POLICE in Germany have stepped up the hunt for a missing Russian artist who, it is feared, may have been kidnapped for criticising both the Kremlin and the powerful Orthodox Church.
Anna Mikhalchuk, 52, vanished without trace on Good Friday. Fears are growing for her safety, with police issuing a statement saying there remains no sign of her whatsoever.
She left her apartment in the west Berlin district of Charlottenburg last
Friday at 3:30pm and has not been heard from since, the statement said.
Mikhalchuk, who exhibits under the name Alchuk, took part in a show at Moscow's Andrei Sakharov Museum titled Caution! Religion in 2003. Shortly after the opening, six men from an Orthodox church in Moscow ransacked the museum, damaging and destroying many of the works on display.
Mikhalchuk moved to Berlin last year after her husband, the philosopher Mikhail Ryklin, took up a university post.
University officials, with Mr Ryklin's help, drafted a letter to the police to highlight the possible political or religious motives for a crime involving Mikhalchuk.
"There were religious fanatics who really hated her," Mr Ryklin said. "For German police to imagine that someone can suffer for artistic activity – for these people it's not easy because it can't happen here."
Mr Ryklin said his wife's disappearance remained a complete mystery, with the police finding no clues to point to either foul play or an accident. He said the police told him they were doing everything from searching nearby lakes to checking video cameras at train stations.
Officers yesterday dragged a lake and combed gardens with sniffer dogs in the hope of finding Mikhalchuk.
"All we know at this point is that the woman is missing," said Michael Maasz, a spokesman for the Berlin police.
Several prominent Kremlin critics have been killed, including Alexander Litvinenko, who died in London of polonium poisoning.
Mr Ryklin said he and his wife were critical of government policies but not political. "I am trying to defend my right of free expression," he said. "My wife also was trying to do this."
According to her husband, Mikhalchuk had encountered great difficulties with her artistic career after a trial of men who attacked her exhibits.
He said she was shut out of exhibitions and even openings in Moscow. She had been focusing on her writing career, working on poetry and a book of interviews with prominent cultural figures in Russia and Germany.
"She deserved to be known for other things and not this," Mr Ryklin said.
Mikhalchuk was charged in Russia with fomenting inter- religious discord for her controversial exhibition, which used paintings and sculptures to ridicule the Church.
She was later acquitted but the exhibition was ruled "openly insulting and blasphemous". It included paintings and sculptures depicting saints and religious figures in states of nudity or involved in sex acts.
Mikhalchuk and her husband criticised the Russian government, saying it did not protect "artists, free speech or people who disagreed with Putin line." She once called the president, Vladimir Putin, "a demagogue".
• Investigators probing the murder of anti-Kremlin journalist Anna Politkovskaya have identified her killer, Russian news agencies said yesterday. Politkovskaya, a harsh critic of President Putin, was shot dead in October 2006 in her Moscow apartment. The reports did not name the person being sought.
The full article contains 554 words and appears in The Scotsman newspaper.
