Sorokin faces porn charges

Russian postmodernist writer Vladimir Sorokin was hauled in for questioning July 29 by Moscow police over charges of pornography but refused to answer investigators' questions, denouncing the affair as a "theater of the absurd."

Sorokin, whose controversial 1999 best-seller "Goluboye Salo," or "Sky-Blue Bacon," contains an explicit gay sex scene between the clones of late Soviet leaders Josef Stalin and Nikita Khrushchev, faces two years in jail and a fine if convicted.

The case against him was initiated by a shadowy pro-Kremlin youth group, Moving Together, whose mostly teenage supporters wear T-shirts bearing the image of President Vladimir Putin.

Claiming 50,000 members nationwide, it has singled out Sorokin, one of post-Soviet Russia's brightest literary talents, and his contemporary Viktor Pelevin as harmful influences on the nation's youth.

But Russia's Culture Minister Mikhail Schvydkoi has described the move as a "dangerous precedent" while a top presidential aide warned of a return to Soviet-era censorship.

"I refused to give any evidence in this shameful case, which is humiliating for me as a writer and for all of Russian literature," Sorokin said after leaving the Moscow police investigative department. "I will not participate in this theater of the absurd."

Since the pro-Kremlin group's campaign was launched last month, sales of Sorokin's novel have surged.

The liberal Yabloko party and representatives of the world writers' group International PEN held a small protest July 29 outside the Moscow prosecutor's office to demand an end to the criminal case against the writer.

"Prosecution staff should not be the ones to read literary texts, but editors," Interfax quoted Yabloko deputy head Sergei Mitrokhin as saying.

Mitrokin warned that the persecution of writers was "endangering freedom of expression."

Sorokin's lawyer, Genri Reznik, said the charges were politically motivated.

"Pornography is supposed to excite sexual desire. I cannot imagine who can get excited by imagining the two leaders in coitus," he said.

"It is no coincidence that Sorokin has been chosen as a target. Reading his books, I felt an enormous hate of the writer for totalitarianism," the attorney said.

The affair "damages our country's image and is extremely worrying," he added.

Critics and human rights activists have noted that the prosecution of Sorokin, if it goes ahead, would be the first involving a Russian writer since dissident authors Andrei Sinyavsky and Yuli Daniel were tried by Soviet courts in the 1960s.

Sorokin meanwhile said that the lawsuit he and his publisher Ad Marginem had lodged against Moving Together for distributing a booklet of extracts from his novels without permission should go to court on Aug. 5.