On the evening of December 30, 2014, just as two dozen or so patrons were settling into their seats at a purposefully ramshackle basement theater in central Moscow to watch a film about the ongoing conflict in Ukraine, police officials and a television crew entered the hall, declared a bomb threat and asked everyone to evacuate.
Despite the declared urgency that a bomb might go off, the police checked and recorded the documents of everyone in the audience and requested that they wait in paddy wagons parked outside, for their own protection. When questioned about the wisdom of taking 45 minutes to evacuate the site of a possible explosion, the police began to change their story without even a pretense of veracity.
Eventually, three of Teatr.doc’s animating figures—Maksym Kurochkin, Stas Gubin and Seva Lisovsky—were taken off to a nearby police station for questioning.
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