as he pres-
sures her toward a sexual relationship and then steals her wallet.
The short play moves quickly to the climactic moment. HE begins to
forcefully remove her clothing, leaving her head covered and arms pinned
by her shirt. He stands her against the wall. He begins soaking handfuls of
toilet paper in a metal basin of water and flings them at her. Taunting her
and shouting at her, he grows more animated as he throws the sopping tissue
at her with increasing force. He then picks up the basin and drenches her
entirely, allowing the container to crash to the floor with a bang and he exits
in disgust. In silence, the audience stares at the unmoving, battered woman.
Only after a very long pause, does she begin to move. Looking apologetically
at the audience, she begins to tidy herself. In a dreamy monologue about

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FIGURE 3 Aleksandr Zamyraev and Tamara Zimina in Tenderness. Designs by Nikolai

Kolyada. Photo by Elena Getsevich.

tenderness, she collects soggy toilet paper from the floor and forms it into
a sort of doll, holding it tenderly and attempting to mask her indignities in
her still hopeful, final monologue. It is a horrifying and frightful image that
captures the traumatic figure’s basic survival strategies.
These depictions bring into focus domestic violence and trauma specific
to women abused by men. According to Lynne Attwood, reported incidents
of rape and domestic violence spiked in the post-Soviet era. In 1993, 14,500
women were murdered by their domestic partners, a number Attwood notes,
“far exceeded the widely publicized mafia killings.”12 Kolyada’s women ref-
erence these victims and other victims of violence and terror more gener-
ally. His plays critique the harsh machismo that gives rise to the brutality on
domestic as well as national and global levels. Kolyada’s repertoire consis-
tently presents individuals as disposable to men in positions of authority,
those who demonstrate base masculine power through spitting, throwing
punches and kicking, wresting stuffed bears, masturbating, and physically
dominating the spaces they inhabit. His repertoire is packed with exam-
ples of bloodthirsty monarchs and avengers. In Kolyada’s Hamlet, Claudius
pulls Gertrude around by a leather collar on her neck, and he lashes his

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subordinates to keep them in check; his Boris Godunov compares his foes to
the raw chicken that he chops with a cleaver and devours on stage. Kolyada’s
masculine terrorizers dehumanize their victims, making enormous messes
of body fluids and the remnants of their consumption as they move across
the stage, dragging others through their messes and leaving them as part of
the landscape of destruction and decay.
While his productions may depict decay and disposability, the Kolyada
theatre itself is a warehouse of memory. The lobby acts as a twentieth-­century
domestic museum; it is crowded with clocks, lanterns, globes, maps, tea-
cups, stuffed animals, handicrafts, photographs, souvenirs, and other knick-
knacks. One audience member said, “It looks just like my grandmother’s
home.”13 These objects, which might be read as kitsch, have outlasted their
usefulness but reveal their everyday functions in the past. Their permanence
speaks to the absence of those who used the items, particularly women, and
how they lived their lives in eras quickly being forgotten or recorded in ways
that encourage selective memory as nationalism resurges.
These everyday domestic items are intermingled in Kolyada’s lobby with
objects recognizing the great Russian “history makers”: a color print out of
Chekhov, small bust of Gogol, a little statue of Pushkin. There are several
large busts and paintings of Lenin, which are sometimes used irreverently in
performance. Two small bronze circular plaques of Stalin hang on the wall:
one above a clock and another above a telephone. A photograph of Stalin
with a slightly blackened eye appears in one corner. In the context of his
repertoire, these last images evoke a chilling past in which dehumanization
and human disposability enabled absolute power. The images undermine
the reviving cult of Stalin and the current revisionist history glorifying the
Stalinist era. Through inference, his production of Richard III, which recently
opened in the theatre, has become another reminder, and perhaps a warning,
of the dehumanizing impact of unchecked power. As Kolyada’s productions
depict domestic terror and the ease with which the mundane turns violent
and destructive, his lobby, and his refusal to dispose of the objects of do-
mesticity and the reminders of terror, willfully restore and activate memory.

VALLERI ROBINSON is the author of Russian Culture and Theatrical Performance in America.
She teaches courses in theatre historiography, twenty-first-century dramaturgy, and
Chekhov. She is working on the manuscript, “Cold War Stages: Performing US-Soviet

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 46 Valleri R o b i n s o n

Peace and Friendship, 1942–1965.” Valleri has been a Fulbright Scholar, working with the
Kolyada Theatre in Ekaterinburg, Russia, and a 2020 Resident Fellow at NYU’s Center for
Ballet and the Arts.

NOTES
1. This article relies heavily on my research at the Kolyada Theatre from April through
June 2014, which was sponsored by a Fulbright Award. I attended twenty productions,
some multiple times, attended rehearsals, and interviewed Mr. Kolyada several times
during this visit. All photos are by Elena Getsevich. This article was written and accepted
for publication prior to the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine.
2. Freedman, John, “A Playwright Supports Putin,” The Moscow Times, February 10, 2012,
https://www.rbth.com/articles/2012/02/10/a_playwright_supports_putin_14346​.html.
3. Personal Interview with Nikolai Kolyada, May 30, 2014.
4. John Freedman, Real and Phantom Pains: An Anthology of New Russian Drama
(Washington, DC: New Academic Publishing, 2014), 9.
5. Kolyada Theatre, “2001–2004,” May 31, 2014. http://www.kolyada-theatre.ru/ru/
theatre.
6. In the performance I saw on May 15, 2014, several audience members stomped out
of the theatre. Others vocalized sounds of disgust. Those who remained in the theatre
applauded loudly and gave the actors a standing ovation.
7. See, for example, Oliver Rolin, “Yuri Dmitriev: The historian being silenced by
Putin,” https://www.indexoncensorship.org/2020/10/yuri-dmitriev-the-historian​-being
-silenced-by-putin/?fbclid=IwAR3GIp8SJ6IiGBj-GgesumSLBcqTqPYcakUISA1utgw_
CH1ddG80LAL4Qpo.
8. “Minkul’t Preduprezhdaet: sovremennoe isskustvo mozhet bit opasno dla zdorov’ya
Russiian,” Kultura, April 11–17, 2014, 4.
9. The city organized a clean-up of the garbage in the river, and volunteers turned out
to help with the efforts. Additionally, the city invests to repaint, repave, and repair the de-
struction of winter in May and brighten the city’s numerous natural spaces and gardens.
10. Personal Interview with Nikolai Kolyada, May 30, 2014.
11. Kolyada Theatre, “Tenderness,” May 21, 2014, http://www.kolyada-theatre.ru/en/
tenderness.
12. Lynne Attwood, “She Was Asking For It: Rape and Domestic Violence against
Women,” in Post-Soviet Women: from the Baltic to Central Asia, ed. Mary Buckley (Cam-
bridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 99. Attwood writes that the increase in do-
mestic violence can be attributed to the collapse of the Soviet structure. “In the past,
women were afforded some protection from violent husbands through official state and
party organs. Trade unions, the Komsomol, and local Communist Party organizations
would reprimand or punish members who violated ‘socialist’ morality’” (102).
13. Interview with teenage audience member, Aleksandra Kontorovich, May 15, 2014.

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 Degradation in Hypermasculine Cultures of Disposability and Forgetfulness 47

WORKS CITED
Attwood, Lynne. “She Was Asking For It: Rape and Domestic Violence against Women.”
Post-Soviet Women: From Baltic to Central Asia, edited by Mary Buckley. Cam-
bridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997.
Freedman, John. “A Playwright Supports Putin.” The Moscow Times, February 10, 2012.
https://www.rbth.com/articles/2012/02/10/a_playwright_supports_putin_14346​
.html.
———. Real and Phantom Pains: An Anthology of New Russian Drama. Washington, DC:
New Academic Publishing, 2014.
Kolyada Theatre. http://www.kolyada-theatre.ru/o-teatre.
“Minkul’t Preduprezhdaet: sovremennoe isskustvo mozhet bit opasno dla zdorov’ya Rus-
siian.” Kultura, April 11–17, 2014, 4–5.

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