Russian stage actor Artur Shuvalov sliced his arm in front of an audience in Ulan-Ude, eastern Siberia, in an attempt to take his own life, blaming artistic director Vyacheslav Mikhailovich Dyachenko and theater manager Natalia Nikolaevna Svetozarova for his suicide attempt. A video of the incident, that took place at the end of the last performance of the play Teatr Iznanka, on March 29 at the Buryat Russian Theater, shows Shuvalov address the audience, accusing the theater management of harassing him into resignation. Shuvalov then took a blade out of his pocket and, without hesitation, sliced across his left arm four times before throwing the blade on the ground. He was then taken to hospital and has since been released after receiving stitches. “I didn’t see any other way out”, the actor explained to the website Lyudi Baykala.

That day, prior to the incident, his wife, actress Svetlana Polyanskaya, who also had a role in the play, resigned. She granted us an interview.

“In the end, I could not stand it and wrote a letter of resignation. They signed it for me, despite me being one of the leading theater actresses. The management of the theater did not even talk to me. On the same day, Artur was again illegally deprived of a cash bonus” she told us.

The play, Teatr Iznanka, was written and directed by the theater’s former artistic director Sergey Levitsky. Levitsky had been fired in 2022 for opposing the war in Ukraine and was replaced by Vyacheslav Dyachenko. Following the change of artistic director, several actors were put on Dyachenko’s blacklist.

“During the past year, they tried to fire Artur because of our position about the government,” explains Svetlana. “They deprived him of roles, tried to remove him from performances, forbade directors to take him to new productions, deprived him of bonuses, forced his colleagues to write denunciations against him, on the basis of which official investigations were carried out. In this way they made work at the theater unbearable. In fact, he was forced to quit on his own.”

Svetlana explains she and other actors supported Shuvalov. “Because he’s our colleague, he’s been working in the theater for 14 years. The announcer has been working in the theater for three years, Mr. Dyachenko for less than a year. Mr. Dyachenko is completely incompetent in the field of art, he does not understand anything about a good theater, he has no directing education and experience in theater management. With his arrival, the level of performances dropped. The new productions were of poor quality. Artists opposed to him could not work nor play in new productions.”

“Of course, none of the artists knew about the impending disaster, otherwise we would simply not have let him on stage”, she adds regarding her husband’s self-mutilation. “We were shocked. Everyone was in shock. Many in the audience began to cry. Because many people know us personally.” “The resonance was powerful. For two days, people wrote and called us from different cities and even from abroad, asking for an interview. They expressed support and sympathy. Our audience has been very supportive. They offered help.”

Buryatia Minister of Culture Soelma Dagayeva commented on the case and announced an investigation would be carried out to determine the reasons and possible psychological factors behind Shuvalov’s act. She denied any form of harassment, indicating the actor was receiving a full salary and offered roles and that his wife willfully resigned. She added the actor had recently refused to participate in an event in front of wounded soldiers at a hospital.

In an official statement written by the theater’s artistic director and the theater manager, Shuvalov’s act was described as being an inappropriate attempt at destabilizing the theater and disrupting the work process. “I think it’s just a mental imbalance”, explained Dyachenko to Lyudi Baykala. “I’m as surprised as you are.”

Sveltana regrets the reaction of authorities. “The theater management and the Ministry of Culture did not get in touch with any artist. They gave an official comment on social networks, where they said that everything is in order, that they are sorry for the audience, that Artur is a psycho and a dissident. They began to accuse us of being traitors to the motherland, of undermining the work of the theater and spreading anti-patriotic sentiments.” On April 1 some actors tried to enter the theater but were quickly expelled after Dyachenko called security.

Yet Artur Shuvalov’s self-harm was performed in front of an audience which suggests the incident was intended to be a message. It took place at the very location he held responsible for his suffering, the Buryat Russian Theater where he had been working since 2009. “This was his manifesto. An appeal to the troupe, to the audience, to the management, to everyone who sees it, because the audience often filmed the bows at the end of the performance” explains Svetlana. “All attempts to reach out to the leadership and the Ministry of Culture were in vain. The theater is a small model of the state. And my husband expressed his protest against the cruel politics in this theater state.”

Accusations of harassment are not a rare occurrence in Russia since the war in Ukraine. Many people have lost their jobs over their anti-war stance. “Local media were forbidden to interview the artists” adds Svetlana. Furthermore, dismissing protest self-harm as only consequences of psychological disorder is frequently used by authorities to deprive the act from its political or contestative meaning. As Aitchison & Essex note in their paper Self-harm in immigration detention: political, not (just) medical published in the Journal of Medical Ethics (2022), while hopelessness and depression can contribute to self-harm, interpreting the act within a medical perspective only fails to reflect on the institutional context that leads to such despair and feeling of injustice. It is also frequent that authorities describe protest self-harm as being manipulative and emotional blackmail. Such strategies have often been used to shift the responsibility and to avoid debate about what conditions led an individual to such an extreme act.

“My husband is an honest, brave, talented, intelligent person, a wonderful artist. But even a strong person can be taken to extremes” regrets Svetlana. “Artur has been fighting cancer for three years now. He underwent two surgeries and four courses of chemotherapy. At the same time, he postponed one operation for the sake of a performance that we played for the experts of a prestigious theater festival. My husband is not the psycho they want to make him out to be. He has more courage than all those officials who send people to their deaths. And he cut himself so that they would hear him and understand that people should not be treated like this. The theater is not a place for the personal ambitions of an empty-headed manager. The theater cannot be a dummy and a mouthpiece for propaganda. Theater is about life, about people, about compassion, about love, about philanthropy and mercy.”