Roxana Shatunovskaya, the general director of the New Holland cultural centre in St Petersburg, has resigned after her husband suggested in a social media post that terrorists should have attacked the Kremlin instead of a Moscow concert hall last month. Nikolay Konashenok was detained in March and on 17 April he was officially listed by the Russian government as a “terrorist and extremist”.
New Holland was founded by Dasha Zhukova and Roman Abramovich in 2011. When the couple split in 2017, they said in a statement they would “continue to work together as co-founders of the Garage Museum of Contemporary Art in Moscow and the New Holland Island cultural centre in Saint Petersburg”.
Konashenok’s social media post referred to the attack on Crocus City Hall on 22 March, for which Islamic State (Isis) claimed responsibility. His post set off a campaign against him and Shatunovskaya on so-called “Z-channels”. Such channels on the social media platform Telegram promote a radically anti-Western, pro-war position and often target cultural figures for failing to uphold patriotic values. Z is a symbol that was first used by the Russian military during its full-scale invasion of Ukraine and is now widely applied in Russian mass culture.
In a 25 March post on her since deleted Instagram page, with the handle @roxxrocks, Shatunovskaya resigned, saying that “by mutual agreement of me and my management, we came to the decision that I can no longer hold my position and perform my duties due to the fact that a member of my family allowed himself monstrous statements incompatible with humanity,” which she condemns, but “I stay with my family.”
Konashenok was detained that evening at St Petersburg’s Pulkovo Airport as he was about to fly to Armenia. A video of him, already in police custody, apologising for his post, did not stop his arrest. He was added to the terrorist list just days after the theatre director Zhenya Berkovich and the playwright Svetlana Petriychuk, who face trial in a military court following their arrest for their play about the plight of women who marry Isis fighters. The play had previously won a state-funded theatre prize.
Shatunovskaya began her career in fashion magazines when they were booming in Russia and organised a Helmut Newton exhibition at the now defunct Moscow Biennale of Contemporary Art in 2005. She was hired by Zhukova in 2008 to work in public relations for Garage and then to launch New Holland. At the time, she told Sobaka, a St Petersburg cultural glossy, “the island will become a habitat for the generation that is already growing up in New Holland”, which was first created in the 18th century under Peter the Great for naval needs. “This is, of course, an ambitious task, but it is impossible to think in other categories in Dasha Zhukova’s team.”
Konashenok, who was originally a journalist, was known in the past decade as a popular bartender, creator of a design company that refurbished and recreated mid-century modern furniture, and for essays about his hobby, sailing.
New Holland was founded as an arm of Zhukova and Abramovich’s Iris Foundation for supporting contemporary culture, but it has since been transformed into an independent non-profit. Russian media reports that New Holland Development company, which has been reconstructing the site, is still controlled by Abramovich.
