Russian actor and Putin critic found dead in Moscow - Telegraph
▻http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/russia/11212072/Russian-actor-and-Putin-critic-found-dead-in-Moscow.html
A well-known Russian actor who was a vocal critic of the Kremlin has been found dead in suspicious circumstances at his home in Moscow.
Alexei Devotchenko, 49, was discovered in his apartment in the north of the city, police told Russia news agencies.
“There is reason to suppose that the artist’s death is of a criminal character,” said one law enforcement source.
[…]
However, Mr Devotchenko’s outspoken criticism of the rule of Vladimir Putin, Russia’s president, is likely to provoke intense scrutiny over how and why he died.
In 2011, the actor said he was renouncing two state acting prizes “received from Putin’s hands”, saying he was “ashamed”. “I’ve had enough of all this tsar-state stuff,” he wrote in a blog post. “With its lies, its cover-ups, its legalised theft, its bribe-taking and its other triumphs.”
A year earlier he had urged fellow actors, artists and musicians to boycott “ultra-patriotic, propagandistic, chauvinistic, anti-Semitic, or pro-Stalinist feature films and television projects” and “agitprop documentaries”.
He also called on them not to talk to “lying and tendentious state media” or to take part in Kremlin-linked banquets.
Money earned from such appearances, “smells of dank prison cells, of neglected hospitals and homeless shelters, of the acrid smoke of burnt-out architectural monuments and historical buildings and night clubs and homes for the elderly,” he said.
“It smells of the boots of the OMON riot police.”