Paper Bullets

Two Russian journalists. One a pacifist, one a war veteran. Two assassinations. One real, one fake. October 2006. Anna Poltikovskaya is assassinated in the elevator of her apartment building. May 2018. Arkady Babchenko is reported assassinated in the stairwell of his apartment building. Both were outspoken critics of Vladimir Putin. “Paper Bullets” is a performance in two halves, looking at the struggle of being an honest journalist in modern Russia. These two short plays imagine a brief moment in the lives of Anna Politkovskaya and Arkady Babchenko, and their struggle to write the truth under the dangerous eye of Putin’s Russia.