A WOMAN's honour is still sacred in today's turbulent Russia, seven hundreds of years after her death.
In a court case lodged yesterday, the Russian edition of Playboy magazine is being sued for publishing portraits of Catherine the Great and other famous Russian women wearing little or nothing.
The Academy of Sciences, one of the country's leading cultural institutions, is seeking 100 million roubles (£11,000) in damages from the magazine for "harm to the honour, dignity, and professional reputation" of the women, according to the Moscow Times.
A similar suit was filed by the St Petersburg Centre for Gender Issues, a private group. The Gender Centre placed a plea on the Internet for all right-thinking Net surfers to write protest letters to the American publishers of Playboy. "This was an obscene depiction of Russian women, created without their consent," said Ms Olga Lipovskaya of the Centre for Gender Issues.
The portraits depict Catherine the Great (1729-1796) and three other famous women in history in semi-nude, sexual poses. They are Natalya Goncharova, a ballerina who was married to Aleksandr Pushkin, a 17th-century religious dissident, Feodosiya Morezova, and a 19th-century mathematician, Sofia Kovalevskaya.
The artist, Mr Dmitry Vrubel, said he did not understand what the fuss was about because he had made the women more attractive.
"If I'd drawn them as ugly, I could understand," he was quoted as saying. "But I made them more beautiful than they were in life. Catherine the Great was ugly! I made her beautiful."
Mr Vrubel was previously best known for his mural on the Berlin Wall which showed the former Soviet president, Leonid Brezhnev, embracing the East German leader, Erich Honecker, a work called The Deadly Kiss.
Since the law suit was announced Playboy has shelved plans to publish nude portraits of other famous Russian women, including Lenin's wife, Nadezhda Krupskaya, and his mistress, Inesa Armand. In a preface, the magazine warned readers who might find the portraits to be "even blasphemous" not to take them seriously.
But Mr Leonid Petryenko, a lawyer for the Academy of Sciences, was not amused. "The pictures are offensive," he said. "We expect compensation for the moral damage done to these women."