Ms. Berkovich, the director, comes from a family of advocates: Her mother is a human rights activist, as is her grandmother, and her father is a poet. On the first day of the full-scale invasion of Russia, Ms. Berkovich was arrested and jailed for 11 days after holding a poster reading “No to war” and allegedly disobeying police officers who asked her accompany them to the station. He also wrote anti-war poems.
Playwright Petriychuk rose to fame in the Moscow theater world in 2018, when she gave her first reading at the Lyubimovka theater festival and began gaining recognition and awards.
Both women have repeatedly asked that their detention be transformed into house arrest. Ms. Petriychuk has scoliosis, a curvature of the spine, and Ms. Berkovich is the mother of two adopted teenage daughters. She met them at a summer camp for orphans, where she and some of her friends were helping young campers put on shows for potential adoptive families.
““It's horrible, it's very hard for them,” Ksenia Sorokina, a friend of Ms. Berkovich, said of the two daughters. “This is a terrible trigger for them, losing their parents repeatedly.”
In April, shortly before the trial began, both women were added to Russia's official list of “terrorists and extremists,” with their bank accounts frozen. The list includes the Islamic State, Al Qaeda, the Taliban, political opposition figures such as the late Aleksei A. Navalny, the “international LGBT movement” and Facebook's parent company Meta.
Mr. Dyurenkov, a former artistic director of the Moscow festival, said he expected more such prosecutions. “Once this door opens, it never closes,” he said. “This is how the repressive system works.”
@Anastasia Kharchenko contributed reporting.