The 'Tannhäuser' Mess

Russian Women Jailed in New Twerking Scandal at WWII Monument

YouTube A video of the performance posted on YouTube shows six women shaking their butts near the city of Novorossiysk's Minor Land monument.

In the second twerking scandal to rock Russia in recent weeks, several women who were filmed dancing in front of a World War II monument in southern Russia have been put in jail for up to 15 days, local authorities said Saturday.

A video of the performance posted on YouTube shows six women shaking their butts near the city of Novorossiisk's Minor Land monument, dedicated to a hilltop outpost that the Soviets recaptured from the Germans during the Battle of the Caucasus in 1943.

Three of the women are to serve jail terms ranging from 10 to 15 days for petty hooliganism, while two others avoided jail time on health reasons and only had to pay a fine, the regional Prosecutor's Office said in a statement on its website. The mother of the sixth dancer, who is under 16 years old, had to pay a fine for "failing to instill moral development" in her daughter.

The Soviet Union's victory in World War II, in which the Soviet Union lost tens of millions of people, is one of the biggest sources of patriotism in Russia today. Next month, for the 70th anniversary of the war's end, Moscow is planning an unparalleled celebration.

Two weeks ago a troupe of Russian teenage girls dressed up like bees in the Urals city of Orenburg caused quite a buzz after a video of them twerking in a dance school performance was posted on the Internet.

Some outraged viewers said the girls' bee costumes resembled the orange and black St. George's ribbon, which Russia uses in military awards and is associated with Soviet victory in World War II.

The girls' dance school was closed by authorities, and their instructors were threatened with criminal charges. Children's rights ombudsman Pavel Astakhov said in a Twitter post that the dance was "vulgar" and "insulting."

The dance studio head told Russian media that the costumes and performance "had nothing to do" with the St. George's ribbon or World War II.

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The 'Tannhäuser' Mess

Novosibirsk Opera and Ballet Theater's recent scandal-mired production of Richard Wagner's "Tannhäuser."-

After Novosibirsk's Church elder Metropolitan Tikhon blasted the production — which featured a racy speculation on Jesus Christ's life between the ages of 12 and 30 — as sacrilegious, chaos ensued.

Prosecutors filed administrative charges against the theater's director, Boris Mezdrich, and opera director Timofei Kulyabin. The charges were tossed out by a court on March 10.

Then in late March, Culture Minister Vladimir Medinsky fired Mezdrich. Reporting on the incident, news agency TASS attributed the firing to his refusal to follow instructions, citing the Culture Ministry's press service.

The scandal incited outrage among members of the cultural elite both in Novosibirsk — where activists turned out en masse on Sunday to demand Medinsky's resignation — and across the country where directors of Russia's leading theaters wrote letters in support of Kulyabin's rendition of the opera, and denounced conservative censorship.

Alexei Makarkin, deputy president of Moscow-based think tank the Center for Political Technologies, told The Moscow Times in a phone interview-

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