A year ago, Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered the launch of a “special military operation” in Ukraine, supposedly aimed at protecting the people of the eastern Donbas region and ensuring the country’s “demilitarisation and de-Nazification.” With that, he also launched an assault on his own country’s rich culture, which is now spurned by the world.
Of course, one cannot equate Russians’ loss of careers, plans for the future, and international contacts with the losses borne by Ukrainians subjected to Russian tanks and bombs. Nonetheless, the war’s impact on Russian culture, and Putin’s own crackdown on artists and performers, raise fundamental questions about the future of one of the world’s biggest powers.
Since the war began, I have warned that “cancelling” Russian cultural events and exchanges as a form of collective punishment could backfire, both by limiting access to information about Putin’s intentions and by seeming to confirm his narrative that the West seeks to destroy Russia. But no outsider could possibly do as much harm to Russians as their own government is doing.
True, this is not the Stalin era, when people could expect to be sent to the Gulag or killed for criticising the regime. But Putin’s critics have been known suddenly to fall ill – or from a window. And even when critics avoid such a decisive fate, public opposition to the Ukraine war can easily invite the destruction of one’s life by other means.
When Russian pop legend Alla Pugacheva – whose fame in the 1970s was such that Russians joked that “Leonid Brezhnev was a politician in the era of Pugacheva” – lamented on social media that Russian soldiers were “dying for illusory aims that make our country a pariah,” she was banned from radio and television.
When another Russian entertainment legend, the rock musician Yuri Shevchuk, issued an anti-war appeal at a concert – declaring that the Motherland is “not the president’s ass, which must be kissed at all times” – he was fined for “discrediting the Russian armed forces” and his subsequent shows were cancelled.
It is not just high-profile figures who are being silenced. While in Moscow in December, I personally witnessed police arresting street musicians for singing Shevchuk’s 1989 song “Motherland,” which warned against the return of the KGB, and to which he has now written a kind of sequel, “Motherland, Come Home,” demanding an end to the war in Ukraine.
Comedians are a natural target as well. Russia’s Justice ministry recently designated Maxim Galkin – Pugacheva’s husband – a “foreign agent” after he spoke out against the war. (The same designation has been used to harass or silence 262 independent media outlets and over 300 press workers and activists, as well as human rights organisations like the Moscow Helsinki Group and Memorial, and educators at universities like the Moscow School of Social and Economic Sciences.)
In the world of theatre, husband and wife Dmitry Nazarov and Olga Vasilyeva – both actors at the storied Moscow Art Theatre – were fired after speaking out against the invasion. The well-known veteran actress Liya Akhedzhakova of the Sovremennik (Contemporary) Theatre had all her plays removed from the repertoire.
The plays of one of Russia’s most prominent contemporary writers, Boris Akunin, are still being performed, but his name has been removed from posters or playbills, owing to his criticism of the war. A leading theatre director, Dmitry Krymov, has also had his name removed from performances he directed, with others being postponed.
The Ministry of Culture considers such decisions “absolutely logical.” The people being punished have “abandoned Russia” at a “difficult time,” and “publicly opposed its rich culture.” In the Orwellian dystopia that modern Russia has become, opposing a war, while contributing to culture, is tantamount to opposing culture. Here, art has no artist, and critics of the Kremlin are alive, but have no lives.
In some ways, Putin’s Russia is even less culturally tolerant than Stalin’s. The recent removal of the Tretyakov Gallery’s director, Zelfira Tregulova, is a case in point. A citizen named Sergei supposedly complained to the Ministry of Culture that the exhibition he had visited at the Tretyakov “does not fully” correspond to the state policy “to preserve and strengthen traditional Russian spiritual and moral values.”
From scenes of “drunk alcoholism” to “the presence of marginal social elements,” Sergei – who may well be a Kremlin concoction – saw signs of a “destructive ideology” that inspired in him feelings of pessimism and hopelessness. Tregulova was asked to defend the exhibition’s compliance with Russian spiritual and moral values. Though Tregulova is no critic of Putin or his war, whatever explanation she may have provided was clearly deemed inadequate: she was dismissed under the pretext that her contract had ended.
During the Stalin era, there was plenty of “happy Soviet” propaganda: while people were dying of hunger on collective farms, artists painted scenes of plenty. But after Stalin, state control over art was loosened somewhat. For example, in the late 1960s and 1970s, Moscow’s Taganka Theatre staged several productions that riled the authorities, and were even banned, but its director, Yuri Lubimov, was allowed to continue his work in Moscow until 1984.
Of course, the Soviet Union was hardly a bastion of artistic freedom. Lubimov’s citizenship was eventually stripped, forcing him to join artists like Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and Joseph Brodsky in exile. But if Putin is cracking down on culture as harshly as the Soviets did, Russia has truly fallen far.
At least the Bolshevik secret police exerted deadly control over society for the sake of moving the backward Russia of the czars into the industrialised future – and even to the technological frontier in some areas. Russia was, after all, the first country to launch a satellite, and then a person, into space. Putin’s cultural crackdown, by contrast, will succeed only in driving Russia back toward its benighted past.
Professor of International Affairs at The New School, is the co-author (with Jeffrey Tayler) of In Putin’s Footsteps: Searching for the Soul of an Empire Across Russia’s Eleven Time Zones (St. Martin’s Press, 2019). Copyright: Project Syndicate, 2023. www.project-syndicate.org