Outrage over scantily clad socialites highlights the growing contradictions of a society reshaped by the war in Ukraine.
Tearful apologies, revoked sponsorships, canceled performances and two weeks in jail for wearing a sock on the genitals.
A widening crackdown on the participants in an erotic celebrity party in Moscow underscores an accelerating conservative shift in a country where hedonism has long been tolerated in return for the acceptance of shrinking political freedoms.
The scandal broke last week when a Russian TV presenter and blogger, Anastasia Ivleyeva, hosted some of the country’s show business personalities at a private party in the popular club Mutabor. Ms. Ivleyeva, who has 18 million Instagram followers, said the event was the premiere of her photography project, originally commissioned by the local branch of Playboy magazine.
She said the dress code was “almost naked,” and that guests were given the freedom to interpret that as they saw fit.
The suggestive photos and videos that surfaced on social media soon after were unremarkable. Yet the blowback was immediate and severe.
“The country is at war, and these scum, beasts, are putting on this,” one of the country’s most prominent propagandists, Vladimir Solovyov, wrote on his Telegram channel hours after the event. “Cattle who don’t give a damn about what’s happening.”
Some prominent conservatives went further, claiming, without offering evidence, that the party was a satanic ritual because it occurred, according to their calculations, on the 666th day of the war in Ukraine.
“Stop trampling on our hearts with your hoofs,” Vadim Tsyganov, a music producer, said in a video, where he appeared with his wife, Viktoria Tsyganova, a prominent Russian pop singer known for her religious and ultranationalist activism.
As the conservative outrage piled up, police raided Mutabor on Dec. 21. Soon after the party, some celebrity participants said they had lost sponsorships, had performances canceled and even had been edited out of prerecorded festive television programs.
A prominent Russian conservative activist, Ekaterina Mizulina, claimed that the country’s tax authorities had opened an audit of Ms. Ivleyeva, and local news media reported that another group of activists had sued her for millions of dollars. Through a spokesperson, Ms. Ivleyeva declined to comment.
The biggest punishment thus far has befallen a 25-year-old rapper, Nikolai Vasilyev, who performs as Vacío. He was sentenced to 15 days in jail under the country’s new anti-gay law for having attended the party wearing only a sock on his genitals.
Aleksandr Baunov, a Russian politics https://bukanlah.com expert at the Carnegie Russia Eurasia Center in Berlin, said the crackdown underlines the contradictions in President Vladimir V. Putin’s wartime vision of the country.
Mr. Putin has attempted to mobilize Russian society for what he presents as an existential and prolonged conflict against the West in Ukraine. But he has also tried to maintain a sense of normalcy, particularly in the wealthier cities, and he has allowed Russian elites to largely carry on with their lives as long as they don’t question the war.