Famous photographer Evgeny Nikiforov was attacked and ended up in a pre-trial detention center: what happened (photo, video)

Evgeny Konstantinovich Nikiforov
(born 1955), chairman of the Orthodox Society Radonezh, director of the Radonezh radio station, member of the Inter-Council Presence of the Russian Orthodox Church. Born on February 6, 1955 in the city of Odessa, Ukrainian SSR, in the family of sailor Konstantin Evgenievich and Alevtina Ivanovna Nikiforov.

Graduated from the Faculty of Philology of Odessa University.

After graduating from university, he headed the department of ancient art at the Odessa Museum of Western and Eastern Art.

In 1980, he entered graduate school at GITIS and began studying Stanislavsky’s psychotechnics.

He worked as a psychologist at the Moscow Neurosis Clinic named after. Solovyova.

Soon he found a spiritual father - the rector of the Vvedensky Monastery in the city of Ivanovo, Archimandrite Ambrose (Yurasov), around whom a fairly large circle of Moscow intelligentsia gathered.

In 1987, with his direct participation, the educational society "Radonezh" was registered, which subsequently established three Orthodox schools (1990), the radio station "Radonezh" (1991), the newspaper "Radonezh" (1995), opened the portal "Radonezh", a video studio, a pilgrimage service, began to hold exhibitions, concerts, educational evenings, and various creative competitions.

Since 1995, festivals of Orthodox television and radio programs have been held annually, bringing together creative teams from more than 100 companies in Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, and near and far abroad.

Since 2009 - member of the Inter-Council Presence of the Russian Orthodox Church.

Awards

• Order of St. blgv. book Daniel of Moscow III Art. (1999)
• Order of St. Sergius of Radonezh III Art. (2001)
• Order of St. Innocent of Moscow III Art. (2004)
• Order of St. Nestor the Chronicler III Art. (2004, UOC)
• Order of St. Seraphim of Sarov III Art. (2006)
• Order of St. Macarius Metropolitan of Moscow III Art. (2011)
• Order of St. Nestor the Chronicler I st. (2014, UOC)
• Order of St. blgv. book Daniel of Moscow II Art. (2015)
• medal "Metropolitan Laurus" (ROC)

Secular:

• Order of St. Anne (2005, from Grand Duchess Maria Vladimirovna)
• Order of Grand Duke Sergei Alexandrovich (2015, IOPS)

Interview with Nikiforov E.K.

Interview with a member of the Gymnasium Council, Chairman of the Radonezh Society, Evgeniy Konstantinovich Nikiforov

• Evgeniy Konstantinovich, how did the idea of ​​creating a gymnasium come about?

“This is a collective idea, and it did not arise out of nowhere. Radonezh never had any abstract ideas. We had real needs - our children were growing up, and they needed spiritual nourishment. And we began to create a Sunday school for our children. We taught at this school ourselves; the range of subjects there was quite diverse - since from the very beginning it was clear that it was not enough to simply teach the law of God, but it was necessary to create a certain spiritual and educational environment in which children would be spiritually raised. Thus, we have about. Alexy Sysoev - then just Alexey Nikolaevich - taught fine arts, Evgeny Andreevich Avdeenko taught Greek at Sunday school, etc., that is, the gymnasium was already in its infancy. The “old” secondary school, Soviet, by this time was already quite collapsed and corrupted. Fr. Artemy Vladimirov, who was the confessor of the gymnasium for a long time, once said that we are talking about creating a kind of “pedagogical Eden” for Orthodox children; I don’t know how much we succeeded in this. We created a school for our children, and the initiators were the same Fr. Alexy, Evgeny Avdeenko, Alexey and Elena Rogozhin and a number of our brothers and sisters, people close to us in spirit. Since we did not have a building, and we did not have much school experience, at first a simple idea arose of “infiltrating” the classes of an Orthodox school into a regular school. We reached an agreement with a certain secondary school (on Karamzin Passage), they gladly let us in, and thus classes of an Orthodox gymnasium were opened within the framework of a regular school.

• How did it happen that you later ended up here - in the kindergarten building on the street. Odoevsky?

- Yes, indeed, this is very instructive in a spiritual sense for Orthodox people who are starting some kind of business. Naturally, we did not know how everything would work out. What kind of relationship will we have with the state school, how will relationships be built within the teaching team, but it turned out that such an infiltration of an Orthodox school into an ordinary Soviet school causes a conflict, because this is a foreign body that the school will try to either crush under itself or push out of itself. There was a conflict with the administration, quite mild, I must say, but they began to push us out, and we did not fight, we began to contact the educational authorities, and they gave us these areas. At that time, the system of Soviet educational institutions had just collapsed, kindergartens were being vacated, many of them were being used by commercial structures, and we had every reason to demand that we be given this kindergarten in order to continue the educational process in the system of educational institutions.

• — Another question, which you have already partially answered: how did you see the direction of the gymnasium and its main tasks?

I repeat, we have never been carried away by Manilovism. We are people of concrete actions and the Radonezh society is a society of perhaps small, but real deeds. We do not set ourselves any cosmic goals - to save all of Russia or to bring everyone into the Church - this is pointless. There was a specific problem - it had to be solved. Therefore, here too we did not set the task of building some kind of special gymnasium, based on the traditions of antiquity, or the charter of gymnasiums of the 19th century. There were specific teachers: a brilliant teacher of ancient culture and ancient Greek language - Evgeniy Andreevich Avdeenko, Alla Novikova - his student and employee, father Alexy - an artist. And from these specific people the foundation of an Orthodox school, a humanitarian school, a classical school began to be built.

• How did the Moscow government feel about the creation of the gymnasium and how does it feel about it now?

— The ministry and all educational authorities learned about the opening of the gymnasium from television reports. Therefore, we specially invited all possible media in order to present the official Soviet structures with a simple fact: that’s it, the deed is accomplished, there is such a gymnasium. The fact is that our gymnasium is not only the first Orthodox school, but also the first non-state school in Russia. Therefore, there was no legislative support, no regulatory framework - none of this existed. Nobody knew how to deal with this. A visiting session of the Moscow department took place, they saw that there was nothing to do, they resigned themselves, and ultimately began to help.

• What are the problems facing the gymnasium now?

— The gymnasium faces several problems. Firstly, organizationally, it is developing. Now, I feel that the school should make some kind of qualitative leap, although I don’t know how all this will happen. Perhaps it will be divided into two parts - a primary school and a gymnasium. But this is a technical problem, and it is difficult to say how its solution will affect the internal life of the gymnasium. After all, a school, as we have already seen for 10 years, is truly a living organism that lives, develops, some people come, others leave. This is a gracious living world in which the Spirit gives life. And among the external problems, we have only one problem - provision, despicable money. The gymnasium has practically no sponsors; it has always faced big problems in this regard. But the Lord always helped us - after all, it was a good deed.

"Radonezh Film Festival". Bright Evening with Evgeny Nikiforov (11/24/2016)

— But precisely because we, firstly, cannot organize a competition, although we sometimes because there is not a sufficient number of films that we could recommend, because the festival is of a recommendatory nature, all of its films are immediately receive an automatic stamp from the Publishing Council and the opportunity to be sold in church shops - this is a very important achievement, that is, the Publishing Council completely trusts our decision. And by the way, “The Island” was at our festival and then I presented it to His Holiness the Patriarch, and the Patriarch awarded everyone with certificates, Lungin, Mamonov, and all the other participants in this film. That is, the film then... well, you know how popular it is still, even on Mount Athos in Greek monasteries it is sold already titled. The film is a great success, how it was possible is already the grace of God, I don’t know, because, I repeat, the only church person there was Peter Mamonov, and everyone else had difficulty understanding what, what, why this Church is and who these people are Fathers, it turned out so interesting. As for “The Monk and the Demon,” firstly, two outstanding names are the script by Arabov, the director Nikolai Dostal is a famous and wonderful high professional. As a result, the film turned out to be really very strong, very good. The casting and actors are all just wonderful. It’s worth watching in any case - it’s an interesting spectacle, everyone will think about something and so on. But now at our festival there is such a high level of churchliness in particular that the jury decided, since we are a documentary film, in principle it would be possible, but we have an “excuse”, as they say, since we are a documentary film, not to take a feature film - well didn't. Because we were divided within the jury, because what you really say is correct, on the one hand there were such rigorists who said that this is canonically incorrect, it cannot be this way, it contradicts church teaching and in general this does not happen in the Church and in life. What I tried, well, not that I tried, but I also say that the film is actually not about a monk and a demon - it’s a hyperbole, it’s a parable, it’s about something completely different, just based on church material, which by the way Arabov, being a deeply human being church and Dostal, who is a person who still knows something about the Church, did everything very similar, they know what they are talking about... and they know hagiographic literature, so the script in this regard, he could somehow be trusted. But, in general, this slightly distorts the picture of spiritual life as it generally happens. There we are not talking about a monk and a demon, there we are talking about friendship, about how one person can influence another so that he is transformed. That is, as it is said in the psalms: “with the wicked you will be wicked, but with the righteous you will be saved, you will be justified.” So how... here, whoever wins, the wicked one wins, who will you associate with? There is just one practically saint, coming to Christ, and the other is a demon, and they turned this hyperbole into a script, into a movie. And this is the attitude of two people, one of whom strives for holiness, for Christ, for God, and the other just walks around so vain, sensual, thirsty for life...

Founder

Supervisor

The incident was caught on video

Meanwhile, a video from the scene of the incident appeared on the Internet. The footage shows two men (one of them on crutches) approaching a Hyundai car. One of them opens the front door and tries to climb into the front seat of the car on the passenger side.

The car begins to move backwards along with the man who was being held by the car door, turns, and drives away. Then the recording ends.

Brother of Evgeniy Nikiforov told the details

As Evgeniy’s brother Vadim tells about the incident, in the center of the village, where they were filming from a drone, two drunk men came out of a nearby store. One of them, the one without crutches, began to threaten the photographer. Then the second man - on crutches - also came up and began to show aggression, after which he hit Evgeniy in the ribs with his elbow.

“Then they noticed me and came over. A man (without crutches) opened the door on my side and stuck his head into the salon. I asked him to let go of the door. The brother quickly got into the car, backed up, and this man ran in the direction of travel. He ran on the asphalt for some time—about 100 meters—then he let go of the car door,” Vadim said.

According to him, the conflict lasted about an hour. All this time they demanded to give them a camera, a drone and a car.