Ismene Brown

The Kremlin is dictating Russian culture once more – and it’s neo-Soviet and anti-Western

It’s suddenly gone icy-cold in Russia’s arts relations with us and the US. Last year’s Russia-UK Year of Culture just snicked under the wire before the political chill started building up ice in all sorts of unexpected places. The international acclaim for the epic Russian film Leviathan, up for a Best Foreign Film Oscar, was sneered at by the feverishly nationalistic culture minister Vladimir Medinsky. Recently he denounced the film as ‘perfectly calculated to pander’ to western views of a bleak modern Russia, and he has previously proposed that only movies properly celebrating today’s Russia should be allowed either public funding or a release.

Director Andrei Zvyagintsev has been a victim of the new ban last summer on ‘mat’ (Russian slang) and his great film has had to be dubbed and bleeped in any Russian cinema showing it. The fact that the last Russian Oscar-winner was in 1995 and that it’s seven years since a Russian movie even got Oscar nominated has got under the skin of two absolutely opposed camps. There’s cultural pride over the world’s recognition of a complex, darkly brilliant film (cinema has long been one of the country’s cultural treasures) and derision from nationalists who consider it treachery to cast the smallest shadow on the moral perfection of the state under President Putin.

Evidence of the mounting difficulty in negotiating this new ice age for the Russian arts – which need Western currency tours – has come in two other striking statements. Six weeks ago the Nigel Farage of Russian cultural politics, Nikolai Tsiskaridze – formerly the trouble-making star dancer of the Bolshoi, now revamping his image as rector of the Vaganova Ballet Academy – declared on TV that Russian ballet needed to be ‘isolated’ from the ‘half-trained’ west in order to preserve its purity, that the west had stolen classical ballet and should pay his country to perform it.

Representing the last Soviet-raised generation of reactionaries, Tsiskaridze chimes in unison with his friend Medinsky (who spent two years as a member of Medvedev’s ‘Presidential Commission for Countering Attempts to Falsify History to the Detriment of Russia’s Interest’).

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