“It is impossible to remain silent on the subject”

Googling the keywords  “Надежда. Процесс” [Nadia. The Process] will bring you to a website with the same name (savchenko.openrussia.org), which will show you a strong-willed look from behind the bars. This is the graphical saga of Savchenko, created by activists of the “Open Russia” NGO. The designers have shown all the absurdity of the process against the Ukrainian pilot in comics, graphic quality, and the irony of which increases with every new strip. With the advent of photo images, the courtroom drawings have almost lost its popularity, but in this case the very material of the process against Nadia Savchenko gives them an entirely different resonance. The Day contacted Semyon Zakruzhny, one of the project’s initiators, and asked him why should “an open-minded Russian” be interested in this topic.

“By the nature of my work I visit Russian courts often. Russian court is almost always a boring thing; it’s a whole bunch of formalities and a huge amount of uninteresting, perhaps even excessive, official information. All of this makes a compelling story (like that of Savchenko) overloaded; the reader or viewer is bored. In Russia, judicial journalism is developed well, and there are many top-quality reports and online broadcasts. We did not want to compete with the colleagues; we tried to come up with a new format that will attract a new audience. Thus, we deprive the material of its judicial formalities, we tell the pure story in a simple language. Our main goal is to make the reader interested in the process and draw their attention to this aspect of life, to explain that all this, in fact, is very interesting. Given that readers rarely watch a trial from beginning to end, we have a decent number of viewers, and we are pleased with the results. Of course, the audience increases with every new issue, because comics become cooler. This is our first project of this format.

“Since I have been doing this thing continuously from the start, I think I should refrain from expressing my personal attitude to Nadia Savchenko. In fact, it is always the same: you want to highlight a process on a particular criminal case, only to have everything come down to issues of Russian justice as a whole. And that is not a bad thing, because it is impossible to remain silent on the subject.”