It is Russia’s most famous opera house, where Tchaikovsky premiered Swan Lake, where Russia’s premier ballet dancers and symphony musicians are judged for their technical excellence and revered for their artistry.
Now employees of the Bolshoi Theater will also be judged — and monitored — by another criteria: their interest in, and views on, Russia’s all-out war on Ukraine.
The renowned Moscow theater has signed a 21.6 million ruble ($266,000) contract to install on hundreds of employees’ computers monitoring software designed by tech entrepreneur Natalya Kaspersky’s company.
The contract was discovered in a government database by Systema, RFE/RL’s Russian investigative unit.
The software, called InfoWatch Traffic Monitor, will examine e-mail correspondence for things such as obscene content or discussions about theater management. The developers have also included filters to detect “political views” as well as “interest in the SVO” — the acronym for the Kremlin’s official name for the Ukraine war.
According to promotional materials, InfoWatch’s software also monitors social media networks and messenger applications such as WhatsApp and Telegram, and popular Web browsers.
As of 2024, the Bolshoi, which has its own line item in the federal budget, said it employed nearly 1,000 dancers and musicians, plus around 2,500 support, administrative, and technical employees.
Tech Pioneer Kaspersky
Under the contract, the main contractor for the project is a company called Andek. But the InfoWatch software itself was developed by a company called InfoWatch Laboratory, which is owned by Kaspersky.
Kaspersky’s ex-husband is Yevgeny Kaspersky, a programmer and tech pioneer whose antivirus software was ubiquitous on computers around the world until allegations of ties to Russian intelligence prompted the US government to ban the software. Natalya Kaspersky helped found Kaspersky Lab in the 1990s and played a key role in propelling its success.
The couple divorced in 1998.
Neither the Bolshoi nor Natalya Kaspersky’s company responded to request for comment.
Founded in 1776 and standing just a stone’s throw from the Kremlin walls, the theater has always been under the close supervision of Russia’s security services. In the Soviet era, KGB agents accompanied the theater’s foreign tours to monitor dancers and performers and prevent defections.
The theater is now under direction of famed conductor Valery Gergiev, whose outspoken support for Russian President Vladimir Putin has resulted in him being shunned in many Western capitals.
Gergiev replaced Vladimir Urin, the Bolshoi’s general director, who was pushed out after he signed a petition in 2022 expressing opposition to the Ukraine war.
Since the launch of the all-out war on Ukraine in 2022, many cultural institutions across Russia have come under pressure, with directors and artists who have spoken out in opposition to the war being fired, or public subsidies being cut off.
In June 2022, the Culture Ministry announced it was ending contracts for Moscow’s famed Gogol Center, which had been under the artistic direction of filmmaker Kirill Serebrennikov until he was fired a year earlier.
