A verdict has finally been reached in the divisive Russian court case against against two curators accused of inciting religious hatred through a satirical 2007 "Forbidden Art" exhibition: both men have been found guilty, but they avoided the three-year prison sentence sought by the prosecution. Instead, former Shakharov Museum director Yuri Samodurov, whose museum had been the site of the incendiary show, has been fined 150,000 rubles ($4,900), and former Tretyakov Gallery curator Andrei Yerofeyev has been fined 200,000 rubles ($6,500). Both men were also recently dismissed from their posts.

According to Agence France-Presse, judge Svetlana Alexandrova found the two men guilty of having “committed actions aimed at inciting hatred” with the exhibition, which featured provocative works depicting Jesus as Mickey Mouse and Lenin. After receiving harsh censure from the Russian Orthodox Church, Yerofeyev and Samodurov were brought to court by the intensely conservative nationalist group Council of the People in 2008.

Over its two-year course, the trial found denunciators as diverse as a spokesperson for the Russian Orthodox Church, the country’s culture minister, and a collective of 13 irate Russian artists who published an open letter to President Dimitry Medyedev last week dubbing any guilty verdict a sentence “for the whole of Russian contemporary art.” But Council of the People representative Oleg Kassin told the AFP that his organization remained firm in their conviction that once art is made available to the public, “if it contains insults, it’s no longer art.”

Yerofyev, who paid fines in 2005 for an exhibition at the Sakharov Museum titled “Caution: Religion,” had expected the 2007 show to face criticism from the government but, as he told AFP before the trial, was not expecting to provoke a battle “within the church or with fascists.”