Russian artist detained for setting fire

His lawyer Olga Chavdar told TASS that on November 10 the investigator would file a notice at the court about choosing a pre-trial measure for the detainee.

The imposing building was used by the country’s secret police and later KGB – the forerunner to the FSB – and contains a prison.

Video footage showed Pyotr Pavlensky standing on Moscow’s Lubyanka Square in front of the building where political prisoners were interrogated and killed in the Soviet era, as flames licked around its entrance, scorching parts of two heavy wooden doors.

The question of whether to detain Pavlensky in jail pending the investigation would be decided later Monday or Tuesday, she said.

“The burning door of the Lubyanka is the glove thrown by society into the face of the terrorist threat”, Pavlensky wrote, employing a duelling metaphor. “The Federal Security Service acts using the method of ceaseless terror and holds power over 146,000,000 people. I don’t want anyone’s death, ‘” she said.

“He told them “What are you saying?”

“I think it will be a criminal case, everything points to that”.

In his statement, Pavlensky accused the FSB of “terrorism” and said that “the threat of inevitable reprisals hangs over everyone within the range of security cameras, phone-tapping and passport control borders”.

He called the performance a “reflex to fight for my own life”.

Two journalists who watched were questioned before being released, reported the Dozhd independent TV station, whose journalist was at the scene.

In his arguably most shocking performance, Pavlensky in 2013 nailed his scrotum onto the cobbles of the Red Square. The case was eventually closed due to the lack of any crime.

He has already been charged with vandalism for another performance called Freedom, held in Saint Petersburg past year.

The following year, he stripped naked and had himself wrapped in barbed wire, then carried to the entrance of the St. Petersburg Legislative Assembly. During the performance, Pavlensky set fire to a pile of tires and waved a Ukrainian flag to mimic the Maidan protests that ousted Viktor Yanukovych, Ukraine’s pro-Russian former president. On social media, a few have praised his challenge to the powerful FSB as “courageous” and “heroic” – a fellow performance artist of Pussy Riot fame proclaimed Pavlensky the “mind, conscience and balls” of the age.

Pavlensky first shot to public attention in 2012, when he sewed his mouth shut in protest at the detention of the Russian punk group Pussy Riot.