A medieval combat enthusiast has been given four months in jail after he admitted slapping French President Emmanuel Macron. Damien Tarel told the court it was an act of impulse, but the prosecutor said it was a “deliberate act of violence.” The court heard that Tarel subscribed to right-wing or far-right politics and was close to the yellow-vest movement. President Macron said the attack should not be trivialised but had to be kept in proportion.…Prosecutors had called for 18 months in prison for assaulting a public official. The three judges said Tarel should be given 18 months, with 14 months of the sentence suspended. His four months in jail will start immediately but the rest will only be enforced if he commits another offence.Footnote 1
Quaragandy is a mid-sized city in central Kazakhstan.Footnote 2 It is located about two hundred kilometers to the south of Nur-Sultan (formerly Astana), Kazakhstan's current capital city. At one time Quaragandy was the second largest city in Kazakhstan and a major industrial hub in Central Asia. Its staple product was coal. The presence of coal led to a large metallurgical plant being built, along with other plants that produced and exported mining equipment, excavators, and agricultural machinery. By the early 1990s much of this fell into decay. The Soviet Union disintegrated, its industrial chains had been broken, and on top of that, the coal mines had become depleted. By the turn of the century, when Kazakhstan's economy improved, Quaragandy was caught up in yet another setback, which eventually led to even greater decline. The government had relocated its seat from Almaty, in the south, to Astana, in the north. Astana's rapid development and the new opportunities it provided slowly sucked the most ambitious and skillful people out of Quaragandy, as well as other nearby cities.Footnote 3
No one would have expected anything important to ever happen again in Quaragandy, but in 2014 it held an astonishing court trial that shook both Kazakhstan's judicial system and its way of conducting political protest. The media covered the trial widely and many people attended the court sessions or followed the events in the media. This article investigates the activities of Evgenii Tankov, an established lawyer, who conceived of and performed in the trial, and who was sentenced to jail for having done so. In brief, in March 2014, Tankov, while defending a client in a routine court session, hit judge Araĭ Alshynbekov with a fly swatter.Footnote 4 A subsequent trial was scheduled for July 2014 to judge Tankov for this behavior, and it was this trial that became headline news in the otherwise unremarkable timeline of Kazakhstan's public hearings (and that of the declining city of Quaragandy). For some time, the lawyer arguably became the most noticeable and admired prisoner in Kazakhstan.Footnote 5
Different actors described the lawyer and his act in divergent, sometimes conflicting ways, from “madman” and “hooligan,” to “brave man” or even “saint.”Footnote 6 One should keep in mind though, that despite the way Tankov's act and trial were represented in the media, and despite how Kazakhstan's authorities characterized and judged the lawyer, the reconstruction of the trial and the events that led to it may indeed paint a picture that goes beyond heroism, recklessness, or madness. This text is an attempt to find that deeper explanation. It claims, in particular, that Tankov's act was not a flash of rage or an actual attempt to harm the judge. It was, instead, a calculated strategy in which an important political statement was concealed—if not sheathed—within the form of farcical performance. The lawyer knew he would be punished for disrespect towards the court: and he transformed his subsequent trial to demonstrate the moral and intellectual impasse of the judicial system in Kazakhstan whose deafness to the demands for justice had become appalling by 2014. Tankov was sentenced to three years in prison and was released on appeal six months before the end of his term.
The research for this article took place over several years and is based on several kinds of sources. I first learned about the case from the press, as everyone else did. In 2016, I took a field trip to Quaragandy to collect the Minutes of the trial and conduct an unstructured interview with Tankov's mother, Valentina, whom I befriended while in the city. I also met a number of Tankov's supporters and collected information about his professional and artistic activities (it turned out that he combined the two) before 2014. After Evgenii Tankov was released from prison, I talked to him in person. Beyond that, in 2016–19 I reached out to Kazakhstan's leading performance artists to grasp the challenges of their and their colleagues’ work in contemporary Central Asia. The final version of the text took shape as it became clear that the three strands were intertwined: investigating the Quaragandy trial meant considering the broader topic of political protest as well as the background of artistic performance in post-Soviet Kazakhstan from the 2000s onwards.
As I collected material for this article—from the official press, people close to Tankov, and Kazakhstani artists—I gradually realized that the trial and what it represented for society in the mid-2010s went far beyond being a fait divers in a decaying post-industrial city. Social and ethical issues were deeply intertwined within the trial, as were issues of personal and public agency. By 2014, Tankov was a well-known and well-paid lawyer, with a reputation built, to a large extent, on pro bono cases in which he often pleaded against state agencies or the companies affiliated with them. He did not shun cases which other lawyers rejected because a client might be impoverished or insolvent (he defended defrauded estate property holders or badly vaccinated children, for example).Footnote 7 This being said, one could still ask why a licensed lawyer would choose to perform in the court instead of devoting his time and energies to a regular client who would provide him cash. And why did Tankov act in such a fashion instead of finding more conventional ways to obtain justice? Was this a case of a postmodern Don Quixote who went all in? Or the case of a sophisticated player whose performance was the first move in a larger and unknowable strategy? This article attempts to tackle these issues and subjects Tankov's trial to a critical analysis in the context of artistic performance (sometimes referred to as aktsionizm in Russian) and political protest in Kazakhstan and beyond.Footnote 8 It argues that as a performance, Tankov's act encourages one to re-think the legal process itself and proves that reshaping how a trial is conducted can become a political act—one which paves the way, in turn, for reflections on access to and conditions for (im)partial judgement within an authoritarian regime. As an example of protest praxis, Tankov's actions encourage one to question the ways in which actors produce and affirm their identities and create new forms of agency in circumstances in which political behavior is bounded by and negotiated within a post-Soviet authoritarian state. This paper also provides an unstructured comparison between Tankov's 2014 trial and the trial of the Russian feminist punk group Pussy Riot—whose members had performed a punk service in Moscow's Christ the Savior Church in 2012—to comment on the strategies that authoritarian justices in Russia and Kazakhstan used to deal with forms of dissent that were carnavalesque in form but political in content.Footnote 9
I will begin with an analysis of the Quaragandy trial, focusing on the significance of Tankov's behavior, his interaction with judges and audience members, and the way the trial was handled by the authorities. I will then explore the genealogy of Tankov's performance and consider it within the context of discussions of artistic practices in Kazakhstan and beyond. Ultimately, this text is not an attempt to write a panegyric to an unjustly convicted lawyer (although his sentence, as we will see, was indeed problematic). Instead, it uses Tankov's trial to explore the agency of an individual who “hacked” (and not inconsequentially for himself) Kazakhstan's judicial system not through legal means, but by staging an aberrant performance. In doing so, Tankov challenged and compromised the symbolic power of the court, and subsequently ridiculed it. This act had two important consequences for Kazakhstan's judicial system. First, the trial, because of its unprecedented visibility, provided a detailed picture of the mechanics of judicial repression. By 2014, justice in this country consisted by and large in choosing the most effective way to sentence the suspect, and was not a deliberated effort to establish guilt or innocence. Bringing the Kafkaesque routine of judicial proceedings out into the open, as well as the obnoxious esprit de corps that existed among judges and prosecutors, was crucial: while highly visible political repression had existed in Kazakhstan for many years, dozens of known political prisoners were still inconsequential next to the tens of thousands of new convictions that occurred annually due to courts that were either corrupt or disinclined to do a fair job.Footnote 10
Second, Tankov's trial demonstrated how an authoritarian state, which is thought to resort to coercion more “naturally” than a democratic one, turned out to be weak rather than strong once it faced resistance from a tenacious citizen. In Tankov's case, the state was not able to ensure the sentence's legitimacy, which is the most important component of faith in the justice system as such, particularly in Kazakhstan.Footnote 11 The judge who accused Tankov of “attacking” him was overtly mocked by the people as well as the media during and after the trial. With time, the average person's lack of trust in the justice system pushed state authorities to introduce structural changes to Kazakhstan's judicial system. On the one hand, Kazakhstan's criminal law has gradually been humanized since 2014.Footnote 12 Due to that shift, Tankov's own term in prison was shortened from three years to two and a half.Footnote 13 The overall number of those detained in Kazakhstan decreased from 49,821 in 2014 to 29,403 in 2020.Footnote 14 On the other hand, despite the law enforcement agencies’ massive inertia, a new legislation regarding judges and the judicial system was adopted in 2019. This law annulled earlier advantages that prosecutors and court clerks were entitled to when they applied to become judges (there had been an effort to encourage lawyers to become judges), and decreased the dependency of puisne judges on chief judges.Footnote 15 This, in theory at least, was one right step toward making the justice system more transparent and decreasing the current indictment practices in the courts.Footnote 16 All these improvements did not issue from Tankov's case exclusively and yet one could argue that the latter played a role in the humanization of justice in Kazakhstan because it exposed its most problematic practices.
The Trial
On March 19, 2014, Tankov appeared in a district court of Quaragandy to represent his client, Berikhan Sarsengulov, in a lawsuit for compensation of damages caused in a car accident. The sitting began with four people in the room: Judge Alshynbekov, Tankov as the plaintiff's attorney, Igor Mitin as the defense attorney, and Kamila Ormanbayeva, the court secretary.Footnote 17 Neither the plaintiff nor the defendant attended the session: the case was about a minor car accident, so their presence was not even required.Footnote 18 All proceeded as usual until Tankov began acting strangely. First, he opened his briefcase and pulled out a few objects that were unrelated to the case. These objects were: fly swatters, a bell pepper, two playing cards, a camera, a pawn, dice, and a cigar.Footnote 19 Formally, none of these objects were prohibited in the courtroom: had Tankov brought an illegal or dangerous object, he would not have been allowed on the premises since all visitors undergo inspection at the courthouse entrance.Footnote 20 After Tankov pulled out the objects, the situation escalated. The lawyer left what he had brought where he sat, except for the swatters and the camera around his neck, and he approached the judge. The latter ordered him to return to his place, but in vain. Instead, Tankov placed one of the swatters on the judge's desk. Judge Alshynbekov then noticed the other swatter in the lawyer's hand as he hovered around the judge and pretended that he wanted to hit him. Alshynbekov called for the bailiff.Footnote 21 The judge felt endangered, as he would later describe, and yelled at Tankov to return to his place and calm down, after which Tankov presumably swatted at the judge three times and calmly returned to his place.Footnote 22 I write “presumably” because the swats, as such, were not visible on the video recording shown during the trial. Clearly visible though, was that Tankov was aiming to strike Alshynbekov, although no contact was recorded. Moreover, one of two key witnesses, the defendant's attorney, Igor Mitin, who was in the room, stated: “He was waving, trying to hit the judge's head, he aimed three to four times, and then he turned back. After that, to prevent him from escaping, I struck him.”Footnote 23
In any case, the slaps with the swatter, whether real or intentional, were hardly strong: from the recording, one can see that the judge could not have been hurt and that the “swats” he presumably received were in fact little more than a few waves of the hand. Aggression did in fact occur once Tankov had returned to his place. At that moment, the judge left his seat, approached the lawyer, and hit him strongly on the head. Tankov tried to protect his head and defend himself while the judge, assisted by Mitin, continued to hit him until they pinned him down. From the video one can see the furniture in the room had been displaced, after which the three men ended up in the corner of the room, a grey zone without camera surveillance. However, one can also see that by the time the fight was over no one had been injured. Tankov sat calmly and smoked, using the bell pepper he had brought as an ashtray. Finally, the bailiff arrived, followed by the police. A protocol was drawn up, and Tankov was detained.Footnote 24 In the initial protocol that was compiled and signed by the participants of the bagarre, Judge Alshynbekov declared that he had suffered no physical harm or injury.Footnote 25
This reconstruction of what had happened in the courtroom on March 14 seeks to neither approve of what Tankov did nor to blame any of the participants for their (over)reactions. It is meant, first and foremost, to establish the facts. First, Tankov neglected his direct duties as his plaintiff's advocate. Second, he disrespected the court through his attack on the judge, though the attack did not result in harm. Third, the judge attacked Tankov in return, instead of waiting for the bailiff to arrive—and in the absence of a plausible subsequent threat from Tankov. Fourth, no one had been hurt in the incident. Finally, the courtroom camera and Tankov's own camera had recorded everything and had been witnessed by two people: the secretary and the defendant's attorney, Igor Mitin.
Given all the elements of the situation, it might be just as stimulating to provide an account of the “pulp of disputable interpretation,” to use Edward H. Carr's expression, as to linger on the “hard core of facts.”Footnote 26 Why did Tankov bring those strange objects into the courtroom and what was their significance? Why did he act as he did knowing, as a lawyer, the consequences of his actions? And why did he choose to “attack” that particular judge? The answer to the latter question was provided during the trial: Tankov had already encountered Judge Alshynbekov in the past and considered him to be corrupt and “dumb.”Footnote 27 As for the objects he had brought, while the fly swatters specifically served to stage an imaginary duel between himself and the judge, all other objects had a more or less pejorative meaning.
A bell pepper is a vegetable. In Russian slang, dumb or insensitive people are referred to as “vegetables.” Both the pawn and the cards contained a ludic element, which, according to Tankov, would be expressed or unpacked in his planned court disturbance. These objects also suggested the uncertain result of what would happen to the lawyer after the “duel.”Footnote 28 As a single object, the pawn is the least significant chess piece in hierarchical terms and one that can only become important if it reaches the enemy's rear flanks—at which point the pawn's victory signifies the loss of its previous identity, thus realizing its destiny only by being transformed into something else. Bringing the pawn into the picture could have been a reference to the judge—suggesting he was an insignificant actor in someone else's more extensive game—or to Tankov himself, implying his intention to evolve through what he had staged. Playing cards—Tankov used a pair of sixes—shesterka—also held a wide array of connotations in the (post-)Soviet epoch (the earliest instance I have seen of this was in Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn).Footnote 29 Shesterka denotes a person who serves or is dependent on someone more important in the social hierarchy.
All the objects that had been brought to the courtroom thus had a derogatory meaning, and all aggravated what Tankov had done by demonstrating that his misdemeanor not only consisted in a physical assault (though harmless), but also in a symbolic insult by virtue of having introduced objects into the courtroom that one could allege pointed to Judge Alshynbekov's incompetence and fatuity. Once charges were pressed, the symbolic offence that the latter had received must have played a massive role in Alshynbekov's attitude to Tankov. And yet, because the case itself could not be based on symbolic grounds, Alshynbekov had to resort to treachery. He changed his initial testimony and declared that during the “attack” his little finger had been badly hurt (although not broken).Footnote 30 Tankov was thus accused not only of disrespect towards the court (according to Article 342 of Kazakhstan's 1997 Criminal Code) but also for the more serious assault upon “the life and health of a judge” (Article 341). The maximum punishment for the former Article was two years in prison, and ten for the latter. Tankov was imprisoned immediately after the performance. His trial would take place in July, after he had spent nearly four months in a cell with a few old offenders.Footnote 31 The lawyer had never been to prison before, and the first few months were particularly tough for him: as a vegetarian, he was unable to eat most of the prison food and fainted several times from hunger.Footnote 32
The first sitting of the trial took place in Quaragandy on July 8, 2014.Footnote 33 While Tankov had a public defender assigned to him, most of the time he acted solo. Eight witnesses were called to the courtroom: among them, Judge Alshynbekov, Tankov's own parents, those people who had happened to be near the courtroom on March 14, which included the bailiff, the defendant's lawyer Mitin, and Tankov's client Sarsengulov. I will focus on three testimonies that were particularly important: Judge Alshynbekov's and those of Tankov's parents. The exchange between Tankov, who defended himself and thus could interrogate the witnesses, and Alshynbekov during the first sitting is illuminating.
Tankov: Could you, please, tell us again what kind of threat you felt from me, exactly?…
Alshynbekov: …You hit me 2–3 times, and I was thinking that you would do something more dangerous. Who knows, maybe you had a grenade in your briefcase. Laughter in the audience.…
Tankov: So, do I understand you correctly: the threat was not spelled out, but expressed non- verbally through my waves with the swatter?
Alshynbekov: Well, I felt it that way.
Tankov: I get you. Let us proceed. Article 341 presumes responsibility for the threat of death, damage to health, etc….Concerning the threat as such: did you feel your life was threatened by the fly swatter?
Alshynbekov: Yes.
Tankov: Since when have you been identifying yourself with a fly?
Public Prosecutor: This is an insult.…Be careful with what you say.
Tankov: Judge Alshynbekov felt threatened by a fly swatter, an object that exists to injure flies, so my question is absolutely legitimate. When was the first time that you felt that you were a fly?
Judge Akhmetova: Question withdrawn.…
Tankov: I am accused of disrespect towards the court, and for threatening the judge. I thus would like to know, how exactly did the fly swatter insult you?…
Public Prosecutor: I require this question to be withdrawn.
Tankov: OK, then let's talk about the bell pepper. How were you insulted by the bell pepper?
Alshynbekov: …I already responded to this question. You were not allowed to pull out objects and manipulate them in the courtroom.
Tankov: OK, I have the swatter on your table, and the bell pepper on my chair. Did the bell pepper insult you from there?
Alshynbekov: I already replied to this question.…
Tankov: …Could you, please, specify how in this case the insult correlates with such notions as “honor” and “dignity”?
Alshynbekov: Your Honor, I repeat, I felt a real threat, a real disrespect…, there was criminal intent in his actions, according to articles 341 and 342.
Tankov: My question was about your honor and dignity.
Judge Akhmetova: Move on. This is irrelevant.
Tankov: How is this irrelevant? An “insult,” according to current law, is the “humiliation of a person's honor and dignity expressed in an indecent form.”
Judge Akhmetova: Proceed then. But do not distort the argument….
Tankov (to Alshynbekov): You have just mentioned that honor and dignity in this case are not related to insult. So, I would like to know how could Judge Alshynbekov be insulted when his honor and dignity were irrelevant in this trial, given that our law connects the two. I would thus like to know how the plaintiff defines what constitutes an insult?
Alshynbekov: Your Honor, the accused brought irrelevant objects to the court and threatened me, he disrespected the court according to what he is accused of. I cannot provide more explanations. I did not provoke him, I was presiding over the case that I had been given. There was no hostile relationship between us.…
Tankov: Can you respond to my question?
Alshynbekov: I already did.
Tankov: No, you are saying something irrelevant about what was not even asked.…
Tankov: Mr. Alshynbekov, “dignity” is defined as the internal appreciation of a person according to her/his own qualities, capacities, worldview, her/his social significance. Can you tell us, have you ever had a worldview?
Alshynbekov: No, I haven't.
Tankov: Not even once in your life?
Alshynbekov: (silence).
Tankov: I do not have any other questions.Footnote 34
This surreal dialogue does not simply indicate two different strategies, that of the prosecution and that of the (self-)defense. It points to a profound difference in how ethics and justice are perceived by two different people. On one side, we have a judge who openly admitted he had no worldview: in fact, Tankov's long interrogation of judge Alshynbekov, with its artfully set traps, was all geared toward demonstrating this. One can see that Alshynbekov does not reflect on ethical categories, he only thinks in terms of which article it is better to apply to a particular case and how it should be applied. In the July trial the judge did not act in his usual role but acted as a witness: the situation of power was thus upended. But when it came to the matter of justice, not just of how the law is applied, Alshynbekov's intellectual impasse as well his inability to reflect on his own role became clear. Obviously, what happened in Tankov's case is a one-off, but taken as a whole it confirms many opinions held by human rights defenders in Kazakhstan. According to them, Kazakhstan's law enforcement system has an accusatory bias, and the trials are not adversarial, for they serve rather to formalize the evidence of guilt already collected by the prosecution.Footnote 35
On the other hand, we see a lawyer who acted defiantly. His questions to the witness—for example, the one about when the latter began to think he was a fly—were innuendo-filled. Tankov had nothing to lose because he had already taken a conscious risk and had already served several months in prison. For him, the trial itself was a performance, a tool to demonstrate the moral impasse of the court. However, the lawyer's familiarity with the system compelled him to formulate questions in a way that would reveal how the judge's testimony did not make sense. By the end of the discussion, Alshynbekov, who had been backed up against the wall by Tankov's precise questions, did not insist on the moral damage that he had presumably suffered, but presented physical evidence of his suffering. As mentioned earlier, information about the bruised little finger was not in the protocol drawn up on March 14, 2014 during Tankov's detention. According to Tankov, the judge feigned an injury, or inflicted it on his own, after the incident in court. This was publicly announced by the lawyer during the trial but no clear answer was given in response to the accusation.Footnote 36
Another testimony that is worth considering was provided by Tankov's parents, Vladimir and Valentina.
Tankov's public defendant (to Vladimir, his father): Could your son have hit Judge Alshynbekov without a reason?…
Vladimir: No, he couldn't. He wasn't brought up like that. If he [chose to] hit the judge, then the judge, through his previous actions, forced him to protest against the injustice, in a moral sense. So, [what my son did] was a last resort. He wouldn't have done that to any other person.…
Public Prosecutor: Do you think that what your son has done is right?
Vladimir: I explained to him that no, this wasn't right. [What he did] helped neither justice, nor himself.…I tried to talk him out of the idea of doing it.Footnote 37
Tankov's mother, Valentina, was more explicit in her comments.
Valentina: The day before his performance, [my son] told me that he was planning to create this performance. I tried to persuade him not to do that. He is a very positive person and he creates such performances without any evil intent. Of course, those who become the objects of such satire don't like it. But I'm certain that he has already been completely punished for what he had done….He is convinced that this is his mission: to fight against injustice, and lack of education. He is not evil, or aggressive, and I think he was already punished enough.…
Public Prosecutor: Has [your son] ever explained to you the reason for what he had done?
Valentina: […he did this] to show disrespect towards the court. A disrespect towards that exact judge, for his wrongdoings during earlier trials. When Zhenia was locked up, I had to deal with his clients’ papers, so people came and told me horrible stories.…
Prosecutor: Focus on this case, please [emphasis added].
Valentina: My understanding was that those things were related to this judge [Alshynbekov]…Footnote 38
During Valentina's interrogation, the atmosphere in the courtroom began to glow. The hall was jam-packed, hooting noises and disapproving comments were made, especially when Valentina mentioned Alshynbekov. Judge Akhmetova, who headed the trial, removed several people from the courtroom.Footnote 39 The evidence from Tankov's parents reveals another side to the trial, without which the matter would be incomplete: the popular attitude to justice as such. The audience's reaction to Valentina's testimony was not accidental: some of the people who came to the trial knew about Alshynbekov's past rulings (and therefore came to the trial to support Tankov and his parents). Others disapproved of the judge because he had changed his testimony to punish Tankov more severely. In the eyes of the audience, Vladimir and Valentina were part of a collective “them.” They were typical representatives of the lower middle class, helpless before the wheels of Kazakhstani justice. It is interesting that despite the gendered differences in their discourse (the father appealed to issues of morality and upbringing and the mother gently evoked her son's positive qualities), their strategies shared a strikingly similar vision of justice that was disconnected from the judicial system as such. Vladimir spoke of his son's act as a “last resort,” meaning that Evgenii did not have the opportunity to establish “the truth” within the judicial system as it existed. Valentina said that her son had no evil intentions, and she appealed to Judge Akhmetova's mercy and not to legal arguments to prove that her son was innocent. And yet, as Valentina told me later, it was clear to her during the trial that her son's case was doomed before it was even heard.Footnote 40
And so it came to pass. The court met several times to hear evidence from other secondary witnesses. At the penultimate session, the accused pronounced a damning speech for his defense.Footnote 41 Yet none of this could prevent the inevitable: Tankov was convicted and soon transferred to a colony near Quaragandy. He was only released in September 2016.
The Genealogy of Tankov's 2014 Performance
The performance Tankov staged in court on March 19, 2014 was not his first. During the trial Tankov mentioned several performances he and his supporters had organized in Quaragandy since the mid-2000s. All of those events were somehow related to issues of law enforcement and fair justice. The most notorious event was the distribution of oranges to citizens in 2011.Footnote 42 In it, Tankov and his supporters, dressed in police uniforms, formed a giant chain in the shape of the letter M (aka militsioner or its slang version “ment” in Russian) along the central avenue of Quaragandy and gave oranges to passersby. According to Tankov, the oranges and police uniforms were a direct reference to Vladimir Maiakovskii's poem, Vesennii vopros.Footnote 43 The poem recounts Maiakovskii's dream of friendly policemen who share oranges with the citizens on the street.Footnote 44 For Tankov, a reference to Maiakovskii constituted both a criticism of the local police's inhumane behaviors and an attempt to improve dialogue between law enforcement and ordinary citizens.
There were other events, too. In one, Tankov made a request to an obtuse judge that Cardinal Richelieu be summoned to court to testify. Without batting an eye, the judge wrote a warrant to summon the cardinal who had died in the seventeenth century.Footnote 45 This, as the lawyer recalled, inspired fury from some of Tankov's colleagues and yet, they had to live with it since no direct offence had been given.Footnote 46 On another occasion, when the lawyer was denied the possibility of registering a public non-profit movement, he staged a performance right outside the walls of the Department of Justice. This time, he used lamb horns, spiritual music, and an inflatable duck to perform a pseudo-shamanistic rite evoking the spirit of justice near the Department headquarters.Footnote 47 When one draws up a list of Tankov's activities before 2014, one can grasp that what would at first glance seem to be an eccentric individual's prank actually had a much longer and consistent genealogy.
During the deliberations and in his final speech, Tankov emphasized that works by Marina Abramović, Yves Klein, Chris Bourdain, Piero Manzoni, and Joseph Kossuth were a source of inspiration for his own court performance in March 2014.Footnote 48 It is likely that Tankov knew or studied the work of those artists. When we discussed his performance, he told to me that the way he staged it had two direct references: one to Piero Manzoni's experiments with transforming people into art objects, the other to Abramović's Rhythm 0 in Naples from 1974.Footnote 49 Thus, while Alshynbekov's transformation into an art object was done in emulation of Manzoni, Tankov's own trial and imprisonment would be more analogous to an Abramovič performance. To my question that a plausible degree of similarity was probably missing, Tankov reacted by saying that his intention was not simply to reproduce someone's work—he had wanted to create an hommage to art he admired.
In any case, whatever the “external” genealogy of Tankov's performances, one could argue that they had become a primarily social practice for him, shaped within the context of his legal experience. This means that the root of his aktsionizm lay in issues of injustice and corruption along with the need to draw attention to both—thus distinguishing his acts from the artists he had mentioned, as these had been focused on creating a (new) artistic form (Klein), or scrutinizing the artist's inner world and relations with the opposite sex (Abramović), or investigating the meaning of art as a form of human existence (Kossuth).Footnote 50 If one considers performance mainly as a bodily practice, what comes to mind is the performances of another contemporary aktsionist, the Russian Petr Pavlensky (never mentioned by Tankov during the interview or in any source I was able to consult). Pavlensky, born in 1984, became famous after he sewed up his mouth and stood near Kazanskii Sobor in St. Petersburg in support of Pussy Riot, who were being tried in Moscow in July 2012. Pavlensky then staged a series of provocative performances, including one in which he nailed his own scrotum to the Red Square in 2013 and set fire at the Federal Security Service's entrance door at Lubyanka Square in Moscow (for which Pavlensky was tried and fined).Footnote 51 While Pavlensky also attempted to continue his performances during the court trial, the key difference between himself and Tankov was that the former, through his disquieting masochism, attempted to send direct messages to the “apathetic and apolitical” Russian society, with a clear aftertaste of anarchism.Footnote 52 Tankov's strategy consisted rather in demonstrating the absurdity of what he had been through (implementing the law without justice), yet without an implicit call for anarchism or disobedience to the authorities.
Performance(s) in Kazakhstan and Beyond
Despite the significance of Tankov's activities, he was not the only one who performed notable and socially significant happenings in post-Soviet Kazakhstan.Footnote 53 Performance art became part of the expressive language of Kazakh artists in the 1990s. In Quaragandy, the first performances were organized by Aibek Begalin, Alexander Patsiura, and other artists, all with similar aesthetic philosophies.Footnote 54 These first performances, however, were driven not by political issues, but by novel opportunities for uncensored expression, which had been proscribed until the late 1980s.Footnote 55 In Almaty, the first post-Soviet performances were organized by Erbosyn Meldibekov, Sergei Maslov, Lida Blinova, Rustam Hal΄fin, and others in the mid-1990s.Footnote 56 In 1996, Hal΄fin staged Autumnal Gestures of Wrath, in which he chopped up cabbage on podiums that resembled sculptures. Hal΄fin's performance grew out of his personal experience: chopping up the cabbage was his way of expressing rage for the loss of his beloved wife, whom he mourned.Footnote 57 The final part of the performance, as a participant recalls, was nonetheless peaceful: “chopped cabbage was [put] into a pan to be marinated. It was consumed in a new country whose government, through [an] official commission,…started to shape [the] new ‘national’ artistic milieu in which [the] achievements of socialist realism were mixed with kitschy ethnicity.”Footnote 58
Kazakhstan's performances acquired a clear political direction by the early 2000s, during the country's gradual transformation under the more authoritarian regime of its first president Nursultan Nazarbayev. It was at that point that artists began to be persecuted for departures from the sanctioned norms regarding creativity.Footnote 59 From the early 2000s, Kanat Ibragimov and Askhat Akhmed΄iarov regularly held performances that challenged the existing political system.Footnote 60 In 2010, Ibragimov brought fish to the Republic Square in Almaty and chopped off its head, shouting “the fish rots from the head.”Footnote 61 This phrase meant that no reforms and improvements in the country were possible while its leadership remained in place. In 2013, a year before Tankov's arrest, Ibragimov had been forced to emigrate from Kazakhstan under threat of prosecution.Footnote 62 Akhmed΄iarov's provocative works combined political criticism and intense postcolonial reflection on the trajectory of post-Soviet Kazakhstan. In his recent works, he smashed a stone wall at the National Museum with a sledgehammer, produced gigantic images of activists imprisoned for an unauthorized rally, and attached tree roots to a chair to show how some leaders “take root” in their chairs.Footnote 63 Akhmed΄iarov's artistic language, which is well known in Kazakhstan and abroad, combines clarity of expression, power of persuasion, and sharp political messages.
While Tankov was neither the first nor the only aktsionist in post-Soviet Kazakhstan, there was a significant difference between him and other artists. First of all, Tankov was a lawyer. This, in turn, had a direct impact on the intended audience and how he organized his events. While most performances created by Kazakhstan's artists were held in public spaces (often galleries) dedicated to art, Tankov chose places that were familiar to him from his professional practice, such as the courts, or outdoor spaces like the street where citizens might encounter the State (in the form of law enforcement). Second, there was a difference in the type of public that Tankov addressed. Unlike other artists, whose audience often consisted of an elite and liberal audience, the lawyer addressed either the agents who represented justice (and whose very consciousness he tried to “break through”) or the “common people,” on whose behalf he called for more active protection of civil rights, (self-)education, and freedom from fear. Third, Tankov crossed the line with his own body, so to speak. True, some Kazakhstani artists have used their own bodies as the fundamental frontier for artistic expression. But while their bodies may have called for audience participation (as Ada Yu had during her performance at the Venice biennale of contemporary art in 2015), the artistic cadre still prefigured and framed the content of performance. Moreover, the audience was paradoxically less likely to be engaged because bodily experiences are usually only apprehended within the boundaries one's own body—not to mention that artistic cadre provides the context for (albeit open-ended and spontaneous) meaning and that there are legal risks of physically involving a spectator's body in the performance.Footnote 64
In Tankov's case, the situation was the opposite: in the fly swatter performance, he lurched at the judge. Even if the attack was a sham, and was not intended to result in violence, a judge's immunity from assault was nonetheless violated. This provided the legal framework for the authorities to pursue the lawyer. Had Tankov's “attack” been a case of ordinary hooliganism, all could have been much simpler. Kazakhstan's law is clear and differs little from that of other countries: a judge is inviolable and attackers must be punished. But how is one to interpret an act aimed at penetrating a judge's symbolic space, co-opting this sacrosanct body as part of a performance? Was the fact that it was a performance itself desacralizing? For Tankov, it was—as he said himself, he felt he had managed to “transform the judge into a work of art.” Footnote 65
The assessment from Judge Bakhyt Akhmetova, who sentenced Tankov in July 2014, was not that permissive, however. When sentencing Tankov for three years for having waved the fly swatter in front of her colleague's face, she must have relied not solely on the Kazakhstani practice of suppressing dissent, but on another notorious case in neighboring Russia that had been much discussed in Kazakhstan. In March 2012, on the eve of Shrovetide, the Russian punk band Pussy Riot performed at the Cathedral of Christ the Savior in Moscow. Dressed in colorful monochrome dresses and balaclavas, Mariia Alekhina, Nadezhda Tolokonnikova, and other members of the group climbed up on the altar and sang a punk prayer with the words “Mother of God, drive Putin away” for two and a half minutes until they were removed from the temple.Footnote 66 The performance was directed both against the Russian president and the Orthodox Church, which, judging from the prayer service text, had also become authoritarian and corrupt. The participants were subsequently arrested, and the ensuing trial became one of the most notorious events in the Russian history of the 2010s.
Obviously, the circumstances of Pussy Riot's and Tankov's cases were very different. And yet they shared a few things in common. Both were attacks on a symbolic space that was deemed by the current political regime to be “untouchable,” so the punishment for the transgression had to be conspicuous and public. The members of the Pussy Riot collective had opposed the gradual narrowing of the space granted to freedom in Putin's Russia. For, by that president's third term, when most of Dmitrii Medvedev's liberal reforms or his short-lived “thaw” had started to wane, something like Orthodox revanchism had begun to intensify. Punk prayer was a response to those moods and a criticism of the way the police state and the Orthodox Church had become integrated. Christ the Savior Cathedral, the main official church of post-Soviet Russia—and in a sense a symbol of its glamorous official Orthodoxy—had been chosen by Pussy Riot as a place of symbolic penetration in order to purify the corrupted sanctuary. The démarche, however, provoked ambivalent responses in Russian society, and when it came to the matter of punishment, Pussy Riot came under crossfire from the conservative public, the church itself, many moderate liberals, and even radical feminists.Footnote 67 In any case, Alekhina and Tolokonnikova paid a high price for their attempt to redraw the boundaries of the sacred: they were each sentenced to two years in prison.Footnote 68
Tankov went as far as to interpret the judge's body as an artistic object, recasting the courtroom as a space for artistic interaction. His strategy in March 2014 was to desacralize the judge's body through a carnivalesque duel. It was a protest against the political structure as such, but also an attempt to assert his right to interfere in that structure, albeit on a symbolic level. Predictably, the court could not allow this to happen and did everything to punish Tankov. Yet there is something paradoxical in the fact that Tankov's sentence was issued on the basis of the perceived assault to the judge's physical person rather than of the symbolic damage effected. From the point of view of the public's reaction, Tankov's sentence was seen ambiguously by the society, but it still evoked more sympathy than the Pussy Riot case. This happened because, as mentioned earlier, trust in the judicial system is very low in Kazakhstan and many saw the verdict as yet more proof of the esprit de corps among judges and prosecutors rather than fair justice.
Both Pussy Riot and Tankov began to organize performances long before the processes that made them prisoners of conscience—this being the second trait the two cases share. They performed in public spaces and were known for their extravagance, but before their respective performances in the Cathedral of Christ the Savior and a courtroom in Quaragandy, they had never violated the boundaries of what could be considered sacred, boundaries that are of a religious nature in the Pussy Riot example, and secular in Tankov's. Anya Bernstein perspicaciously noted that in the case of Pussy Riot, the situation was paradoxical because the norm of mocking the Orthodox church in Russia for almost the entire twentieth century suddenly turned into its opposite only twenty years after the Soviet Union's collapse.Footnote 69 Tankov's case signaled yet another turn. It had been abundantly clear from the trials of Soviet dissidents that the Soviet courts could be unfair and biased. Nonetheless, at the same time, publicity, as was evident in the Joseph Brodsky case, helped to transform the to-be-convicts into intellectual or artistic trend-setters of a sort.Footnote 70 This being said, trials over Soviet dissenters usually focused on the specific figures of the accused, and while their cases were at times discussed by the intelligentsia, it was the injustices against the people, not the judicial system's imperfections, that were the key issue. In Tankov's case, a set of unpredictable behaviors in the courtroom constituted a symbolic attack that functioned as an unimaginably successful challenge to the process of justice. The show was mainly staged to demonstrate the decline of justice: instead of arguments being made to put Tankov behind bars, he was sentenced in the most trivial and witless fashion.
Finally, there have been attempts to depoliticize the issue in both cases. The prosecution carefully removed the political dimension (any criticism of government and the church) from the Pussy Riot trial. The accusation was based not on the intent of political sedition, but on the fact that Alekhina and Tolokonnikova had insulted the feelings of the church's visitors. In Tankov's case, the matter boiled down to finding out how badly the judge had suffered physically (how badly hurt his little finger had been). In Russia, however, the big difference was that the charge represented the “people” (narod) as victims, so that the prosecutors were able to summon witnesses whose feelings had allegedly been hurt during the performance.Footnote 71 In Kazakhstan, its citizens only played a secondary role in the trial. Tankov's sentence needed to look legitimate in terms of how it would be seen by the outside world: during the appeal in September 2014, Judge Askar Turysbayev emphasized that “in every country of the world a judge is inviolable.”Footnote 72
That being said, the crucial question of where the line between artistic practice and criminal intent should be drawn remains, not in terms of justice but in terms of common sense. To answer this question, evaluating the figure of a judge meting out justice seems fundamental, for if one accepts a judge's inviolability as such, then the right to determine the crime derives implicitly from that fact, regardless of context. But if one accepts the primary importance of aesthetics, then Tankov's act can barely be defined as a crime—and not because it lacked “criminal” design or intent. Without a corpus delicti the whole situation could not quite fit into the logic of a conceivable condemnation. Marina Abramović confessed that the most frequently-asked question about her performances was: “Why is this art?” In Evgenii Tankov's case, one could invert the question and ask: “Can an active judge become an art object?”Footnote 73 From the lawyer's perspective, he accomplished this transformation. Speaking during his trial, he said: “As a result of my swatting [gesture], the judge became a work of art.” In another instance he said: “I decided to deliver an aesthetic-legal assessment of the judge's actions.”Footnote 74 This quote seems crucial because Tankov partially reveals the artistic strategy in his performance. Over the course of his career, he had been involved in many trials and filed many appeals, some of which he lost. Perhaps some of those cases were lost due to poor preparation. However, a number of high-profile cases were lost due to the obstruction of judges and other authorities. Tankov's performance was, as his father said, his son's last resort to draw attention to the issue of unfair justice in situations where legal methods had been exhausted. In other words, the performance was a form of extra-legal appeal, which, due to its method, while within the framework of the courtroom, simultaneously transcended it. On many occasions Tankov emphasized the non-violent nature of his act. “My performance was non-violent and I believe that it is necessary to prevent violence in general,” he said.Footnote 75 Nevertheless, one cannot erase a word from a song, and it is hard to call the lawyer's invitation to a duel, even with a fly swatter, a peaceful initiative. To this Tankov responded: “I was saving my homeland from the State.”Footnote 76
That was guile, of course. “Homeland” was a euphemism for his pro bono clients—deceived equity holders, badly vaccinated children, political prisoners—while the “State” was represented by Judge Alshynbekov and company. However, the meaning of the quid pro quo, to which Tankov resorted, resonated on another level. “Homeland” is an abstract concept with many meanings. In one, homeland refers not only to a territory, but also to the people who inhabit a certain place and are associated with certain ideas or beliefs that have been constructed by having interacted with that given place. The public good in Tankov's instance was that it mobilized a large number of people with similar views who were critical of Kazakhstani justice. A lot of people came to his trial, and thanks to the media they learned more about him. Tankov's supporters organized rallies, wrote appeals, gave interviews, and held other events in support of the lawyer and other political prisoners. The trial served to catalyze all this activity. All of these measures, as well as the trial's visibility, ultimately contributed to the further humanization of Kazakhstan's criminal law after 2014.
In 2020 the Russian politician Alexei Naval΄nyi claimed that “one cannot be a lawyer in contemporary Russia.” “I tried,” he said, “and I consider myself to be a good lawyer. But at a certain moment I realized the uselessness of my efforts,…and the depravity of the State. And then I realized what I could do. Become an ‘internal’ migrant? No, I decided to become a politician and change something through that.”Footnote 77
Naval΄nyi's words can certainly be interpreted in the sense that he did not want to continue being simply a lawyer because it no longer suited his ambitions. Yet, when I read these words, I had the feeling that Naval΄nyi had formulated something that had crossed my mind more than once while I was researching Tankov's case. Modern Russia and Kazakhstan, of course, differ from each other in many respects, but in one they are similar: these countries have problematical judicial systems.Footnote 78 And while Russian citizens have the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) as their last resort for a fair trial, Kazakhstan, a sovereign country for almost thirty years, has not yet ratified the European Convention on Human Rights (and only by doing so would its citizens be provided with access to and representation in the Strasbourg court). In addition to the issues of those who are defenseless against corrupt judges, the situation is often challenging for the lawyers. Under democratic regimes, the law tends to be a prestigious profession: some lawyers become public officers or politicians and even attain the upper heights of power. In post-socialist authoritarian countries, such as Russia and Kazakhstan, the status of a lawyer, especially in the realm of human rights, remains problematic. Some of them adapt or continue to work despite the known futility of their efforts. A minority does succeed in obtaining justice for their clients or at least lessening the damage from an unjust prosecution. A tiny fraction attempt to go beyond the boundaries of the profession in order to reach the public and stakeholders so as to obtain justice of a moral kind. Tankov's case is unique because he combined advocacy and artistic practice. Moreover, at some point the latter replaced the former. This allowed him to stage what was arguably the most striking lawsuit in the history of post-Soviet Kazakhstan—and to spend two and a half years behind bars. When I asked Tankov if he ever regretted what he had done, he said no—although he never verbalized that he had spent almost three years of his life in prison. “I was there. I came back from there,” he said. He is now writing a book about his trial. “It has no chance of being published under the current regime,” he added, “but I have time.”Footnote 79
