Culture may not be as important to the current regime as it was in the Soviet Union, but that does not mean Russia will avoid the mistakes of the past.
Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022 will spark protests by prominent Russian cultural figures, from legendary songstress Alla Pugacheva and rock star Zemfira to novelist Lyudmila Ulitskaya and theater director Dmitry Klimov. woke up. President Vladimir Putin’s government has responded with a crackdown, which will inevitably continue to expand.
Many wonder if this new crackdown is similar to the not-so-distant Soviet-era retaliation, which was a formative experience for both Russia’s intelligentsia and Russia’s current rulers. thinking. However, despite the obvious similarities, cultural persecution in Russia today is very different from that in the Soviet Union. The recent issuance of an arrest warrant for exiled writer Boris Akunin, one of Russia’s most popular writers, is a case in point.
As well as their ruthlessness towards cultures independent of the state, Soviet authorities in the 1920s and 1930s (not to mention after World War II) created anti-Soviet exiles such as Ivan Bunin, Zinaida Gippius, and Vladimir Nabokov. It is difficult to imagine that the writer was banished. wanted list. The hypothetical headline “Arrest Warrant Has Been Issued for Vladimir Nabokov” looks completely ridiculous.
Of course, if Nabokov had appeared on the Soviet border, he would have been arrested on the spot. However, Soviet authorities were reluctant to use bureaucracy preemptively against distant ideological enemies.
When the Soviet Union’s war on independent culture ended in the mid-1980s, the survivors returned to their homeland as victors. Their citizenship was restored, novels were published, films were broadcast, and paintings were exhibited. In other words, the nation openly admitted defeat.
There is no way that President Putin and his cronies have forgotten this chapter of Russian history. So why did they follow the example of their Soviet predecessors and fall down the same rabbit hole? The answer lies in their unique worldview, values, and historical understanding. No matter how far from reality, this is the key to explaining the current situation and how it will develop.
Take one recent example from the spa town of Kislovodsk in the North Caucasus. There, a motivational quote by Mikhail Baryshnikov, a world-famous ballet dancer and actor who was born in the Soviet Union and defected to the West in the 1970s, was removed from the list. The wall of the dance school. The mayor of Kislovodsk said he doesn’t know how it got there, and there is no doubt that Baryshnikov is a genius, but his anti-war stance, not to mention his Latvian nationality, made his comments ( (ballet-related, ballet-related, or otherwise) is not acceptable.
This reasoning is unprecedented. The Soviet regime banned art by excluding artists, whether it was cellist Mstislav Rostropovich, film director Andrei Tarkovsky, or Baryshnikov. The freezing of writers Boris Pasternak, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Josef Brodsky and composer Arvo Pärt was often accompanied by state vilification. But no one would have said, “Solzhenitsyn is a genius, but he is anti-Soviet, so we won’t publish his books.” All “non-Soviet” culture was labeled defective and deemed unworthy of popular consumption.
The reason is that the Soviet Union saw culture as part of a communist ideology destined to change the world. This explains the importance given to cultural policy from Stalin until his 1980s. Culture is more important than ever to Putin’s government, which sees ideology only as a tool to solve specific political or economic problems.
Russia’s current rulers cherish only one institution: the state. They consider it infallible and the basis of patriotism. On the other hand, culture is a niche entertainment for them. Dissident writers like Akunin may be talented, but the intrinsic value of their work is trivial compared to the important matters of the state.
A selective approach to culture is nothing new in Russia. Troublemakers are removed and supporters are brought to the forefront. What is new, however, is that Putin’s government values loyalty above all else, even when considering works of art.
This approach is problematic if it contradicts Russia’s history. Many of the artists today hailed by the Kremlin as foundational to the Russian state were never loyalists back then. In fact, most of the Russian culture of the 19th and his 20th century was anti-establishment.
If Putin’s cultural cull continues, much of Russia’s heritage could be relegated to the blacklist. However, it is impossible to imagine mainstream Russian culture without writers like Leo Tolstoy, Alexander Pushkin, Maxim Gorky.
The Russian government may pretend there are no bad actors, but the contradictions speak for themselves. Putin’s ideological apparatus is currently operating on an ad hoc basis, and its top priority is to harass artists who oppose the war in Ukraine. In keeping with the materialism of the current administration, this is primarily done by cutting off sources of income, such as canceling concerts, removing books from shelves, and laying people off.
But at the same time, Moscow is trying to build an ideological Potemkin village that creates the illusion of national unity. President Putin’s oft-repeated claim that the war in Ukraine has the support of all Russians is difficult to sustain when influential anti-war artists continue to capture public attention.
Putin’s government functions without any strategic understanding of how to shape cultural policy and, above all, with a complete disregard for the lessons of history. I am moving forward without thinking about where I will end up.
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