Russia has been accused of encouraging religious intolerance after rightwing activists attacked a major art exhibit in Moscow, claiming it offended their ultra-conservative beliefs and was therefore illegal under recent laws.

Members of God’s Will, a Christian group led by self-proclaimed missionary Dmitry “Enteo” Tsorionov, vandalised the Sculptures We Don’t See exhibit at the Manezh, a vast exhibition space next to Red Square, on Friday.

During the attack activists shouted that the works on display were offensive to people of faith and violated legislation introduced to deter protests such as that carried out by Pussy Riot in Moscow’s main cathedral in 2012.

In a video of the incident one of the activists rips a linoleum engraving of a naked Christ made by Vadim Sidur, known as the Soviet Henry Moore, off its plinth. She then throws it on the floor and stamps on it.

The group’s leader Enteo targeted a work by another artist, Megasoma Mars. This sculpture was titled Beheading of St John the Baptist #2 and comprised a series of heads displayed on plates. Enteo seized one of the heads and smashed the plate it had been on.

As a result, four works by Sidur and one Mars were damaged, said a spokesperson for the gallery . Sidur’s engravings have been on display in a museum dedicated to the sculptor for 20 years without any problem, the exhibit’s curator Vera Trakhtenberg added.

The spokeman said the gallery would file a complaint with the police.

But Enteo, who is famous for high-profile attacks on cultural events, said it was the art gallery that had violated the law. During his stunt he can be heard to say: “Jesus Christ and the Virgin Mary are being mocked. This is punishable under the criminal code.”

Legistlation making “offending religious feelings” a crime was signed into law by Vladimir Putin in 2013 in response to an anti-governmnet protest by members of Pussy Riot in Moscow’s Christ the Saviour cathedral.

The law, which carries up to a year in prison, does not clearly specify what qualifies as an offence.

Visitors to the exhibit attempted to protect the works during the attack. One of them, Lyudmila Dyagileva, called the activists “fanatics and extremists whose actions have nothing to do with faith and Christianity”.

“If they get away with it, it will send a message that you can do anything you want,” she said. “It is a signal that you can destroy everything if the authorities do nothing.”

Enteo was detained briefly by the police on Friday before being released the same evening.

On Sunday he staged another protest, this time in front of the Manezh, in which he verbally attacked two elderly visitors. He said the pair could not be true believers and should be sent to a labour camp.

High-ranking members of the Russian Orthodox Church have criticised Enteo’s activities.

What so-called Orthodox activists do has nothing to do with religion Church spokesperson Vladimir Legoida

“What so-called Orthodox activists do, as a rule, has nothing to do with religion,” Vladimir Legoida, a spokesman for the Moscow Patriarchate, wrote on Sunday, describing Sidur as “an artist acclaimed around the world”.



The government has also condemned Enteo’s God’s Will movement.

The head of the presidential human rights council, Mikhail Fedotov, compared Enteo’s actions with those of “barbarians from the Islamic State,” Russian news site Interfax reported.

Konstantin Kosachyov, head of the international affairs committee in the Russian parliament’s upper chamber, the Federation Council, called the trashing of the exhibit “disgusting”.

A similar incident took place on Saturday in Kaliningrad, Russia’s Baltic exclave.

During the Franz Kafka and George Orwell Intellectual Forum, a group of activists rushed into the open-air venue shouting: “We are patriots of Russia and you have sold yourselves to the US State Department,” and threatened to burn everything there, a witness of the incident wrote on Facebook.

Jordan Reed contributed to this report. A version of this article originally appeared on The Moscow Times